There’s a story about a bear that spent most of its life in a 15-foot cage.
Eventually, some people rescued the bear and brought it to a much larger, cage-free area where it could roam around.
But instead of exploring its new freedom, the bear just walked back and forth across the same 15 feet.
Nobody was stopping it.
There was no cage anymore.
But the bear had spent so much time in that cage that it didn’t know how to live outside of it.
I think that’s what we do all the time.
We create these invisible cages around ourselves. We decide how we are, how other people are, how relationships work, how the world works, and how we’re supposed to respond when certain things happen.
Then we keep walking back and forth inside the same 15 feet.
Someone says something we don’t like, and we react the way we always react.
Someone disappoints us, and we immediately assume they’re going to hurt us again.
Someone is kind to us, and instead of receiving it, we wonder what they want.
We get frustrated, and we become the frustrated person.
We get afraid, and we become the afraid person.
We feel vulnerable, and we close ourselves off.
And eventually it becomes so familiar that we don’t even recognize it as a cage.
Nobody is actually telling us that we have to be this way.
But we’re so used to being in the cage that the idea of freedom can actually be terrifying.
The mind can only know what it has experienced
The mind doesn’t typically see a situation exactly as it is.
It sees the situation as you are.
If you’ve been hurt by people, your mind learns to look for the next person who’s going to hurt you.
If people have betrayed you, your mind becomes very good at finding evidence that someone else can’t be trusted.
And once you’ve decided something is true, you’ll usually find something to confirm it.
This is how we get stuck.
It doesn’t mean the thoughts are stupid or that the feelings aren’t real. They’re real.
But a thought isn’t necessarily reality.
“I think he’s up to something” is a thought.
“Maybe he’s not” is another possibility.
We don’t know yet.
That little bit of uncertainty is incredibly important.
There is something powerful about being willing to say, I don’t know.
Not as a way of avoiding life, but as a way of actually meeting life.
We think we know our parents. We think we know our partners. We think we know our children. We think we know our closest friends.
But we can never completely know another person’s experience.
We can listen to them. We can understand parts of their story. We can spend ten days together, twenty years together, even a lifetime together.
But I still don’t know what it is like to be you.
I don’t know what it’s like to be inside your mind and your body, experiencing your life exactly as you experience it.
And you don’t know what it’s like to be me.
That’s not depressing.
I actually think it’s kind of beautiful.
It’s the don’t-know mind.
Don’t go into the moment with an agenda
The don’t-know mind means that instead of deciding what something is going to be before it happens, we allow ourselves to find out.
I experienced this in a very ordinary situation.
My wife had an appointment that ran much longer than expected. I had to leave for something, I had the kids, and suddenly the timing wasn’t working.
Ten or fifteen years ago, that probably would have been a disaster.
I would have gotten angry. I would have made it her problem. I would have reacted before I even had time to think.
But this time, I just thought, Okay. I’ll wait.
I was frustrated, but I didn’t need to make anything out of the frustration.
She hadn’t done it intentionally.
She wasn’t trying to ruin my night.
It was just what was happening.
And once I stopped fighting what was happening, the situation worked itself out.
I got where I needed to go. I came home to a peaceful house.
Nothing magical happened.
I just didn’t make the situation worse.
That’s one of the most practical aspects of mindfulness.
There is the normal reaction.
Then there is awareness of the normal reaction.
And in that little bit of space, something else becomes possible.
We can never know what someone else is carrying
This also applies to our relationships with other people.
We don’t know what people are experiencing.
Someone can look completely fine and be struggling enormously.
Someone can be angry because they’re having the worst day of their life.
Someone can say something insensitive because they’re hurting.
This doesn’t mean we have to tolerate bad behavior or abandon our boundaries.
People have work to do.
I’ve always liked that phrase.
They have work to do.
The person screaming in traffic has work to do.
The person who can’t respect your boundaries has work to do.
The person who needs everyone else to behave a certain way so they can feel okay has work to do.
And so do I.
And so do you.
That doesn’t excuse harmful behavior. It just gives us another way to see it.
Instead of making someone’s behavior entirely about us, we can recognize that what people do often says much more about what is happening inside of them than it does about us.
Sometimes we are the person who needs to do the work.
Sometimes we’re the person who gets hurt.
Sometimes we’re the person who hurts someone else.
We’re human.
Vulnerability is another step outside the cage
One of the most difficult cages is the belief that we shouldn’t share.
Maybe we’ve learned that if we tell people too much, they’ll use it against us.
Maybe we’ve been rejected before.
Maybe we’ve been misunderstood.
Maybe we’ve been told to keep certain things to ourselves.
So we stop sharing.
But underneath that can be a very strong desire for connection.
And that’s where the cage becomes interesting.
One part of us wants deep connection.
Another part says, Absolutely not. Deep connection means getting hurt.
So we stay inside the cage.
I’m not saying we need to dump our entire life story on every person we meet.
But there is something powerful about authenticity.
Sometimes you tell somebody something real, and they say, “Oh my God. Me too.”
You thought you were the only one.
They thought they were the only one.
And suddenly there is a connection.
I’ve had completely random conversations with people that somehow became incredibly deep. You might start talking about something ordinary and suddenly you’re talking about addiction, grief, death, loss, or something else that is deeply human.
And you never know what that conversation might mean to the other person.
Sometimes people don’t need you to fix anything.
They just need somewhere to put what they’ve been carrying.
There was a woman once who simply needed to say out loud that she wanted to die.
The healing wasn’t necessarily in someone giving her the perfect answer.
It was in finally being able to say it.
To express it.
To have someone hear it.
To have someone hold it with her.
Sometimes that’s enough to create a little space.
You don’t have to stay predictable
I think one of the most interesting practices is simply becoming less predictable.
Not reckless.
Not impulsive.
Just less predictable in the ways you’ve become conditioned to be.
If your normal response is anger, notice the anger.
If your normal response is shutting down, notice the shutting down.
If your normal response is assuming the worst, notice the assumption.
Then see what happens if you don’t immediately follow it.
Maybe you respond differently.
Maybe you say nothing.
Maybe you ask a question.
Maybe you stay.
Maybe you leave.
Maybe you apologize.
Maybe you open up.
You don’t know what will happen.
And that’s the point.
When we open to the moment instead of forcing the moment to fit what we’ve already decided, the possibility for something new appears.
That’s stepping outside the cage.
You’ll probably still feel like the cage is there.
For a long time, the bear probably felt like there was a 15-foot boundary even after there wasn’t one.
But eventually you start to realize:
There’s nothing stopping me.
I don’t have to react the way I’ve always reacted.
I don’t have to see this person the way I’ve always seen them.
I don’t have to assume I know what is going to happen.
I don’t have to keep walking the same 15 feet.
There is a whole world outside of it.
And maybe the practice is simply taking one step.
Then another.
And seeing what happens.