400 Days of Surrender — Day 18: Freedom of mind
New to this series? You can find Day 1 and why I’m writing this here.
Today is one of those slow days. I ended up staying in bed until lunchtime using the benefits of mobile phone technology to do something though not much. I then got up to make lunch and in the process wondered for a moment whether I should feel bad for this “guilty” pleasure.
I’ve done this plenty of times in my life and felt guilty just as many times but there’s no point in feeling guilty for the past as it has already happened. The only thing it does is carrying something that you supposedly did “badly” by your own assessment — hence the guilt — into the presence, thereby ruining your current experience.
Feeling guilty is a waste except for that — just like any negative emotions — it triggers a learning or a correction how you behave or what you do. And hence I did decide not to feel guilty, rather appreciate the fact that I have that the freedom and the fact that I did enjoy lying in and that in life there is nothing you need to do.
In life, to stay with this theme, we often feel guilty when we are not productive, when we don’t achieve or do what we planned to do, but that thinking doesn’t empower us, it does the opposite. It puts constant pressure on us to behave a certain way vs the way we might want to behave. We have a feeling that we must or should do something and hence it constrains our freedom.
And freedom is really the thing we are all striving for knowingly or unknowingly. We often confuse freedom with financial freedom. Yes, money gives us the ability to do what we want when we want but it doesn’t give us freedom of mind or not even freedom of our time.
I have a number of wealthy clients that have all the financial freedom you could wish for yet they don’t feel that they have control over their time. Whether it is their jobs that constantly require their input (not because someone tells them what to do but because if they want to do it well, they are need to manage other people and relationships) or because it’s their friends, families, or children that always fill up their agenda and they feel they need to attend to all those needs all the time leaving themselves with no own time.
And then there’s a third freedom (besides financial and time) which is freedom of mind, the freedom to not feel one has to do something and the freedom not to feel guilty to spend the time differently than one thinks they ought to (the guilt factor). The latter one is the highest degree of freedom and it’s also the one the everyone of us can achieve by just changing your perspective from “I have to do something” to ”I don’t have to do anything but I choose to do something because I want to or because I want to support others” or whatever your reason.
That simple change in language between “I must” and “I should” to “I choose to” even while still doing the same things — like going to an office — makes a huge difference of how doing things make you feel. And how you feel is how you experience life and we all strive to have a positive life experience from moment to moment.
So realise that financial and time freedom are great things to achieve but if you think that those will bring you peace of mind and make you arrive in the paradise you are chasing after let me break you the news: that’s not the case. The freedom you want to feel is right inside of you and all it takes is a little change of perspective and language.
I can tell you that my clients that have the other freedoms are working with me to obtain the latter because that’s the one we truly are all after and it can’t be achieved with money and time.
And so with this slow start of the day and London being all cold, grey and rainy, as much as this day started out differently than I thought it “should” I realised how blessed I am to have found the latter freedom and that because of my decision to go on this journey of surrender and uncertainty (that I doubt in moments like these), I reminded myself that it opens up so many possibilities including being able to spend time at places like the one in the picture that my friend @cbm posted today (I hope you don’t mind me using it for this post).
So free your mind from the “I have tos” and start choosing to do what you do. ✨
Continue to Day 19: Finding your purpose.
