Freedom is Within Us…
Freedom is within us, it can be nowhere else. Looking for it outside is a fruitless and disappointing search.
In the end, freedom is a process of letting go.
It really is as simple as that… To write down, anyway!
It clearly isn’t that simple to experience, or we would all be living from our true nature, which is freedom.
To ‘be free’, we must find out what is holding us back from this, and then let it go.
Which is why there can be lots of ‘working it all out’ needed to reach the place of surrender… ‘Ah… so I just have to let go…’
But the journey to this acknowledgement, this acceptance, this surrender can be fraught with a lot of ‘holding on’… To what we know.
Everyone wants to be happy, and to feel free, and at ease… This is a natural desire and one that is possible for all of us…
Freedom is our birthright and the essence of our true self… So why are people not free, happy at ease?
Because holding on is what we know; holding on to who we think we are…
The truth is that many people hold onto pain, because the pain has informed their lives. All of the adaptations that have sprung from the hurts in the past can serve to make you the person you know, and so letting go of your perceived self can feel like a loss, a death even…
And it can be doubly hard to surrender the tension, the patterns, the familiar ways of being, because some of who we think we are, we might admire and identify with… Because of course not all adaptations are ‘bad’… In fact the reason we can become so restricted and trapped is because the adaptations have kept us safe. Being good or nice, or always accommodating even when it doesn’t suit you, for instance…
Now this doesn’t mean we become horrible to become free… Our true nature is silence and so horrible doesn’t come into it.
But it is recognising that letting go, is letting go of everything can comes from this place of pain or tension, and this can reveal itself in over compensation to ‘do the right thing’, as much as negative and uncomfortable reactions within us…
And then, when the commitment to clearing away of all the reactivity, the tension, the holding occurs… Keep on doing it, moment by moment…
And then, watch the space and see what emerges….
I have spent my life ‘wanting to be free..’ My mother said that from a very young age I would say continuously ‘I want to do it by myself…”
I pulled for freedom this way and that, whilst also getting caught up in a double bind of seeking approval….
Outside myself….! An impossible and endless task, I thankfully discovered… It took awhile, but eventually I sought only my own approval, and ultimately the dream life that I started dreaming about when I was in my twenties emerged….
But it emerged from the inside out.
Freedom is within us and we can only find it by going within and letting go of all that is restricting us….
I have been running all of my life – it feels I was born to run. In the running step I experienced freedom and my true expression. I came to see that I needed to ‘get out of the way of myself’ and let my energy flow through the running step; allow it to express itself in the dance and the motion of running. I ran for England and GB for some years. My first international was in 1979, a three mile cross country race; and I continued to run at international level until 1993. Two of my best results were first place in the Dublin City Marathon in 1985 and 7th place woman, 3rd British woman in the 1986 London Marathon in a time of 2.36.31, which gained me selection for the Commonwealth Games.
As a little girl I ran barefoot for many years, and then I put on shoes to race around the world. Fifty years later I am travelling the world as a nomad with my husband Anadi and I have taken off my shoes and I am running barefoot again….
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Email : juliachitaylor@gmail.com
