May I be free from injury. May I live in safety.
The second of Thich Nhat Hanh's nine loving-kindness prayers is the shortest one.
It sounds like something you'd wish on a candle. Safety is not luck. Safety is maintenance. Somebody has to build it, tend it, and repair it, and for your life, that somebody is you.
We did this work already. Back in "Not a Wall. A Practice." we took the word boundaries away from the memes and put it to work. A boundary is not a defense against the world. It is the shape safety takes in a life. It is you deciding, in advance, what you will carry and what you won't. And like every practice on this blog, it is not something you achieve once. It is something you return to.
Here is what I have learned since writing that post. A boundary you never acknowledge starts to feel like a burden instead of a gift. You remember the awkward conversation. You forget the peace it bought you. So the boundary gets blamed for the discomfort of building it and never thanked for the safety of having it.
The metta tradition would call that a watering problem. You watered the memory of the hard part. You never watered the result.
There is a second layer to this prayer. Injury is not only what others do to us. Some of the sharpest injuries are self-inflicted: the self-talk, the commitments we make against our own limits, the rest we cancel. May I be free from injury includes injury from my own hand. Sit with that. I did, and do.
This week’s watering. Take out your journal and name one boundary that held this month. Maybe you said no to a request. Maybe you left on time. Maybe you didn’t reread the message that would have cost you sleep. Write down what that boundary protected. Then thank it, in writing, the way you thank a friend who locked the door behind you. Two weeks, one boundary at a time. You are teaching yourself that safety is something you make, and that you are someone who makes it.
Water what you want to grow.
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