What is Freedom?

My clients come to me wanting freedom from anxiety, grief, trauma, fear, anger, powerlessness, and discomfort in general.

I can’t even count how many times I have heard, “Nichole, I just don’t want to feel like this anymore.” Which I totally understand and have said to my own healers, multiple times. 

But what does it mean to be free of this stuff? Never feel it again? Feel only ease, joy, confidence, and relaxation? A life consisting of beaches and champagne? Maybe.

You can definitely make it so you experience more of those things more often. But, as long as you are a living, breathing human…you cannot get rid of the “negative emotions” completely. 

True freedom is actually holding everything you experience in your life as ok. Buddhist philosophy sees freedom as accepting that there are always going to be limitations and difficulties in life. 

Not rejecting the unwanted, uncomfortable, or unseemly. 

Not grasping after the good, comfortable, and easy. 

Nor becoming attached to it when the good times visit. 

Most importantly, not becoming attached to the bad or the “problem” (unfortunately we hold onto ourselves as projects to be fixed and create a strong identity around our struggles). 

Because it’s all fleeting…all of it. 

So freedom is holding the discomfort with the comfort, the wanted with the unwanted, the anxiety with the ease, and the joy with the grief.  

Freedom is realizing that when you have a bout of anxiety it is going to pass and so are those times of ease…and that shift can seriously happen in a matter of minutes.

True freedom is doing your best to embrace all of it and deny none of it.  

When you do this, you are no longer at odds with reality. You are open to all that life has to offer. 

You move away from the rigid thinking that you, or life, has to be a certain way which actually makes space for more of the good stuff.  

You learn that you really are ok, no matter what comes your way in life…and that is true freedom.