Free From The Inside Out

Are you really free?

May be you are, but not completely. There could be aspects of your life where you’re not totally free. You could be in debt, therefore your money is not free; you have to surrender your payments every month, God knows for how long! May be you dislike your job too. You “have to” go every day, or you won’t find the money to survive. You feel “forced” to do something meaningless and uninteresting. That’s not freedom. As you can see, freedom is not only about being out of prison!

Freedom, or the lack of it, can even be more subtle than that. Any addiction, be it a substance or a behavior, is a restriction on our freedom. Addictions imprison our free will to do what we know is right and beneficial and to avoid harm.

Addiction to a substance is not limited to drugs or nicotine or caffeine. Some people have to have their sugary treats every day. Others can’t imagine giving up McDonald. Many know that vegetables are what they should eat, but they don’t seem to be free enough to eat the veggies and forget about the toxic processed foods. This is not freedom.

Bad habits are sometimes the closest thing to a life sentence! People could struggle for decades just to overcome a single habit like procrastination! Decades for one single behavior to get out of?! Others spend their life time trying to escape their bad eating habits, that’s a life sentence for our rational mind, imprisoned and guarded by our taste buds and appetite!

We cherish freedom. It deserves. But we don’t seem to grasp the extent of the actual lack of our innermost freedoms. When our body is the prisoner of our habits. When our mind is the prisoner of our body. When our mind and body are the prisoners of our emotions. When our mind, body and emotions are prisoners of our subconscious mind!

When we rejoice in our being free from a physical prison, it’s only a distraction from deeper and much more dangerous prisons!