This blog is best experienced by starting at the beginning.
In engaging with the exercise of establishing one’s definition of freedom, as outlined in the previous post, most of my patients arrive at a definition that involves connection to one’s body. For many, to be free to live authentically would mean following joy and bliss as one’s principal motivators rather than what society dictates they should do. Most patients engaging in this exercise describe the permission to attune to one’s inner compass of how to live life, and when pondering this concept further, they arrive at the explanation that this compass would be an intuitive felt sense of inner knowing. When we go beyond just associating “freedom” with joy and bliss to pause to consider what these concepts would look like enough in action, we slow down enough to embody them, and thus to actually feel our bodies. It is this embodiment that affords freedom from the past.
Our automatic mind tends towards the familiar, locking us in the stories we have historically told ourselves and leading us to feel stuck in old schemas and routines. But when we ask the question “what would freedom feel and look like,” two really important things happen. The first is that by framing our goal as a hypothetical, we trick the intellect, our ultimate defense mechanism, and bypass the doubt and negativity biases that often arise when we try to change our mental maps. We feel safe enough to really conceptualize our goals, rather than avoiding potential sources of disappointment, internal or external, that we typically associate with going to the depths of our true desires and dreams. This question could also be framed as “what would it be like to trust yourself,” because this is what is happening in the brain — we feel safe enough to imagine a world in which we were the intuitive author of our own story.
The second thing that happens when we ask the freedom question is that by transcending typical structures in such a way, we experience expansiveness. Ruminative thought loops and fears take us out of our senses and disassociate mind from body. We get stuck in our heads and can’t ground into who we are. Thus, we don’t experience ourselves as a person capable of living a life of mattering enough to pursue our goals. We don’t experience ourselves as a substantive person at all, but as a stuck thought loop. We loop further and further out of reality, creating the sense that these patterns are monsters that would be impossible to overcome. By tasking our minds to conceptualize and feel into overcoming these patterns, we orient ourselves back into our bodies. And not just any old body, but a body that is not reliving trauma-informed thought patterns manifesting themselves physically because we are imagining being in a free body. This body would be one made of mattering in every sense; it would be made up of matter — substantial and real, grounded in the here and now — and it would be steered by someone who recognized their intrinsic sense of mattering.
The reality of course is that our issues live in our tissues — our traumas live on physically in our bodies. But we are authors over this story as well. If we fixate on what hurts and feel powerless in changing it, we won’t, just as we will never feel free if we attach to the identity of being broken and in need of fixing (especially if we believe this fix must be external, as discussed in previous blogs). But when asked what feeling free would feel like, we remember that there are so many other parts of our bodies that feel good and are healthy, and we feel our whole, expansive bodies. We broaden our lens on our bodies beyond the trauma-driven spotlight (this thing hurts and is limiting or fear-inducing in some way) to that of a floodlight (but woah, my body is so much more than just part). When our vantage point expands in this way, it is like seeing our lives in color rather than black and white — everything around us looks vivid, non-threatening, and even beautiful, and the opportunities for what we could do with the rest of our day (or tomorrow, or next week, or the next five years) come soaring in. We can conceptualize feeling healthy, whole, and complete, and we can then turn this into reality. Invariably, all my patients, myself included, report that freedom would come with feeling free to be present in one’s body, without resistance to pain or afraid of what skeletons we could dig up with idle time. For everyone, freedom would involve moving slowly and taking in life with carnal pleasure and mindful awareness.
We all already have the freedom to live this way. Yes, we have pain in our bodies, but we also have access to many, many other sensations, and even pleasure and joy. If we slow down enough to really listen, and then to really see, then to really smell, then to really taste, then to really experience touch, and then to really hear, we can experience a free body. This doesn’t necessarily even have to be a body experiencing pleasure, but a body that is sensing reality as it is today. Look around your room and try to notice things you have never noticed before, not just what needs to be cleaned. Often, we are so concerned with b-lining to do something productive that we aren’t actually looking ourselves and taking in our surroundings at all. Smell. Really smell. Like take a few deep breaths through your nose and notice temperature, air thickness, and fragrances. Taste. What flavors remain from your last meal? What would it be like to be tasting lemon right now, mint, chocolate, [some other flavor you like]? Can you swallow your saliva and imagine you are digesting this meal? Feel. What’s going on in your body right now? What’s happening on its surface? What textures and temperatures are you coming into contact with? Hear. What sounds do you hear in your body? In your room? Can you hear more remote sounds outside your room? Voila, you are actually in your body. And now you are actually in the present. And if you are in the present, you are not stuck in the past, and you are free to move into the future with intentionality. What feels good in and around your body right now? Can you enhance this? Would positive sensations do you want to strengthen, deepen and grow? What would it be like to see this moment right now and what you can do with it as sacred? What do you want to go do with that amazing brain of yours? What do you want to create with those hands? What desires and inclinations are present for you right now? What is preventing you from actualizing them?
Oh, and while we’re at it, now that we are present, what is actually true in your life? Not emotionally true, but what is factually true? By grounding into the present and perceiving reality for what it is, you are reclaiming the developmental phase that we all must check off to functionally operate in society: innocence. This is the phase of perceiving reality as it is, without fear-based, performance-based, victim mentality, or family-of-origin-modeled schemas informing how you see the world. A child must know what it is like to just be before doing, in order to take in the world around them and define for themselves how they feel compelled to engage with it. If not, they will default to performing and living for other people or operating in a way that was imposed upon them by others. With time, this becomes too much pressure, and they opt instead to avoid life (depression) or try to control it by going through what if’s and [unsuccessfully] planning for unlikely scenarios (anxiety). These thought patterns, as we saw, pull us further and further out of their bodies, out of reality, and out of the capacity to experience the joys afforded by our present day lives.
Thus, before we start understanding who we authentically are and what we came here to create, as is the goal of the developmental phase we are looking at now, we must innocently live in sensual engagement with our present reality, like a tactile child exploring a garden. In this way, we can live free of our previous programming. We can’t just check off nesting and then return to puppeteering ourselves to be impressive or check off as many should’s as possible every day. To be free to discover who we are and what we like, we must integrate feeling at home in our bodies as our baseline. We must start every day by being before we can do. If you just wake up cognitively, going right to planning or an intellectually-driven action, your mind will revert back to familiar pathways that ignore that you are an adult living in the present. These pathways typically tend towards one of four negative senses of self: I am bad or flawed in some way; I am powerless; I am not safe; or I don’t belong.
If you can feel your body here and now, you can change your life. By embodying your whole body without resistance to what you may feel, you are allowing the self-acceptance and orientation to reality that constitutes the “ready to change” state from which anything is possible. Your body can soften enough to reconfigure those issues in the tissues. And, if you can really perceive your adult reality for what it is, you can remember that you survived everything bad that ever happened to you. Cognitive change can inform and rewire what is physically encoded in the body, just as mindful physical movement can shift your embodiment and with it your cognitive sense of self; these two levels of change can happen simultaneously if you allow yourself to feel safe in and oriented to your present day body. You are the writer of your own story (and sense of self!). You matter, and you have the right to live a value-oriented, enjoyable life.
As you narrate your life, make sure that you are uniquely writing it from the first person. Are you operating from I matter — using “I” statements? This may seem like a given, but pay close attention to how you internally comment on your movements throughout your day. Do you ever find yourself narrating in your mind how you assume other people are seeing you in that moment? This could be positive, such as imagining that someone is watching you in the gym thinking “what an impressive stretch,” or negative, such as, “did he brush his hair today?” In either case, by going through your day imagining how you are coming across to others, you are ceding power in your life and reinforcing limited definitions of your worth.
Every time you find yourself wondering what other people are thinking about you in a given moment, come back to owning to yourself why you are doing what you are doing. For example, if you assume that your old classmate you just ran into is thinking “man, what a loser,” remind yourself that “I am choosing to take time off work because I was really unhappy there; I don’t want to just rush into a new job out of fear of what other people will think; I am pausing to carefully determining what I really want in my next one.” If you are imagining that that woman who just passed by is thinking “what a crazy person, walking barefoot like that,” reframe this as an “I” statement to yourself that captures what you know to be true: “I am choosing to ground in the woods right now.” Rather than imagining a dialogue with someone else in which you defend yourself, take them out of the picture and just focus on your relationship with you, owning your life for you and from you. Reframing and owning your life from “I” statements is not about justifying yourself to others but instead about orienting to your values and self-trusting confidence that you know why you are living your life and nothing else really matters. Of course, you can integrate how you want to engage with others from a value-oriented perceptive, as discussed in previous blogs, but you must first orient that you are in charge of your life or you will revert to earlier patterns of either passivity/depression or resisting obligation and agency-free living.
You may find that you have to reorient to narrating [and living] consciously many, many times a day. With time, though, it will get easier. As soon as you stop resisting living from freedom, you will be free. In other words, it just needs to click in your mind that you are free to stop controlling your life and actually live it. You have an intuitive you within you who will take over once you stop resisting (via control and old patterning) this inner guidance, and you have a parasympathetic nervous system that knows, at a cellular level, how to live your life from love and abundance rather than the sympathetic nervous system’s proclivity towards scarcity, panic, and lack. Allowing this change to occur is as simple as deeply owning that you matter, which you do by orienting to being made up of matter (aka a body). With time, the daily mindful, grounding practices will become more familiar to your automatic mind, though it will always try to expend as little energy as possible and prefer staying in the intellect rather than the depths of your body. But if you commit to rewiring with grounding, the ease, joy, and appreciation of life afforded by this practice will become the new track in your brain that your inner freight train knows to take.
Typically, new patterns take six weeks to establish, and as they solidify, you will become increasingly familiar with who you authentically are. To facilitate this rewiring, follow what feels joyful to you specifically. Your definition of joy will bring you to an expansive life that resonates with you. Remember, we are not just talking about leisure here. By really understanding what moves you and slowing down enough to listen to yourself and be your own guide, you will discover your unique gifts and aptitudes, around which you will build your life. This life will be one that is governed by a soul-infused capacity to truly connect with and impact the world around you. When you move beyond being limited to trying to be impressive or fulfill obligations, you will find joy, yes, but this joy is the ticket to finding yourself, and the impacts of this will touch every aspect of your life.