On one hand, I’m deeply appreciative of the many maps and practices that have been gifted to us by our ancestors and elders in various traditions. They can be powerful supports for navigating the awakening process, lenses that attune us to facets of being we might have overlooked.

At the same time, I’m painfully aware of how easy it is for a map to eclipse the territory, for the finger pointing at the moon to be confused for the moon itself. No matter how elegant or time-tested, every conceptual framework is a radical oversimplification of lived reality. And the more we rely on the framework to interpret our experience, the more bounded and auto-hypnotic our reality becomes.

So for me, the key is to wear these inherited forms very lightly, to dance with them as provisional tools rather than ultimate truths. To engage the practices and philosophies fully, allowing them to awaken, heal and integrate the bodymind. But to simultaneously keep deconstructing our relationship to the forms themselves, to note the subtle grasping and fixation that can sneak in even amidst genuine openings.

This isn’t a one-time task, but an ongoing practice of intimacy with the living reality beneath our ideas about it. Of tasting the textures of each moment free from the filter of our favorite interpretive frames. And of daring to keep asking the questions that don’t fit neatly into any pre-existing box.