freedom and independence - Battle or journey?
Self-doubt. Uncertainty. Fear. Sounds like a Monday – at least the kind I used to experience before I stopped reporting to a corporate job. For as many years as I can remember Mondays brought a sense of doom – sometimes it was barely noticeable while others it was like an oppressive black cloud. Either way, the need to show up and prove my worth every day was soul-sucking. Befriending my existence and my experience is the path that I am now on, and I practice through mindfulness, mindful movement, and meditation.
These practices are helping me heal my relationship with myself. Self-doubt, uncertainty and fear still exist, but my window of tolerance for all three has increased. I am more curious, compassionate, and accepting of the flow of experience. For this I am eternally grateful and there is still ‘work’ to do. I am learning to be grateful for the things that rile up my insides because this is where healing is needed.
Being a yoga teacher, which I never really planned to do, has become my healing practice. I’ve become less focused on the physical practice and more interested in the spiritual study that I do to bring into my teaching. I still tend to both, but the spiritual is what manifest the physical. Once this shift happened, my teaching practice transformed into my healing practice.
It is July 2025 the energy I am seeking to harness is freedom and independence. It seems natural with the 4th of July being the holiday we celebrate this month. The irony of the symbolism of the holiday against the backdrop of current affairs is not lost on me, but that is only because I have a specific set of ideas about what it means to be free and independent. Millions of lives have ended by fighting for freedom from control and oppression. It’s how our country came to be, and our “independence” is what we celebrate in July. I’m not sure that I would call what we are as a country independent or that independence is even something we should want. Afterall, all spiritual traditions point to our interdependence. As Buddhist monk Thic Nhat Hanh said in his poem Interbeing, we inter-are.
And what about freedom? Free from what? There’s a common saying that freedom isn’t free, meaning that in order to gain freedom there must be sacrifice. I’m not so sure I buy this. I much prefer Janis Joplin’s perspective that “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” From this perspective, finding freedom becomes a journey of letting go.
My reflections have led naturally to my mindfulness practice and the qualities of acceptance and letting. The path to freedom requires both. As Jon Kabbat Zin writes in his book Wherever you go, There you are (and ain’t that the truth), acceptance “has nothing to do with surrender, passive resignation, or despair.” “It is a clear recognition and acknowledgement that what is happening is happening, and what has happened has happened.” (Zin, 1994, 2024) Having a whole lot of opinions and emotions about it doesn’t change reality, it just gives the false sense of control and keeps freedom as something that has to be gained in the future, rather than something that can be discovered in the present.
Externally the fight for freedom is from oppression - a fight for an ideology of what it means to be free. Internally it is a journey rather than a battle. It is the journey of discovering what it is that is constricting and limiting, accepting what is, and letting go – again and again and again, rinse and repeat. It doesn’t ever really stop, it just gets easier and each time something is let go of, the load is that much lighter.
Something in me has been shifting for the past decade and feels close to manifesting into a new way of being. It sounds mysterious and exciting, I know. Transformation isn’t usually comfortable and is often downright unpleasant. In fact, it can feel a bit like waging a war against an oppressor. In this case, the oppressor is my mind and my beliefs about who I am. I have to tread carefully through the landscape, stopping to discover, learn, and tend to what needs care. Rushing only sets me back, patience, gratitude, and compassion allow me to keep moving through.
This feels like freedom.
