Celebrate Independence Day with More Personal Freedom

“Freedom is actually a bigger game than power. Power is about what you can control. Freedom is about what you can unleash.”

~ Harriet Rubin

As we celebrate Independence Day in the United States (July 4), we talk much about our freedoms and the colonists who fought to secure our liberty over 200 years ago. While we are blessed to live in a country without much constraint or imposition on our personal freedom, I believe, nonetheless that many Americans (and many of our brothers and sisters living elsewhere) are less free than they can be.

What is freedom?

Book cover of Live the Life You've Imagined. Click to get more details. For many people, freedom is something they yearn for, expect, and champion as a basic human right. Yet frequently, people abdicate their own power and wait for outside forces or other people to free them. In my book, Live the Life You’ve Imagined, I devote an entire chapter–”Experience More Personal Freedom”–to the subject of how to free oneself and live in a liberated, joyful, powerful way. Last year, I wrote a blog post using material from this chapter.

Experience More Personal Freedom

Freedom is when we make conscious choices rather than running on autopilot.
Freedom is being fully responsible for all our choices and the victim of no one and nothing.
Freedom is choosing our mindset as much as our actions.
Freedom is being attached to nothing (no result, no person) even though we might fully hope to have/achieve that thing.

As I wrote in Live the Life You’ve Imagined, freedom is our choice, our individual decision. People in deplorable and inhumane situations have shown us this. Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor, psychotherapist, and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, and Nelson Mandela, South African civil rights leader, former president and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, both demonstrated this fact when they chose to be spiritually and mentally liberated despite being physically imprisoned (Frankl in Nazi concentration camps and Mandela in apartheid-era South African prisons).

“Deciding to focus on our own freedom isn’t selfish; it is the greatest gift we can give to humanity.”

~ Don Miguel Ruiz

Whether or not July 4 is officially “independence day” for you or not, I urge you to take a stand for your personal freedom on that day. Then continue your choice to be free every day thereafter.

If you’d like to share stories of your own liberations or challenges with choosing to be free, please drop a comment in below.