Letting painful experiences from our past define us keeps us shackled to them and limits our future, but every day can be our own personal Independence Day when we drop those self-imposed shackles and limits.
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Accepting what is (even when we don’t like it and wish it were different) moves us from stuck to freedom where we can begin healing, creating something new, or addressing the life’s hard places.
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The battles we fight in the external world are never as challenging as those that we fight within ourselves. Most of those internal battles can be traced back to a single insidious source: the should monster.
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We spend our lives in cages that we create ourselves. As we celebrate Independence Day this year, what bars of your cage do you need to release to choose more freedom in your life?
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When our world collapses, the cages we’ve built around ourselves of others’ expectations and rules are exposed to view, and the cage’s promise to keep us safe and loved is shown to be a lie. Dismantling that cage allows the winds of freedom to blow through our lives making space for new choices, both inner and outer, as we heal and rebuild.
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The things that cause the greatest brokenness in our lives often do so not only because of the grief of the actual loss or trauma we have experienced, but also because of the way these experiences shatter our self-identity along with it. Painful as it is, however, it also offers us the chance to re-discover parts of ourselves that we’ve lost along the way.
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The mix of liberation and loss all in the same package is precisely what makes the process of transformation so exciting and scary and bewildering and sad and uncertain all at once. Each step along the way is releasing what is known and comfortable to make room for what is unknown and uncertain.
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Many of the internalized patterns that control our thinking and our actions hem us into lives that are too small for our spirits and keep us miserable. By recognizing them, we have the chance to start claiming our freedom as we develop new more-helpful patterns.
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Aikido, a Japanese martial art, is the best image I can imagine for what I have learned to do with my inner critic. I step forward and engage it, but I use the motion of its attack to redirect it instead of engaging it head on.
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I’ve discovered that there is actually greater freedom in choosing to set limits around what I do. Limiting my choices to those that truly fit with the life I want to create has helped me to focus my time and energy on things that really matter.
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