VIP in the Lounge

My freedom was found in choosing to shift all of my focus from the past to being so present in walking towards the rest of my Destiny and away from my hurt and fears. Had I focussed on my past: the rape, the teenaged pregnancy, the emotional abuse, life’s unfairness, I would not have been able to do justice to fulfilling my Dreams and becoming a successful single parent or an Inspirational Speaker, Life Coach and Writer. Working my dreams with all my heart and all my soul was part of my healing, it freed me from victimhood! It reminded me that I could be more than what had happened to me, what others called me or what they did not expect me to achieve. I could become greater than the experiences which had the potential to weaken me. 

Dreaming about my future and working towards it consistently, freed me from my past. It still does. Healing happens incrementally, I re-instated wholeness bit by bit. Every once, broken hole in my heart and Soul had now become the entry point to the caves in which I sought and found my spiritual treasures. I continued to heal as I healed others and I continued to fear less as I taught others to fear less. “We teach the things; we need to learn.” (A Course in Miracles) The will to heal increases, when the price we pay and the price we cause others to pay for our open or concealed wounds becomes too steep. I was a single parent, I could not afford to be a single, wounded parent and have my two, beautiful children bear the brunt of my lack of healing. I also knew that I was called to be a healer and in order to fulfil the breadth and depth of my calling, I had to be fully healed. We can only give what we have. If I was called to assist in others ‘restoration, I had to be fully restored. We continue to be a work in progress…each time I now feel wounded or insulted, I know that I have to take immediate responsibility to flip the script and focus on the experience and what it is trying to teach me, rather than over-entertain negative emotions or others’ negative motives. It has become one of the most freeing realizations that others’ behaviours, whether it is cruelly judgemental or their jaded jealousy, has nothing to do with my script or my value. It is their script, their insecurities and unhealed states for which I cannot accept responsibility. I can own my healing; I cannot own someone else’s wounds. This is key to protecting our sacred freedom and feeing ourselves from their suffering for which we are never meant to pay the price.

In the latter part of my forties, I continued to journey inward, the more I journeyed inward, the more treasures I found. The deepened understanding of My Divinity became my highest truth and this freed me from all the lies: my own and others’. Ultimately, it is our increased levels of Spirituality that frees us the most. My focus was now on my worth instead of my worthlessness, this elevated my consciousness and neutralised all previous external and self- judgements. The Truth sets us free, My Divine Worth was my essential truth in which I now chose to walk. Only you can honour your authentic identity which is your truth. It is this truth which sets us free from negative criticism, comparison and social competition. Experiencing this kind of freedom is freeing…it frees us from our Ego: our fear-driven selves. My Truth became my Spiritual Wings. After my long, dark night, my soul yearned for light and it yearned for truth. I now realised that I was that Light, my truth illuminated it, this caused me to come home, back to me, now fully healed and restored…God’s grace and my conscious choices had brought me home. It was blissfully freeing to recognize that all for which I had ever yearned: Freedom, Love and Light, was within me all along… My new, owned levels of self-worth destroyed all previous spiritual and psychological destruction. The stones which they had thrown at me had truly become the foundation of monumental strength upon which I chose to now build the rest of my Destiny. Recognizing my inner  strength was freeing to my Soul. Nobody can force this realization upon you, only you can realize how inwardly strong you are. Only you can own your strength and claim your freedom that this strength produces. Realizing that I was a priceless artefact of spiritual treasure became the source of my power required to re-engineer my life and claim only the people, places, spaces and experiences that spoke to my worth. The more repeatedly I did this, the worthier I felt. A sense of worthiness earns us the right to create greater and more beautiful life experiences. The re-engineering of our lives and personal evolution is an ongoing process. While the Butterfly can experience transformation only once, the human being can transform as many times as they are willing to grow and to evolve, it is this which becomes the conscious expression of our personal freedom. We cannot dream of freedom without accepting the full responsibility for creating the freedom we dream of in every area of our lives. We cannot experience anything new by simply repeating the old or succumbing to old treatment and old ways of doing or being.

You too, possess the right and the freedom to re-engineer your life and to evolve into who you were born to be in any given moment. I will not stop evolving, I cannot stop now, the Journey has no Distance. If I stopped growing, I would compromise the levels of personal freedom which I have worked so hard to attain. We can only go and grow from the space in which we find ourselves, our current space is produced by our past and current choices. As we grow, our needs grow, our visions, desires and sense of deservingness grow. You exercise the essence of personal freedom when you exercise your right to grow: to dream again, to love again, to forgive again and to evolve again and again and again…Your ability to guiltlessly let go of that which has de-valued or diminished your sense of self in the past informs the levels of personal freedom which you have now attained. 

We need to know what our exact, envisaged picture of personal freedom (relative to our unique journeys) looks like. If we don’t know this, how will we recognize those forms of restrictive thinking or non-aligned choices and actions which will not take us to the freedom that we want to know. We were born to experience a sense of true spiritual and emotional freedom. Most of us already know this, but find ourselves unconsciously paralyzed by fear and an over-attachment to our current realities. We feel paralyzed by the thought of leaving a comfort zone with its payoffs, which are often limiting and over-rated. We feel paralyzed by the accompanied, overwhelming fear attached to the unknown, with its unknown guarantees. We feel paralyzed by the fear of taking the risk, and yet, if we never spread our wings in a calculated way, we can never increase our scope to make bigger decisions, walk in greater courage and feel freer to dream bigger. What’s the use of having the freedom to choose and then choosing continued captivity because of its comfort? Freedom is found in uncertainty, a state devoid of conditioned familiarity. It is in this space only, in which you will be able to experience the freedom you have not yet experienced before, outside of the influence of others.

Wounds don’t keep us in captivity, our paradigms about our wounds do. If I never sought the higher purpose of my pain, I might still have been living in pain. Perspective was my other key to personal freedom. The lens through which we choose to view our experiences determine the nature of our experiences, beyond those experiences. I chose power and purpose over pity and pain. The more pitiful our lenses, the more pitiful our experiences and the more exaggerated the pitiful effects are.

Life’s events cannot hold us ransom, our thoughts about those events do. You cannot be in two mental spaces at any one time. In order to be powerful, you have to choose not to be pitiful. You have the power and the freedom to choose your mind-set, your attitude in any given moment. When you are able to do so independently, outside any form of external influence, you truly are free. Personal Freedom does not lead you to a different physical place, it is a mental state: the ability to think beyond a current, limiting physical circumstance, the ability to change our perspective in any given moment, the ability to make a new choice and alter a previous response without the fear of what others will think or say, these are the greatest expressions of personal freedom.