This is a creative visualisation exercise.
Sit in a quiet place, alone, where you will not be disturbed.
Close your eyes and focus on your breathing for a few minutes, carefully regulating your breath to relax your whole body while calming your thoughts and emotions.
When you have reached a poised stillness, imagine you are a bird in a cage. Your cage has black metal bars. The porch where your cage hangs is all the time gloomy, stuffy and musty. The furniture is old and dilapidated. In a dim far corner a sorry, weary pot plant ekes out its existence, smothered in dust. An occasional spider has to be satisfied with the odd blowfly or elderly cockroach.
Once in a while your owner leaves food in your cage, without so much as a ‘hello’. You sit on your perch, occasionally reorienting yourself to face this way or that. Your days, weeks and months extend in monotonous glum numbness.
And so it continues, until…
One day upon delivering food, your owner neglects to secure the latch on your cage door. From your perch, you gaze in numbed wonder as the door of your cage slowly, gradually swings open.
Although you longed for it, you never expected or planned for this moment to actually arrive. After a long while staring at the gaping cage door, eventually you gather your courage and hop off your perch. You pause at the open door, threshold of your known world. Your pulse racing, you leap onto the windowsill and hop to the far end. With pounding heart you lean against the window to gather yourself…
… all of a sudden the creaky window swings open, you lose your footing and topple tumbling into thin air.