Head touching roof, aching back, racing thoughts … meditation isn’t going too well. I’ve brought my familiar little tent with me to retreat and pitched it in the forest across the pond. I’m fond of my little old tent. It has served me well. Ok, I have to bend down and crawl into it and get dressed sitting on the floor and, ok, I am not as young as I was but …

“You know, it’s ok not to struggle for the wrong reasons. Sooner or later everyone around here upgrades to a new tent,” says my precious teacher. The seed of change is sown.

I check the web and look for something a little bigger. I want something I can walk into without bending down, a space where I can sit on a chair without my head scraping the ceiling. But a tent for six persons with LED lighting — are you kidding?!

I fall for the marketing …

The bigger tent has room for a sleeping area and a meditation area. Luxury! I relax into a chair with a new altar in front of me bathed in a soft glow. Writing this now, the memory itself relaxes me. Our precious teacher once remarked that “we are practicing the extreme sport of relaxation”, which really made me laugh! Now in the middle of winter I am looking forward to being in the big tent again in summer.

What makes us cling to the smaller, more cramped version of ourselves? Familiarity? Stubbornness? Fear of something bigger and better? Maybe a mixture of all of these.

I was so used to crawling into my old tent to sleep and meditate that it was my ‘normal’ for a couple of weeks on retreat. “It’s my space and this is how I do my space” was the unconscious thought. I could not imagine a different space. I had allowed the dimensions of the space itself to cramp my thinking of what was possible. Once I gave myself permission to imagine an upgrade — “you ‘deserve’ it and you can afford it” — it was the easiest thing in the world to do.

My new normal is a bigger tent. The bigger tent teaches me an expanded version of ‘me’. It still has walls and a ceiling – boundaries – and suggests to me that they are just imaginary too.

I am looking forward to the day when I won’t need a tent at all.

By Yeshe Özer

Yeshe is an English author, teacher, storyteller, community currency nut, converted dog lover and trombonist living in exile in the magical Brothers Grimm land of Germany. He has been a student of Domo Geshe Rinpoche since 2007 and hopes one day to graduate to an even bigger tent than the new one he uses on retreat in Wisconsin.

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