4th of July and Independence

What does freedom mean to you?

I’m sure everyone has their own version but it can be a really powerful question.
I spent a small part of the 4th of July meditating on what freedom means to me. First I thought of the world and how I want everyone to experience freedom. Then what came in was “you cannot control anyone else’s freedom, but you can control your own. Change yourself and you change the world.” Even though I have heard this before conceptually, it seemed different hearing it in my meditation. I then pondered what it meant to feel freedom and I came up with this…CHOICE. Freedom is having a choice. Even in situations that I’ve been in where I have felt I have no choice or something was being done to me…I still had a choice. The choice lies in how I CHOOSE to react to what is being done. This is a way of feeling freedom in a situation that looks shackling.

When I understood and had a clear definition of what freedom meant to me, I suddenly felt very free. Once I realized that my choice was to sit and meditate about freedom so I could send that back to the planet, I felt empowered. The fact that I am making my own choices in every moment opened up infinite possibilities of where I choose to go to next. Even my breath felt free in the fact that no one or no thing else could control it except my own spirit.

I ask again, what does freedom mean to you? What does it feel like? Look like?

The more specific you are the closer you can become to that which you long for.
Maybe it’s eating a meal you want to eat, taking a walk when you want to take it, telling someone that you love them, being told that you are loved, simply stilling yourself to feel your own divinity and power, knowing that in the end no one has any control over you that you do not allow.

How does freedom show up in your life? Celebrate all the ways that you do feel free in, instead of all the ways you do not. By feeling gratitude and even celebrating the ways in which you feel free will create a world of free dominion to move with grace and agility.

As an exercise, put some awareness on a couple things allow you to experience freedom. Then, do more of those things and see how you feel. Even in something mundane like cleaning or doing dishes, realize that you are making a choice to do those dishes! You could just let them sit there and pile up, but you are choosing to do them for how you might feel afterward. Being able to see that we make thousands of choices a day puts us in a place of being captain of our own ship.

So now the question becomes…where would you like to sail to?