The Prisons of my Mind

Over the years I have become increasingly aware of the roles I play in the world and the limited ideas, false beliefs, values and emotional reactions that those roles often carry in a particular culture. Not only my notions of temporal and geographic identity, as twenty-first century Canadian, but also my social identity as middle class, female, senior seems linguistically and socially limiting at times, imprisoning, binding, curtailing my freedom as Absolute consciousness/ highest Self.
Such relative world frustrations decrease, of course, the more conscious we become, as we realize these various cognitive 'boxes' are nothing but mental constructs with which we have imprisoned ourselves. I am not a victim of others, but merely a victim of my mind's painful ignorance/ unconsciousness of the malas and their contractive effect on my beliefs and emotions. I am a victim of nothing but the mental paradigms which accompany the many roles I play in the relative world.
Over time, the practices add clarity, ending the misunderstandings that have led me to mistaken identity. They dissolve some limited ideas and reactive patterns and rearrange others freeing me from their contractive grasping.
The more conscious, the more we are capable of changing old loops of contractive thinking and behavior in the moment. We courageously make new choices, seeing the world anew, changing whatever limited beliefs and reactive patterns we have been derailed by or stuck in. Changing the prescription of our glasses.
These changes are key to liberating ourselves from the misguided ideas with which we have imprisoned ourselves. However, as in this construction, at times the keys we actually hold are of no use until we hold them to the light of our practices so we can be guided from within, expanding in the light of evolving consciousness.