Paradox: Discipline v. Freedom

Ramakrishna, the nineteenth-century Indian mystic, taught with a picture I think about often. When you plant a sapling, you put a fence around it so the cattle don't eat it and nobody tramples it. When the sapling has grown into a tree, the fence has to come off. Leave it up and the fence starts doing the opposite of its job: the trunk grows into it and gets trapped. The grown tree doesn't need protecting anyway. It drops fruit, even for the cattle that once threatened it.

When I first built a daily meditation practice, I needed the fence. It took me a few years to learn the discipline: early to bed, early up, eating properly, enough rest. I needed all of it in order to grow, and I loved it. It fed me deeply.

After a while, though, the fences produced rigidity instead of growth. I caught myself judging people who didn't practice as "unconscious." The fragility I'd once protected had given way to a kind of spiritual arrogance. When curiosity goes, that's the sign: either the structure needs to change or I need a new way into it.

Taking the fence down is the hard part, and the reason isn't mysterious. Our identities get wrapped up in the structure and the recognition it brings. When a community considers you advanced, and you're identified with that role, letting go can feel like a kind of identity suicide. We need recognition; humans do. But most of us are starved enough for it that we trade our own experience away to stay loved, admired, wanted, needed. And then we miss the life that was supposed to be the point.

One tell is the word should. When I hear myself saying I do the practice because I should, my heart has already left it.

The point of practice was never to end up more disciplined. It was to put us in contact with our own wisdom, and, past that, to give what we find. That's the end of Ramakrishna's picture: the fruit falls to everyone, even the cattle. But none of that happens while the fence is still up. The trunk just keeps growing into the wire.