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If You Want Freedom, You Need To Make Your Own Rules
There are a lot of rules I have imposed on myself. On the surface, they seem like a deliberately designed cage to contain me.
Daily habits and rituals. Not telling anyone that I fancy them. The rules of the “game” I have been playing with my family since childhood. The rules of my writing. The rules of my friendships.
Many of these reside outside of consciousness on most occasions. So, in a way, I am a robot. I have embedded programs according to which I function and it is very hard to leap beyond those programs. The only possibilities for me to do it is through meditation, staying present in my daily encounters and very intentional behaviour change.
I meditate to be freer. The same goes for writing and running. I do these things perpetually to taste the freedom and then, gradually, invite it to my other activities and ways of being.
There’s no way around this— working on freedom. Even though ‘freedom’ sounds like something uncontainable which arises when there are no rules — taking the nature of our human condition, it hardly ever functions this way. Most of the times, we need intentional routines and deliberate actions if we want to experience freedom.
As it happens, few of us are free by default and most have become the slaves of the system, the…
