There’s a certain stickiness that can occur when we take the experiences, insights and frameworks that have been profound for us and concretize them into a fixed view. Even the juiciest and most liberating insights, when clung to, can become a subtle prison.

I’ve seen this a lot in folks who have a strong awakening within a particular tradition and then, often for very understandable reasons, make that tradition’s map into the supreme truth. They want to celebrate and share what has rocked their world, so they teach it, often quite beautifully. But some part of them is also hanging onto it for dear life.

This can lead to a kind of unconscious editing of all subsequent experiences to fit the prevailing narrative. Aspects of being that don’t neatly align with the model are minimized or excluded. Anything that challenges the map is seen as a mistake or distraction rather than being engaged as a valid opening in its own right.

To be clear, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with devotion to a specific path, especially if it’s bearing fruit. Depth is as important as breadth. But even within a single tradition, I believe there must be room for experiences that exceed or transmute the inherited frameworks. For the unknown to breathe us open again and again.

My sense is that this calcification happens in part because there is so much at stake, psychologically and often materially, in being a master or practitioner of a particular way. To keep exploring outside the box, to name the places where the map and the territory are not the same, is a profound risk. It can upend not just one’s personal identity but one’s whole life structure.

So the invitation is to keep questioning our certainties, to play at the edges where the old models start to fray. This isn’t a detached skepticism, but an open-ended commitment.