I can and I will lay myself down in a bed of roses.

Freedom is not doing whatever you want.

Freedom is having enough of yourself available to genuinely choose.

It is being able to say yes when you mean yes.

No when you mean no.

To speak when something in you knows it needs to speak.

To stay soft when softness is possible.

To stand firmly while somebody else has their own reaction.

To change direction when the road you are on no longer belongs to you.

And sometimes, simply to stay with yourself.

To remain in contact with yourself and with the body while something difficult is happening, instead of immediately leaving that connection to fix, fight, please, escape or control what is happening around you.

Freedom is not having one perfect response.

It is having more than one response available.

Because the more of yourself you have available, the more genuinely you can choose.

Having more of yourself available

Somewhere along the way, we all make decisions about who we are allowed to be.

Perhaps it became safer not to speak.

Not to become angry.

Not to know what you know.

Not to disappoint somebody.

Not to take up too much space.

Not to need too much.

Not to steer.

Not to shine too brightly.

And gradually those decisions can begin to feel less like decisions and more like personality.

They become the wallpaper of your personality.

You have lived with them for so long that you no longer really see them. You simply look around and think: This is who I am. 

But wallpaper can come off.

And underneath it there is always another layer.

Sometimes another old layer of wallpaper.

Sometimes something you had almost forgotten was there.

An aspect of yourself that never actually disappeared.

You simply stopped having access to it.

The one who knows is still there.

The one who speaks.

The one who loves.

The one who says no.

The one who says yes.

The one who can steer.

The one who can stay soft.

The one who can stand firmly while somebody else has their own reaction.

Freedom is not becoming any of them.

It is having access to them again.

And when more of yourself becomes available, life opens.

A situation that once had only one possible response suddenly has several.

An old track can still exist.

But it is no longer the only track.

You can choose.

The Cost of Freedom

Freedom changes the value of things.

What once seemed enormously important may become less important.

And what you barely noticed may become essential.

Money may still matter, but perhaps not enough to exchange all of your time for it.

Belonging may still matter, but not enough to become someone else in order to keep it.

A relationship may matter deeply, but not enough to continually leave yourself behind inside it.

Certainty may feel comfortable, but not when maintaining that certainty requires you to ignore what you already know.

This is where freedom can become costly.

Not because freedom asks you to destroy your life.

But because parts of a life can be built upon decisions that are no longer true.

A role may have been built around always being the responsible one.

A relationship may have found its balance around you keeping quiet.

A career may have been built around proving your worth.

A family may have become accustomed to you carrying what everybody else leaves behind.

A whole identity may depend upon never asking the question:

What is actually true for me?

When those underlying decisions begin to change, the structures built around them may change too.

Sometimes very little changes on the outside.

Sometimes a great deal does.

A role stops fitting.

A relationship changes.

A career loses its importance.

Approval becomes less valuable.

Time becomes more valuable.

Attention becomes precious.

You begin to notice what everything actually costs you.

And eventually, you begin to understand what your life is costing you.

Then you get to decide what you are still willing to pay for.

When You Can No Longer Unknow What You Know

There can be a strange point in this process where returning to the old way would be easier, but no longer honest.

You could still make yourself smaller.

You could still perform the familiar role.

You could still keep everyone comfortable.

You could postpone the decision.

You could tell yourself that it does not matter.

But now you would know that you were doing it.

And at some point the relationship you have with yourself becomes too important to keep paying for your old life with yourself.

The cost of betraying your own integrity becomes too high.

The love becomes too important.

Not the kind of love that tells you that every impulse must be followed.

Not the kind that says everything uncomfortable should be abandoned.

Something quieter.

The willingness to remain with yourself long enough to know what is actually true.

And then to let your choices follow.

Insight without choice can remain an idea.

Freedom becomes lived when what you have realized begins to shape the way you actually live.

You Have to Take the Whole of You With You

A realization can happen in an instant.

Integration usually cannot.

A real shift has to move through the whole of you.

There is the mental layer.

You see something you could not see before. You recognize the decision, the pattern, the belief, or the position from which you have been living.

Often this is where the movement begins.

But understanding something does not mean the rest of you has already changed.

Then there is the emotional layer.

Everything that was organized around the old position has to move with you.

This can feel enormous.

I sometimes think of it as tectonic plates shifting inside you. An old structure has moved, and everything that rested upon it has to find another position.

Emotions that belonged to the old structure may become available.

Fear.

Anger.

Grief.

Relief.

Longing.

They are not necessarily proof that the realization was wrong.

They may simply be part of what has to move when the structure changes.

And then there is the physical layer.

The body has lived the old decision too.

In tension.

In posture.

In contraction.

In habits.

In the impulse to move forward, withdraw, freeze, hold on, make yourself smaller, or take control.

So the body has to come with you.

Sometimes you can literally feel this happening.

The breath changes.

Muscles release.

The way you stand changes.

Your response to a familiar situation changes before you have even thought about it.

What you understood mentally has begun to become available physically.

Mental. Emotional. Physical.

You have to take the whole of you with you.

That is why there is no prize for changing as quickly as possible.

Sometimes you can understand something long before the emotional and physical layers have caught up.

You do not need to drag them behind you.

You stay.

You feel what is here.

You let each layer move when it becomes available.

And gradually what once required enormous attention becomes something you simply live.

Staying With Yourself

There is another misunderstanding about freedom.

Being there for yourself does not mean never needing anybody.

You can ask for help.

You can learn from somebody.

You can lean.

You can love.

You can be supported.

You can allow another person to know something you do not know.

Freedom is not isolation.

It is knowing that while all of this happens, you do not disappear on yourself.

Someone may stay.

Someone may leave.

Someone may understand you.

Someone may not.

Life may cooperate beautifully.

Life may suddenly change direction.

And still:

I am here.

That certainty changes everything.

Not because you can control what will happen.

But because you know who will be there to meet it.

What Freedom Gives Back

Freedom may cost something.

But look at what becomes available when you are no longer spending so much of yourself maintaining what no longer fits.

Time.

Attention.

Energy.

Curiosity.

Creativity.

Love.

Rest.

Possibility.

Parts of yourself you could never meet while you were occupied with being who you thought you had to be.

This does not make the life you lived before wrong.

You lived from what was available to you then.

You chose from what you could see.

And now you can see more.

That is all.

There is no need to condemn the person you were in order to become more of who you are.

The old track may remain.

But another track exists now too.

And you stand at the switch.

You choose.

Freedom Comes Home

And yes — freedom includes love.

Not the kind that asks you to disappear.

Not the kind that costs you your truth.

The deeper freedom is discovering the love that remains when all the roles fall away.

The love that says:

I am here.

I am allowed to exist fully.

I don’t need permission to be alive.

That is the love people can spend their whole lives looking for somewhere outside themselves.

But it is also found at home.

When you let yourself be seen — by yourself.

When you stop negotiating your own aliveness.

When you know that whatever comes, you will not leave yourself behind.

When you finally allow yourself to rest in who you are.

And perhaps then freedom becomes much less dramatic than you once imagined.

It becomes ordinary.

A choice.

A boundary.

A change of direction.

A quiet no.

A wholehearted yes.

A morning in which nothing needs to be proved.

A life that increasingly belongs to the person living it.

And one day you may realize:

You can —and you will—
 lay yourself down in a bed of roses.

Not because life is perfect.

But because you are free.