Letting Go of the Crutches
Soltar las muletas
A student reflects on meditation as a process of deconstructing barriers, and the teacher responds with a metaphor about beliefs as crutches, emphasizing that releasing them, while liberating, can be profoundly terrifying.
Letting Go of the Crutches
A student reflects on meditation as a process of deconstructing barriers, and the teacher responds with a metaphor about beliefs as crutches, emphasizing that releasing them, while liberating, can be profoundly terrifying.
It seems like meditation is just trying to deconstruct all these barriers we've created around ourselves.
It's specifically about being able to drop very specific beliefs, but it usually requires a process because those beliefs are there for a reason. They've been helpful.
The crutch that outlasts the injury
One metaphor that is sometimes used: when you break a leg, you use crutches. Then your leg heals, but you keep going around on crutches. Your leg never fully recovers its strength, and you go through life walking on crutches. The beliefs are these crutches.
What we're longing for is to run again, but we've forgotten that we're still on crutches. We can't go very fast. If we start letting them go and working the broken foot, we'll be able to run again. Metaphorically, at least. In the sense of these beliefs, we can go back to living without them.
The terror of release
But the part that's often not described is that it can be quite terrifying. It is, in fact, the most terrifying process we can go through.
Letting go of our beliefs? Maybe that's what it would be.
Yes, specifically the beliefs I'm referring to.