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breaking barriers

Reworking a post from January 2013


Beyond the gray, lowering sky that brings afternoon thundershowers, the sun shines brilliantly. Underneath the pavement you drive upon, the earth is soft, humid and teeming with life. Outside of the four walls of your apartment or room, the world is full of people of all ages, colors, sizes with their own ideas and wishes and dreams.


So often we believe in barriers that are impermanent, temporary and ultimately artificial. What you see is the barrier – the clouds, the road, the wall – and accept that as the limit when, in reality, it is merely a common edge, shared by observers on either side of it. When your eyes come to rest on the clouds, look beyond and see the sunshine blazing brightly. Imagine you can see deep into the earth beneath the roads, parking lots, sidewalks and parks. What’s there? Worms, insects, stones, snakes, chipmunks, moles. Go deeper to see great roots; deeper still to aquifers and bedrock. Go even deeper and see slowly churning molten rock. All this under your home or highway. Look out of your window at your neighbors' walls and imagine happiness, weariness, hope, frustration, love, and the dreams of the people who inhabit every building you can see and all the buildings beyond.


When you only believe what you can see, you allow barriers to separate you from the world. When you understand that the barrier is merely the other side of something, you open up to wholeness. Even the expression on a stranger's face can be a barrier preventing you from seeing who they are or what they really feel which you very likely would recognize as something in yourself. 


Start looking through barriers and see them for what they are – a flimsy misinterpretation of our own making. Look beyond and look within. You will recognize yourself everywhere. This is the beginning of understanding that caring for others is caring for yourself, and caring for yourself is caring for others. This is the start of realizing that many of our own self-imposed, perceived barriers are self-constructed from our own fear, keeping us separate from our own success and happiness that lies just on the other side of that fear.


When you recognize a barrier as a false self-construction, then it’s easy to see that your fear about that barrier is also a false self-construction. See your barrier for what it is; then you might be able to see through it, see it from the other side and see it disappear.


7/22/2024

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