Becoming Free: Cultivating Inner Freedom
If someone were to ask me, “what do you believe is one of the most important values of human life?” I would say, freedom. Maybe I would say kindness first and freedom second.
There can be different types of impediments, restrictions, or constraints to freedom, some of which are external (lack of money, opportunity, access, external pressures, or restraints), but some of which are mainly internal to the individual.
Beyond some of the very real and often debilitating external impediments to freedom, I do believe many of us confuse internal and external freedom. We might consider our circumstances to be hopeless, or see ourselves and our lives as stuck, not realizing we are creating the “stuckness” for ourselves.
What is freedom?
Whenever we talk about a concept, it is always useful to define the concept. Definitions of the word ‘freedom” include “the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action” in the Merriam Webster dictionary and “the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint,” a definition from the Oxford Languages. Included in these definitions is both a freedom to do and think as one would want, but also a freedom from constraints. Aside from acting, thinking, and speaking, I believe an important part of freedom is having the freedom to feel what we feel, and be who we are.
As mentioned before there can be many external restraints to freedom, some are obvious and tangible like not having resources or opportunities, but some can be more subtle such as cultural mores, social influences, familial expectations, or life events and experiences that limit us or influence us toward certain choices. Even more insidious, however, and likely interacting with external constraints, are the internal hindrances to freedom we create for ourselves; limitations borne of our mind and emotions: our beliefs, our fears, our conditioning, our defenses, our needs.
I do not know the scientific breakdown of how much we are impacted by external versus internal forces, but I am willing to bet inner freedom accounts for a far larger portion of our sense of “stuckness.”
Inner Freedom
You know you need to work on inner freedom when you consciously or subconsciously say things to yourself like:
“I’m not going to get what I want anyway, so I’m not going to try.”
“Nothing is going to change.”
“I don’t want to deal with the repercussions of saying/doing what I want.”
“It will probably fail.”
“I am not worth it”
“I have no choice/power in this matter.”
“I am trapped in my current situation.”
“This is the way it has always been done; it is the only way to do it.”
“Let’s not rock the boat.”
“I am not good enough.”
“They will hate me if I do X”
“Everyone seems to believe X so X must be true.
We cannot have inner freedom to live the truth of what we want, how we feel, what we believe, and who we really are if we act/react/think/feel based on social influence, habit, conditioned beliefs, emotional states (such as fear, anger, hate, envy, despair, shame), or our defenses (the armor we create around ourselves to keep us safe).
Inner freedom comes from inner truth; From knowing, expressing, and living our inner truth. If we are to have that kind of freedom, I believe we will need to develop five qualities:
1. Self-Awareness: All roads lead to self-awareness. To live a life that is authentic and free from external influences or internal hindrances we must be aware of what is going on within us, what is driving us in any given moment? Is it defensiveness, is it unmet needs, is it fear of disconnection or failure, is it a sense of other people’s expectations or what we believe we “should” be doing, is it out of anger or shame? Becoming conscious about our motivations is essential to deciphering when we are reacting from when we are truly choosing what we want.
2. Radical Honesty & Radical Self-Compassion: Deep self-awareness requires radical honesty with ourselves, but radical honesty requires radical self-compassion. Unless we give ourselves space to be and accept who we are with a sense of non-judgement and compassion, we will never be willing to see the truth of ourselves (listen to our podcast for more on this). This truth becomes the gateway to building the life we want and becoming who we want. It holds our freedom. Understanding our humanity, accepting our humanity, and forgiving our humanity are all important steps to opening our hearts to who we are, and until we do that, we cannot move to who we want to be.
3. Belief in Our Own Agency: Unless we believe we can, we can’t. We have to believe we are fundamentally free, and have the power to do, think, feel in a way that is authentic and truthful before we can be free. Our beliefs are powerful, what we believe to be true, will be true. If we believe we have no power to affect our lives, then we will consciously or subconsciously act in a way that will make that true. Sometimes the challenge to accepting our own agency is accepting the other side of the coin, which is responsibility. Accepting we have the power to impact means accepting responsibility for our own lives; for the choices we have made that got us to where we are or kept us where we are. It means letting go of the stories we tell ourselves where we are the victims of what the world has done to us and recognize instead the parts we also played. This can be hard, because we are human, and we are fallible. Again, we may need to hold hands with self-compassion to realize our own agency, but in that journey, we will be gifted with a sense of power over our own lives.
4. Courage: One thing that often gets in the way of freedom is our own fear. Fear that we won’t be accepted, fear of losing those we love, fear of failure, fear of discomfort, fear that we will somehow fall apart. These are just fears, they are not realities, they are not truths. The truth is history has shown human beings have the capacity to survive almost anything. We can do hard things. You can survive hard things, that is, if the hard thing you imagine will happen, happens. More than survive, we may even thrive. It is often those willing to keep trying after failures who succeed. Discomfort leads to growth. Those who truly love us usually stay, or living in our truth will help us find those who truly love us.
5. Belief in Your Worthiness: Believe you deserve a life in which you are free to live your values, choose what fulfills you, and express who you truly are. Believe you are worth it and fight for it with awareness, honestly, compassion, agency, and courage.
Here is my truth: there was a time in my life (well, more a period of time in my life) where I felt I had very little control and very little choice. I felt ruled by “shoulds” and saw my life as a result of the things that had happened to me. Yes, as much as I tried to deny it, I bought into the victim mentality. During my mid-life unraveling of sorts, when I realized things had to change, I started looking for things I could change and things I could control, and realized that was me. I started to shift how I saw and thought about things, and as a result my life changed. I realized the freedom and agency I had within me just from shifting my thoughts. Can you imagine that kind of power? Sometimes it may be hard won, but we all have it.
True freedom is not just being free from constraints, it is created by freeing ourselves from constraints, internal and external, in order to live our truths. As such, freedom is a state of mind rather than the state of our lives.