PERSONAL FREEDOM: Hiding in Plain Sight
Personal Freedom.
What does it mean to you?
In what ways does it inspire and guide your life? Or not?
Through the challenges and confusion of getting through your day, is it even on your radar?
I think of personal freedom as: the capacity to clearly and calmly perceive, think, feel, and process with minimal restriction.
What’s really going on around you? How clearly do you perceive it? What do you honestly think and feel about it? How openly do you process it, especially with yourself?
And then there’s the outer freedom of the ability to live with integrity and intelligently express yourself.
In what ways does this speak with you?
Let’s glimpse some of the factors that enable, or restrict, our personal freedom to perceive and experience what is happening.
In a real way, we live in a personal fog of think-think and emote-emote. As we walk through our day, we’re preoccupied with thinking and emoting about what we are perceiving and experiencing.
This mind-fog and reactive emotion generates ongoing distortions in our ability to clearly see and understand what is happening.
In effect,
We don’t realize we're not aware of, nor directly experience, the actual reality around us. We are locked deeply in the filters of what we are thinking and emoting about it.
Yet, we also live and operate at the clarity and calm of our awareness.
Keeping it short & simple, let’s review some of the factors that shape our awareness.
What dulls and restricts our awareness?
Perceiving something as friend or foe.
Attempting to control or defend.
Preconceived ideas and judgments about the way it should be.
Closing down to protect ourself, and others, from believed impact of the situation.
Our personal-presence disappearing into our concerns.
What brightens and enables our awareness?
Realizing when we are becoming stuck in closing-down.
Employing strategies and discipline to disengage into a place of calm and clarity.
Having a foundation of mindfulness and self care for relaxing and opening our focus.
Progressively uncovering blindspots by releasing concerns and fears.
Maintaining personal-presence enabling the calm and clarity for perceiving and experiencing whatever is happening, without closing down.
Personal Freedom: Hiding in Plain Sight.
The capacity for clearly and calmly perceiving, thinking, feeling, and processing with minimal restriction.
The ability to live with integrity and intelligently express yourself.
Notes:
Awareness feeds on openness and receptivity.
Personal realizations are hiding in plain sight.
2 questions for you:
What about this article speaks with you?
How will you apply it in ways to make a difference in your life?
The NEXT ARTICLE will be published around my birthday in APRIL.
Article Focus: What is your heart’s desire for living the emerging chapter of your life.
In preparation: I’ll be recording and transcribing my dialogues with a colleague for flushing out and illustrating ways: to experience our heart consciousness, to sense the progressive unfolding of our heart’s desire, and to generate the steps into living our heart’s desire.
Sounds like fun!
SUBSCRIBE to my articles on Substack. otanpatrickford.substack.com.
Author via amazon.com
Unwavering Heart: 5 Keys to Living with Fierce Authenticity, 2014
Unwavering Heart: 5 Keys to Becoming your Destiny, 2017
otan@otanpatrickford.com 1.973.229.7174 https://www.otanpatrickford.com