Freedom & Our Fundamental Relationship to Life
Posted by otryba | Filed under Uncategorized
“Freedom!” When you hear the word, what are the feelings that come up for you? I think that for a lot of us in the West, when we think of Freedom, we relate to Freedom-From before we connect to Freedom-For which is a deep reflection of how, ultimately we relate to our existence.
Consider for a moment that
In Your Life, There is Only One Relationship That You Will Ever Have:
That is Your Relationship to Your Experience
Let’s take this back to Freedom.
The quality of Freedom in your Life reflects the quality of Relationship that you have to your Experience.
As we take a look at this, we’re going to discover a dimension of Freedom that rarely gets talked about, much less EXPERIENCED, in our culture, and
This is the Freedom-FOR YOUR Experience.
When I say “Your Experience,” I am talking about the experience you are having right now, in other words the one that you may have been trying to get away FROM.
Are you with me?
Have you heard or said, “As humans we are all basically the same?” Well, yes, there are certain things that human beings ALL have in common; we eat, drink, sleep, seek warmth and connection, that’s true.
In my travels around the world, growing up, living, and traveling in a number of Western cultures, and in my experiences with indigenous friends in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Guatemala and Indonesia, I’ve discovered that humans are fundamentally different in their Foundational Relationship to Life. By this I mean our sense of Human Life as a fundamentally welcoming experience or one where we have to continually strive for our desired experience.
We are used to looking at this from cultural, linguistic, religious, environmental or philosophical standpoints. My Invitation to You, as a sojourner in Deep Freedom Now, is to examine it from an EMBODIED Perspective, from YOUR Experience of Your Life.
Researchers in neuro-anatomy & neuro-cardiology are discovering that different Ways of Life activate, suppress, and express the development of various parts of our capacity for awareness, connection, wisdom and intelligence in very differing ways. This leads to fundamental differences between Ways of Life and determines whether a Way of Life will lead to societal collapse and the decimation of the land after just a few centuries, or whether a people will be able to joyfully inhabit their place for thousands and tens of thousand of years, with human activity actually increasing the life and well-being of other species.
A simple way to look at this is in light of our relationship to Freedom, in other words our relationship to the experience we are having right now:
Do we embody Freedom For this experience or are we seeking Freedom From this experience?
Our embodied experience of our Life as an expression of Freedom From or Freedom For also determines what our relationship to the people around us will be, starting with newborns from the day they come into our world.
Look at your own life. Tell me what you experience.
©2009 Olivier “O” TrybaFreedom, Freedom For, Freedom From, Relationship
Tags: embodied wisdom, Freedom For, Freedom From, Indigenous culture, Relationship
September 2nd, 2009 at 8:47 pm
Hi Olivier,
I am so grateful to see you sharing your wisdom with the world. You have a huge gift that humanity is hungry for.
Your loving spirit and awesome laugh is so…. refreshing! I am looking forward to being able to play with you soon.
Big Hug,
What you share Olivier I know comes from direct experience, therefore I trust and feel it in my spirit. Your words of wisdom come from a deep place of your soul that speaks truth and inspires freedom. When I honor my feelings by acknowledging in the moment what is there for me, is the way I stay free and avoid allowing the past to affect my future.
I am so inspired to embrace and honor my freedom by acknowledging my feelings fully and honestly.
Thank you for this inspiration and reminder.
deborah
September 3rd, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Thank you Deborah for walking the path of heartfelt freedom and humanity - and thanks for posting your encouraging soul offerings!
September 7th, 2009 at 11:44 am
Freedom For vs Freedom From an experience is an interesting concept to examine. Though i find “myself” trapped in the analysis when it comes to whether i’ve gotten it “right.” When experiencing a moment, a feeling, a thought, a sensation …. what is there to do with it but analyze it? The choice seems to be whether i delight in it or believe it shouldn’t “be” like this. Either way, who cares? Seems to me we swap our thoughts and experiences with “others” who give us their idea or judgement of the experience. In a way, really what else is there to do?
Freedom is inalienable … it cannot be surrendered or transferred to another. It is a claim For one’s self. It is the basis of all living.
This is what i experience.
September 7th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Thanks Pat for your comment and engaging in this in-query. Yes, we can analyze our experience and we do. In this culture we’re conditioned into doing that habitually and there’s nothing wrong with this - but it does lead to a certain relationship to self, a manufactured self, a “self” as concept. Beyond analyzing our experience, turning our experience into an object that we could analyze, there are other possibilities. If we consider that our experience is happening at a Point Zero, for example, the Experience is richly textured with FEELING (as a verb). There is the possibility of staying at this Point Zero by continuing to feel our experience. This does not exclude analysis or cogitation, it’s simply the invitation to remain present to what is going on, without beginning to manufacture a separated concept of our experience.
Years of living in other cultures made me profoundly aware of this: there are other possibilities in being human than this relationship to self and world as objects. Why might we care? Because the consequences of such deeply embodied relationships determines whether we are going to generate the sort of relationships to self, others, the world (which is one being) in a way that promotes ways of life that can last, or whether we are going to exhaust ourselves and our world in a few centuries, turning paradise into a toxic landscape - which is where we’re headed in many parts of the world.
My experience is that Deep Freedom thrives on Connection. It is not something we can surrender or transfer, but it IS something we can invite ourselves and others into by learning to actually transform our NEUROLOGY, our hard-wiring, and embrace our full capacities as human beings.
This is no small proposition and it is one that is “blind” to most people operating in one cultural context. As human beings, we internalize the world we grow up in, our neurology replicates that world - so to move beyond that neurology is profoundly challenging. That is the power of LIVING, not traveling but staying on for extended periods of time and engaging deeply, in other cultures; we discover other ways of being human for ourselves as well as the people in our host culture.
This work is profoundly rooted in this dynamic of discovery.
September 7th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Deep Freedom, neurology wise, is a concept that would have a measurable map to “know” when one has arrived at this new “site” in, i’m assuming, the brain. I admit, i have a problem with this concept that my divinity of experience as a human being is somehow “not right” and that i’m not really Living unless i’ve experienced another “way” of being human through other cultures. I have no need to defend my freedom to be, to experience my self. I understand the distinction between my self as concept and my self as the humble, simple nothingness/everything which “i” rest upon and am. Relationships just ARE. The mere act of explanation or definition of seperation engages the mind in the activity. We relate without words, often, with the surroundings and people. There is no thing we can “do” to not be in relationship. I see the world as perfectly imperfect … as perfection is the world … each pattern weaving without “my” control or even “my” thought about it. Perhaps i’m flawed because i don’t want to “save” the world. I just can’t elevate my ego large enough to believe that i make that much of a difference to Life. It’s joyful and magical to just Be here.
September 7th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Pat: YES! I love the way you stated this. It made me smile with delight!
September 11th, 2009 at 8:21 pm
Pat, I’d like to reply to your comment in more depth. Deep Freedom, as I’m talking about it, is NOT a concept, it’s an experience that does NOT require a measurable map, nor is it an experience that I can define for you, it’s more of an unlearning of all of the cultural “bait” that fosters the illusion and the hustle that there is some “remedy” out there. I can’t tell you whether you are getting it “right” or “wrong.” Deep Freedom is precisely the freedom to have the experience you are having - and the willingness to experience (as you say) rather than pursuing the illusion that you can “improve” it. This course is an end to the Self-Improvement paradigm, not from some philosophical perspective, but rather from the understanding of how this addiction arises. It is not a remedy, it is relief from the incessant relief hustle. I’ll post more on this and look forward to engaging further.
September 26th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
I came into this life with Freedom-For, that freedom to become all that I was capable of becoming. However, as I got older, I allowed Freedom-From to embrace my entire being in a fog…a fog that would clear up at times for a moment…enough to let me yearn for that freedom to experience who I was, who I was becoming. I thought I could be better, be more, be what others expected me to be. But, painfully, one day I realized…this is not me. I realized it before my spirit and body became too sick to continue on this path. So, I left it behind. I left the job, the expectations of others, the judgements of others, my own judgement of myself. Now, I am on a journey…one of simply being, exploring and experiencing my own “heart desires” and that has given me freedom…to be open to all possibilities and see each day as a miracle. The way I relate to the universe each day is bringing me ever so much closer to Deep Freedom of experiencing life…feeling the breeze on my face, the songs of the birds, the stirring of my spirit as I connect with another in silence. My question is this–can Freedom-For exist simultaneously while living in this materialistic culture?
September 29th, 2009 at 10:51 am
¡Hola Rosita!
“Can Freedom-For exist simultaneously while living in this materialistic culture?”
This is such a beautiful question, isn’t it? It’s like a huge invitation, right, like the invitation to LIFE itself, don’t you think? Can there be “Freedom-For” including FOR materialistic culture? Not necessarily in terms of promoting or demoting it, but actually recognizing that the entirety of our experience is arising in tremendous space. There is room FOR this too. This is a phase. LIFE is not absent anywhere in the universe; and to somehow intuit that the invitation of Living is to a wisdom that may take 25 years, or 25 million years to blossom. Life is at Play. Life is not “saving” itself. It celebrates and rises anew from the death and devouring of its own certainties. What certainties? Can we be alive WITH Life IN this dying to our certainties and embracing this freshness that always arises in the Unknown?
Somehow I think this is a grand adventure, full of ALL of the flavors of Living, ALL of them, even the ones we’d like to leave behind. And the Circle of Life weaves itself out of it all, entirely.
“Can Freedom-For exist simultaneously while living in this materialistic culture?”
I think that one of the best answers to this question is your smile through the copal on Equinox morning! In this tenderness, in this cariño, the world celebrates Herself in You!
October 1st, 2009 at 9:59 pm
Thank you, Olivier! This is a question I have been asking for the past two years, wanting so much to leave those certainties and expectations behind, to be able to be alive with life and celebrate it each moment…to be surprised, to be spontaneous. You say, Olivier, that life is a grand adventure, full of ALL of the flavors of Living, even the ones we no longer want to remember or continue living. Yet, we must never forget that to be renewed, we need to die to those experiences that have made us less than who we should be and release our energies to continue moving forward. By doing this, then we open up to many possibilities and we attract those things or experiences that will be good for us. ¿Qué piensas?
July 10th, 2010 at 4:18 pm
Thanks Olivier!
I notice a gentle field with a bundle of tensions in it which tend to react in various ways, often compulsively, triggering into different potentials depending on what I bring to mind or is perceived through the senses…
“An energetic bundle” I thought for a long time to be myself though later discovered and continue to discover more deeply is nothing more than a collection of points and pressures once set, a bit like an energetic set of clothes…
This energetic set of clothes is usually many layers deep, and it triggers in a multitude of ways as events change, usually drawing attention to a particular layer, or a scattering throughout the layers…
From this is derived a “wardrobe”, of thoughts, moods, movements and potentials, which seems to be me changing, moving into a different mood or set of thoughts and ideas…
Very little if any of it is true, yet, in order to function in life I have to be interested in it and play along with it and others in a similar predicament, in various stages of development; from realising this to not realising this at all.
When I identify not with this but use it as a guide/barometer I can somehow verbalise it via insight, energetic impressions flow into words and more tangible expressions.
Sometimes I end up merging more fully with reality itself, and form that I seem to enter a level of flow and insight I cannot fully understand or explain but “ports through” endlessly.
I believe from experience and learning to open and play with this that freedom is in that direction, affinity with pure reality, and bringing it through into physical expression with as little inner resistance, with fewest clothes, layers and “wardrobes” getting in the way of it is the great art.
The closest I have got to this is the body feeling almost not here yet still utterly awake and conscious to physicality, that is, an empty vibrant space where the body usually is with all of its various noise and tensions.
This lasts for different lengths of time, my aim is to have it be much deeper and permanent, as it is one of THE greatest experience’s I have yet accessed in waking life, in form.
The way to that seems to be direct confrontation with ultimate truth and staying there, as I find form that all else settles and resolves, and is where the vibrant-spacious-physical reality comes from, is entered, or occurs.
That is about the best description I can give right now of my truest and freest experience, free of what “I am supposed to be experiencing” according to suggestions from people.
I hope it is iuseful or atleast interesting?
Thanks for reading!
Warm wishes
Sean
July 12th, 2010 at 10:42 am
Dear Sean,
Thanks for engaging in the dialogue and bringing your richness to the mix. I love how you speak about a body feeling that is of empty vibrant space. Yes, our cellular reality is certainly way richer and accessible experientially than the short shrift given to it by the neurolinguistic languaging which we are convinced is our “self.” As I explore my EXPERIENCE I begin to see how rich the invitation is within BEING, the verb, AND how truly amputated the Indo-European languages I speak are to even sympathetically reflect the intelligence of the entire reality which surrounds me. More on that later.