Where Freedom Lies
I know, the title… it’s… quite bold but yes, I do believe I know where freedom lies. How do I know? Well, I spent many years being stuck, grappling with shame, guilt, fear, disassociating so much that I have gaps in my memory, and unable to notice opportunities. I’ve struggled to connect with myself, being less in tune with my body and mind, and more in tune to the frequency of whoever was around me. As a result of that I could not hear my wants and needs and assumed I did not have many. Which made me less of a burden to those around me. I’ve counted myself out in advance from opportunities, and I often favored hiding and leaving over confronting and communicating what I truly wanted/needed. I did not know how to set boundaries. I didn’t know how to express myself or even what I wanted to express. I behaved in ways that contradicted what I actually wanted. I spent much of my life being that I was not free, let alone of what freedom was.
My survival patterns were in charge. They formed my habits, responses, and reactions. They made all of my decisions. I was not aware of how suppressed I was, how afraid of my own voice I became. I was rewarded for that suppression with, praise, with a home, with tolerance.
What woke me up from the suppression was my breakup from my long-term relationship. I was in that relationship for almost a decade and it was going nowhere. In truth, I had no idea how to stir that relationship in the direction I wanted it go. Not only was I faced with lack of reference for healthy and thriving relationships, I had no idea who I was, what I wanted, or what I needed. I spent 9 years coasting with someone. Ending that relationship, closing the door on that 9-year-long hope was traumatic enough of an experience for me wake me up. I went from passively living to noticing. Noticing how I created the life I was living and how society, family, and culture has shaped me for better and for worse. I began to question my behaviors and my demoralizing thought patterns. When I behaved in hamulating ways to make someone feel better I’d ask” why?”. If I had a negative narrative about myself when faced with and opportunity I’d ask “where did you come from?“ or “who does this belong to?”. I found I can usually trace back to people or influences I’d came to immolate for one reason or another.
I began to step outside of my life and became something beyond me. I was able to review the entirety of my life and it’s trajectory from an objective lens. No judgments, just seeing what my personal beliefs were, how my decisions were driven by those beliefs, and the outcomes had come from it all. The objective noticing was my first conscious encounter with freedom. My mindset had shifted, clarity had been gained, my heart more open and my beliefs refined to be more suitable for me. My confidence in myself grown considerably, my knowledge of human nature and therefore, in myself have grown, and so has my trust in my intuition. This is why I’ve dedicated myself to the path freedom. It looks like unraveling the passive ways I was/am living in exchange for noticing and intentionality.
What Is Freedom?
I’m going to do my best to explain a convoluted topic such as Freedom from my understanding of it so bear with me.
We are all free but not entirely so. We exercise our freedom by making decisions that will result in outcomes. However, the choices available to us come from within set parameters that’s existed and has been refined since the beginning of civilization.
The parameters were founded so that the human species could survive natural selection. We learned to speak the same language to communicate to share our needs, wants, and ideas. We learned and divided up specializations. For example, I grow crops, you cut down trees, they carve wooden utensils, and we trade and provide what the other needs. This is how culture, politics, society of shared values is born. To help us survive.
Cultural, political and social rules, and our genetic coding wants to be of service to the survival of humanity. We are born into this world with a blueprint on how to jump in and be apart of it all. Our guardians/parents, friend, family, teachers, guides us and help us make sense of it all with their many years of practice navigating the loud noise for what is needed and expected. They are meant to help us understand who we are and what is important to us as individuals so we can find the lanes we want to take part. Some parents/guardians my have not have been taught how to the understand themselves and will go on to guide children in the ways they know how which is to give into whatever is wanted and needed with little filter.
Our thoughts are not our own. They are a compilation of everything we have ever heard, and probably everything that has ever been. Freedom does not lie within our thoughts. We are not our thoughts, our thought are not us, but, our thoughts are informational. They tell us what information we as the collective see and experience the world. We get to choose which thoughts we listen to and take action upon and THAT is where freedom lies. Freedom lies within choice. But there’s a caveat to that, which is that the parameters (the collective chatter of the world) shape our mental health state and our mental health state is what helps us determine which thoughts we listen to and take action upon. So yes, freedom is choice AND for the best results, we want the choice to come not from a place of shame, doubt, fear, but rather a place of inner peace and clarity.
SMF