Emptiness: a good thing. The feeling of emptiness can often be frightening for us. We feel lonely, uprooted and disorientated.

Emptiness is sometimes as well associated with boredom – the feeling of not knowing how to spend your time wisely or having too much time on your hands for too many things that you don’t really want to do in the first place.
People have different tendencies to feel bored or empty. Some hardly know these feelings, others experience them almost constantly and therefore feel a great deal of suffering.
There are lots of strategies people use to escape the feelings of emptiness and boredom. They drink alcohol, take drugs, drive their cars way too fast, go bungee jumping, engage excessively in risky sports, have impulsive sex, spend too much money on shopping or perhaps even tend towards self-harming behaviour.
The aim of these behaviours is to feel life; we want to feel alive within ourselves. That’s why emptiness and boredom are so difficult to bear – within these emotional states, you feel almost nothing.
Basically, however, emptiness is nothing threatening or dangerous. It is simply a feeling like joy, anger or sadness. Instead of drinking away the emptiness, cutting it away or running away, we can simply sit with it and wait. We can use the emptiness by consciously taking time to take a look inside ourselves. The apparent emptiness can give rise to unexpected new things – ideas, previously suppressed feelings, impulses for action.
Emptiness: a good thing. Think back to a time when you had the idea for a big change in your life for the very first time. Or a time when long-suppressed feelings made their way to the surface and you were finally able to get rid of emotional baggage that you had been carrying around with you for a long time. Did these impulses and feelings perhaps arise from a moment of emptiness?
Give those new things space to unfold; give the emptiness the chance to enrich you.
Are you experiencing feelings of emptiness and boredom? How do you deal with them? Would you like to learn how to make space for your emptiness?
Let’s talk about it in a free initial session!
#emptiness #ideas #impulses
