Whatever your own example, it seems our authenticity is tied to what is de-pressed and what is ex-pressed. Just as flowers need healthy roots in order to blossom, feelings can only express their beauty when rooted cleanly within us. Then they can break ground and sprout outside us. It is that delicate paradoxical inch of ground between surface and depth, between flower and root, between what is allowed out and what is allowed in that continually determines whether we are living our lives or not.

Jesus said, “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light.” This implies that the eye that is clear lets light in. Considering the eye as something that lets light in and not just something that observes light outside itself opens the heart of the matter. In truth, considering the heart as something that lets the reality of others in and not just something that projects its desires and fears on others ushers us into the realm of risk. And risk—to let others in as well as to let ourselves out—seems essential in releasing the interior buildup of pain and its unexpressed conclusions.

One crippling duality falsely maintained in our psychology is the seeming tension between risk and safety. These two states are traditionally cast as mutually exclusive synonyms for carelessness and guardedness, where risking openness is seen as a dangerous way to lose all safety, and where keeping closed is seen as a protective way to stay safe. This reflects a wall-in-wall-out sense of being in the world. Within the wall is safe. Outside the wall is not. This, of course, never acknowledges the suffocating dangers of the wall itself.

In true interior ways, the only path to deep safety, that sea of inner peace, is through the continual surf of risk. Inwardly, risk opens safety. It doesn’t shut it down. Only through the risk to open can we inhabit the strength and fullness of what is Whole. This raises the very profound interior question of how to define self-protection. Is it hiding who and what you are, or is it being who and what you are?

While the master sought out an old friend, the apprentice, shaken by the voices not his own, wandered the marketplace, and sat in a corner behind a woman who sold birds. She noticed but wasn’t bothered by him. As the sun shifted across the open sky, the shadow of a brilliant bird and its cage silhouetted his face so that the bird seemed perched between his eyes in the cage of his head. The apprentice didn’t know this, though he couldn’t help but be smitten with the brilliant soft bird. When he focused on the bird, there seemed no cage, for being this bird, where else was there to go? When he focused on the bars, the world turned oppressive.