PART 1 – The Comforts of Limitation
I’ll admit a small secret: I watch cat videos. I particularly love cats in boxes, especially big cats. My favorite is a tiger fighting its way into a box far too small for its body. It squeezes, contorts, until it bursts the cardboard apart—and then lies there, content, half inside a ruined container that clearly offers no real protection. The perfect caption read: “He is a cat, after all.”
That image sent me down a cat rabbit hole. Large, ferocious animals squeezing boxes that could not possibly hold them, yet they somehow get inside and find peace. What became obvious is that support and safety was never structural. It was pure feeling. Even when the box fails, the animal still experiences safety in the feeling of enclosure.
Anyone who has lived with cats knows that cats find the smallest, darkest hidey-holes everywhere in the house. We shake the food bag, jingle the cat bell, call their name—only to discover them calmly folded into a space we didn’t know existed. Sometimes just glowing eyes in the darkness. This is ancient mammalian behavior: nesting, concealment, protection.
Humans are mammals too, but with a difference. We’ve developed cognitive reasoning that sometimes overrides instinct—and sometimes merely disguises it. Our protective urge is still alive, but instead of crawling into physical boxes, we build psychological ones. This is the humamamalian quandary. The predator and the prey both live inside us, and they both want shelter.
Serial killers are often described as animals or monsters, yet to their perspective many describe killing as euphoric, making them feel godlike. My ethical framework refuses to accept this as anything other than a catastrophic illusion—but the illusion itself is revealing. The experience of being “beyond the box” can feel like absolute freedom. The difference is crucial. The serial killer’s god-experience is ego at its apex: “I am at the center.” Awakening, by contrast, is the collapse of the center altogether.
The serial killer has a solid center and is a only a god only from the point of view of the mouse they feel themselves to be. Sometimes the box bears no resemblance to our reality. 
Recovery programs talk about “rational lies”: the mind constructing stories to justify acting out. When we believe these lies, we fail to see the box that enslaves us. We hide inside frames that feel like full states of being but are actually partial. That limitation is the price we pay for comfort.
Humammalian boxes have evolved to be efficient in a modern society with its multifarious information streams. We don’t carry crates, we switch identities. The phone rings and it’s our mother—suddenly we are someone smaller, older patterns activated. We arrive at work and assume another form entirely, a professional self designed to manage stress, competition, evaluation. Each box offers a perspective and a presentation. We become the person of the box we’re in.
Like cats, we often enter these boxes even when no immediate threat exists. The mere sight of the box is enough. From inside, we forget the box and simply experience the world as “safe enough.” Sometimes we scan the environment. Sometimes we fall asleep.
The problem is not that boxes exist. They are adaptive. They can even be brilliant. The problem is that they are fragile and temporary, and we forget that. No matter how ferocious we feel inside a box, it will eventually fail. Like my cat Roger hiding in an empty suitcase to avoid the vet, all the box does is delay the inevitable. Roger still got his shot. At the end of his life, he hid under the bed, refusing comfort, choosing his own final enclosure. His last moments were on his terms, in his own way, in his own box.
We do this too. Especially when we’re afraid.
PART 2 – The Space Between Boxes
I’ve served as a hospice caregiver, and I’ve watched people approach death by crawling into familiar patterns. An old man who wanted a drink before he went. A woman who smoked until the very end. We retreat into behaviors that once soothed us, even when they no longer protect us. Sometimes especially then.
Alternately, I’ve seen those accomplished in meditation who met their deaths as a new beginning, or a next stage. They have experienced their own ego deaths any times – each time they stepped from their box. From outside the box, they could see impermanence, they understood the box game and knowing there was nothing to hold on to, when the time came they were in acceptance.
But, for most of us, clinging to the frail and changing boxes we think are “me”, we are afraid of death as it will tear us from everything we are attached to. For this reason, we construct boxes everywhere throughout our life. Over time, these boxes harden. What once was adaptive becomes restrictive. Sadly, we begin to live beneath the bed long before we die.
In relationships, we say things like “don’t play games with me,” yet games are simply boxes interacting with other boxes. To see yourself manipulating another person for love—causing pain in order to secure pleasure—is fascinating – when we see it from beyond the box. But if someone points out our manipulation, we might jump back in and defend the box. Threatened boxes become rigid. Our available responses narrow.
At any given moment, we are the box we’re in. And yet each box has an edge. Between boxes there is space. That space may feel an uncomfortable contrast to the supposed safety of a box. So we hop from identity to identity like the floor is lava: worker, rebel, lover, child, controller, pleaser. The space between feels like annalization.
Meditation is learning to tolerate that fall.
Contrary to fantasy, meditation is not about finding a better box called “a clear mind.” That, too, is a trap. Although a clear mind exists and is considered a mark of meditation training clarity appears, and will disappear. Cloudy mind replaces it. without warning. Thinking mind. Dozy mind. The movement of mind is natural unless we freeze it. Turning any of these into an identity is a fool’s game. Literally, we are fooling ourselves into believing nothing just because we’ve frozen an idea in place.
The only box we need in meditation is the body. Sitting. Breathing. Not because the breath is sacred, but because it is present. Each time the past arises, we notice it, feel it, and return. Each time the future tugs at us with anxiety, we notice and return. Not to suppress—but to release the grip of limitation.
One of the sneakiest boxes is the one that says, “I am meditating.” It rejects experience in the name of progress. But awakening is not refinement; it is spaciousness. The difference between a god-experience and awakening is simple: one puts me at the center, the other removes the center entirely.
Animals reset. Humans accumulate. We carry neurological echoes of fear long after the threat has passed. Over time, the boxes we retreat into become fewer and more solid. Eventually, there is a final box waiting. But moment to moment, we are reborn into boxes constantly. Each unnoticed transition is another quiet imprisonment.
Buddhist teaching suggests that death removes the box entirely, and rebirth is shaped by the boxes we inhabited. Whether or not one accepts that cosmology, it is undeniably true psychologically. We are continuously rehearsing our confinement.
Liberation does not require destroying boxes. It requires seeing them. Feeling the discomfort of the space between them. Trusting that openness will not kill us—though it may unseat us.
The tiger rests because it feels safe enough to see the world clearly. Not because the box is strong, but because the animal is at ease. Practice is learning that same ease without needing the boxes.
That is real strength. Resting in the space between the boxes we can see the boxes as an ever morphing game. Like kids playing fort, we believe the game, yet know its not real life.
Can we rest in the space outside our boxes without being locked into them?
When I’m passionate about something I hate the idea of letting go. It’s mine, damn it, even if it’s hurting me. But that’s me. Everyone has their own style of attachment. And attachment will always lead to struggle because we’re trying to hold something still in a universe that is always moving. Reality is stretching and expanding, dissolving and moving away from us, as we desperately cling and grab to anything we can. Oh what joy when we find that bone to gnaw!
Once I’m engaged in a struggle, I seem to have to prove something to somebody. I’m going to save this relationship, or I’m going to tell this person off though I never do and just toss about in my bed all night. At some point, I’m just struggling for the struggle. I’m attached to the energy. Attachment brings suffering—I’ve done the research—and it’s a pretty universal human experience. When we grab hold of something we deem important, we don’t want to let it go. Our ego latches on, and whatever grand justification we started with, the war becomes all about us.
altogether. We keep going because after all the investment, letting go feels frightening. Being right and refusing to listen can feel like strength, like clarity—but it isn’t clarity at all. It’s ego blindness. The part of us that needs to prove a point takes over. Our view becomes so narrow, so refined, so focused on our objective that it feels like certainty.
Letting go in spirit means releasing our attachment to how the struggle makes us feel—powerful, victimized, justified. Letting go in the mind is harder. We don’t just “stop thinking.” We replay arguments in bed at night. The way out is through love and kindness, drawing the attention out of the body. Until we let go of attachment to feeling bad or feeling victorious, we keep planting seeds of suffering.
Buddhist iconography illustrates the point. Manjushri, the Bodhisattva of wisdom, carries a sword. This sword of wisdom cuts through confusion, bullshit, and disinformation. The Bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokiteshvara, is sometimes depicted with a thousand arms that represent the many possible actions compassion my take when in the service of wisdom. Tantric icons are depicted flaming, as they burn up the prejudice and ill-will their compassion is liberated as active, and passionate. Compassion is not a static philosophy. It adapts. Compassion responds. Compassion does what works. If we come from wisdom, seeing clearly beyond our self-interest, what needs to be done becomes apparent.
What we are witnessing now—politically, industrially, militarily—has very little to do with care. Our political systems are not designed for anyone’s well-being. Most are designed to accumulate power. Power is a commodity. The planet, and the life that lives on it, are transactional bartering chips. It always has been. Very recently, Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security, spoke openly about how all the world respects power. Only power. He said nothing about compassion, wisdom, even knowledge. Nothing about communication. Nothing about safeguarding the health, safety, or dignity of the people he claims to represent. Fascists never do. They always tell people to tighten their belts ahead of a glorious future.
And we need balance too. Rage that destroys our health and clarity helps no one. Turning off the news sometimes is necessary. Creating boundaries is necessary. But if we are committed to compassion, we cannot turn away. We have to look directly at violence—even when it’s standing right in front of us, aiming straight at our face. Or shoots us in the face.
In our personal practice, we can be mindful of the breath beating out a rhythm as we become aware of the room or our body to begin with. In time, we might relax further, allowing awareness of our thoughts without becoming lost in them.
