July 25, 2026

Life Without Boundaries

This body is not me. I am not limited by this body. I am life without boundaries. I have never been born and I have never died.

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote this verse late in his life, after decades of exile from Vietnam and years of teaching monastics who feared losing him to age and illness. He offered it as a meditation to be chanted, meant to loosen the grip of fear around death by loosening the grip of a fixed self first. The passage says the body and its history are not the whole of what a person is — that life moves through countless forms without a single owner. In the Buddhist understanding of non-self, or anatta, this isn't a denial of experience but a release from the exhausting work of defending a fixed identity. Practiced daily, it turns each role, opinion, and memory into something worn lightly rather than clutched.

A principle of Eastern Wisdom: Non-Self →