You may have heard the story of how to “train” fleas. First you place some fleas in a jar and put the lid on. The fleas will begin to jump, repeatedly hitting the lid in their attempt to escape. After about twenty minutes, the fleas grow tired of hitting the jar lid. They have learned not to jump as high. Now you can remove the lid and the fleas will continue to jump at the same height and never escape the jar. They have adjusted to living their life in a box (a jar in this case). They have permitted the circumstances of their life to limit their expression (jumping in this case) and they have stopped trying even when the circumstances change. They don’t escape because they believe they can’t. We are like fleas.

All of our searching, waiting and looking outside ourselves for the answers is actually living life in a box.

What is a box?

A box can be an opinion, a point of view or our interpretation of how life is. It’s something we believe it be true. We don’t see the walls. We are convinced that it is just the way it is.

How we construct the box

Our experiences in life create boxes in which we live. We make decisions based on past experiences and from there, consciously or unconsciously, we determine how our lives are going to go. An event occurs and we say I don’t want that to happen again or I’m not doing that again. Like my early experience of getting the answer wrong in class and saying I will never raise my hand again. We transfer those old decisions into our current experience of life creating boxes. These influential moments shape our lives and the subsequent choices we make. We think we see life how it is but actually it is as Mark Epstein writes in Going on Being, “we experience the world through the filter of our minds.”

We make decisions about the world, other people or ourselves. “Men are just like that” is a box. “I don’t like ____” is a box. We shield ourselves from pain and uncertainty by creating a wall of opinions, strategies, emotions and views. Anything to protect our tender heart. As we attach meaning to these decisions, the walls of the box double and triple and we start living life smaller and playing safer. We end up with rules and a point of view about how to live. Then mostly what we do is react to life instead of actively creating our experience.

Today, meditate on the Sufi saying – remember we are looking for what is already here.