make sure
the walls
you build
to protect yourself
do not become a prison

Those who build walls are their own prisoners.

We think walls protect us from enemies, but walls are what create enemies in the first place.

Why should a man deliberately encircle his mind with needless prison walls. No man can reach highest excellence who puts limits to his own thought.

The walls of self-preservation that you build for today are the walls of self-imprisonment for tomorrow. Boundaries that you establish in your life as a protection for yourself today will feel like constraints tomorrow.

When we protect ourselves so we won't feel pain, that protection becomes like armor, like armor that imprisons the softness of of the heart.

Because your self-preservation instinct keeps telling you, “Unless you have walls you are not safe,” unconsciously you keep building them. Later, you struggle with them. This is an endless cycle. But creation is not unwilling to open to you the doors to the beyond. It is not creation’s unwillingness that you are struggling with. You are struggling with the walls of resistance that you have built around yourself.

Study the prison you have inadvertently built around yourself.

Not allowing people to go through their pain, and protecting them from it, may turn out to be a kind of over-protection, which in turn implies a certain lack of respect for the integrity and the intrinsic nature and the future development of the individual.

Sometimes the prison of fear is so powerful there's no need to lock the cell doors. Your fear creates a willingness to self-imprison.

Imprisoned in our bodies...and our soul has its windows.

If you take pride in your attainment or become discouraged because of your idealistic effort, your practice will confine you by a thick wall.

"Without compunction, pity or shame,
they've built towering walls around me.

Desperate, I sit and think one thing:
alone here this fate confounds me.

For there were many things I'd hoped to do out there.
With all the construction, how was I not aware?

Yet the crack and clang of hammers I never once heard.
Imperceptibly they've confined me from the outside world.

("Walls")"

When we work merely for material gain, we build our own prison. We enclose ourselves in isolation; our coins turn to ashes and buy nothing worth living for.