Boundaries that Free You
January 22, 2024

A rainy day like this is good for meditation. If your thoughts wander outside, they run into the rain, which points you back inside to where the real work needs to be done.

It’s one of the paradoxes of the path that in order to find ultimate happiness, ultimate freedom, we have to know boundaries first. This is what the precepts are all about. As Ajaan Maha Boowa says, the precepts are a fence to contain our unruliness of mind, because the untrained mind is like a child at an unruly age.

The same principle applies to the meditation as well. Think of the image of the quail that’s gone out of its ancestral territory. Once you go outside the boundaries of what’s safe, you’re prey to Mara. You turn around and look back inside and see the real problem lies inside anyhow.

Even the practice of goodwill: We think of goodwill being totally limitless, but the Buddha talks about it as a kind of restraint. It’s because we have goodwill for other beings that we restrain ourselves in our thoughts, our words, and our deeds. Don’t say, do, or think anything harmful. You begin to see that if you’re not doing anything harmful, then your goodwill can be universal without any hypocrisy.

The limits are there for the sake of freedom.

So as you’re practicing mindfulness, any thought that goes outside the boundaries of your frame of reference here: Regard that as a threat to your freedom. We don’t usually think of it that way. The mind wants to wander, wants to go where it likes—and thinks that that’s free. But there’s even greater freedom that can be found by setting up some boundaries and then staying inside your boundaries and straightening things out here inside. This is where the real problem is, and this is where the solution can be found as well.

So have a good sense of boundaries. Remind yourself that they’re for the sake of freedom. They enable you to be free. It’s not that you’re going to keep yourself bound up and then someday be released. You find that within the boundaries, everything you need to know, everything you need to do is all contained. Any wandering outside is a real waste of your energy.

And the same with the principle of goodwill. If you’re not harming anybody, if you have some boundaries on your behavior, then your goodwill can be unlimited. It can be universal. So don’t think of the boundaries as hemming you in. They’re there for the sake of your freedom.