Twenty-five years ago, a small group of us who wished to begin a meditation center went to check out the Catholic 
novitiate we’d heard was for sale in the town of Barre, Massachusetts. On that first trip we caught a glimpse of a public monument that had the Barre town motto engraved upon it: “Tranquil and Alert.” It seemed perfect–a place with that motto could certainly be home to a meditation center.We later learned that the novitiate’s main building was once the private home of a Colonel Gaston, at one time the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. Ironically, this Colonel also had a motto, which we discovered in a volume detailing the history of Barre. His credo: “You should live every day so you could look any damn man in the eye and tell him to go to hell.”
Each of us, like Colonel Gaston and Barre, has a motto. We have some maxim, some encapsulated philosophy that expresses what we dedicate our lives to, what we aspire to, where our energy goes, what we hold most precious. Our motto can be a nugget of our own truth, one that centers us and keeps us focused on the things we care about passionately. Often, though, our motto tends to be rather timid. The extent of our aspiration and dedication falls short of our capabilities. We confine and constrain ourselves, even in the credos by which we live. When we practice meditation, we often come to recognize the sense of limitation that has been imposed upon our lives. We haven’t allowed for the possibility of huge achievement because we’ve been conditioned to be content with meager results.
The beauty of meditation practice is that we finally take notice of our conditioning, including the tacked-on constraints. We see these restrictions are not inherent to our being, nor are they expressions of our true nature; just as they are conditioned, so too can they be reconditioned. One of my greatest teachers, Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche, asked something like this: “Why is it that your aspiration is so puny? Why not aspire to be a really free being? Why not aspire to be liberated for the sake of all beings? Why not see your life in a much bigger context? What’s holding you back?”
These are questions to contemplate. What does hold us back? Mainly we are hindered by routine and conditioning, not “reality.” Often our sense of limitation is a habituated response to the day-to-day events of our lives, created by our own minds. Our idea of who we are and what we’re capable of is something that can change: We can continue to live within the bounds of our conditioning, or we can change and begin to live in a new way. The act of meditating is a challenge to that habituated construct of limitation.
Just the simple fact of our intention and motivation to practice brings us head-to-head with our tightly held assumptions about who we are. As one of my teachers said, “The most important part of the sitting practice the moment you sit down.” That’s when we affirm that we can care about ourselves in a deeper way, expand our sense of possibility, and widen the image of our potential. In sitting to meditate we ask ourselves the most important question: “Why not?” Why not continue to open and expand? Why not break out of the old ways of seeing ourselves and what we can do? Our aspirations can grow so we can finally include ourselves in an image of freedom, in the image of a Buddha.
