Hello, Void

On the strange usefulness of emptiness

There's a particular kind of mental noise that comes with being good at managing things. You carry a lot. You always have. It's part of how you've operated — tracking the moving pieces, staying ahead of problems, keeping the whole structure running. You're good at it. You've always been good at it. But at some point the carrying starts to feel less like competence and more like weight. And it gets harder to tell which things in the pile are actually yours.

I've been noticing this in myself lately, and I've been noticing it in clients.

Not burnout exactly — not the collapse of capacity. Something subtler. A kind of cluttered interior. The sense that you're still moving but you're moving through a lot of accumulated... stuff. Old decisions. Old frameworks. Old versions of what success is supposed to look like. Things you picked up somewhere and never put down because you were always moving too fast to ask whether they were still yours.

It came up for me in an unexpected way a few weeks ago.

Three times in one day I encountered the same word: void.

Someone used the phrase "screaming into the void." A book title appeared out of nowhere — Touching the Void. Then the word surfaced again, unprompted, on a page I was reading.

I've learned to pay attention when something repeats like that. Not as a mystical rule — more as a practical one. When something keeps appearing, your attention is trying to tell you something. So I stopped and asked myself: what is this about?

I sat quietly, covered my eyes, and let myself go toward it.

Hello, Void, I thought. And waited.

What I found wasn't what the word usually implies. It wasn't dark or threatening. It was quiet. Almost friendly. An open space with no demands on it.

And something in me relaxed.

I started to imagine what I was carrying. Not in an analytical way — just letting things surface and seeing what was there. Old beliefs about work and worth that I'd been examining lately. Clutter, both literal and not. I imagined an old feed bag from cleaning out the basement — full of junk — and I shook it into the void.

Gone.

It seemed almost too easy.

But I kept going. A backpack I actually like, tossed in anyway. A duffel bag — no idea what was inside, didn't need to know, gone. A red rolling suitcase. I opened it and found a small lap dog with a bow — sweet, but not mine. I asked where it belonged, got a sense of the answer, let it go to its right place. Kicked the empty suitcase into the dark.

And then something loosened.

An avalanche of smaller things came tumbling past — forks, wires, bottle caps, paper clips, all the small broken bits that accumulate in a life without you quite noticing. A landslide of it, then a great shaking, like someone had finally turned the bag completely upside down and gotten the last crumbs out.

Then silence.

Light came in from above — soft, diffuse, like morning fog just before it lifts.

The ceiling was gone. The weight was gone. Just light everywhere.

I'm not asking you to believe that anything literally left my body. I don't know exactly what happens in that state — I only know what it reliably produces, which is a felt sense of having less to carry. A quieter interior. Room.

What I do think is happening is this: we hold a lot more than we realize in the body and in the nervous system. Patterns, identities, old conclusions about who we are and what's possible. They're not stored as thoughts we can simply decide to drop — they're stored somewhere deeper. And sometimes the way to shift them isn't to analyze them but to engage them through a different kind of attention.

This kind of inner work — imaginative, embodied, direct — is close to the center of what I do with clients.

The analytical mind is useful for many things. This isn't one of them. What moves this stuff is contact: making direct, felt contact with what's actually there, and giving it somewhere to go.

The void, it turns out, is quite good for that.

If something here resonated, I'd be glad to talk. You can schedule a free conversation or learn more about the Threshold ARC.

A note on the original version of this piece: A longer, stranger, more personal version of this story lives on my Substack, My Life is a Spell. If you want the unfiltered field notes from this practice — the synchronicities, the spirit guides, the animism — that's where I write that.