Free Your Mind
“You’ve got to let it all go…fear, doubt and disbelief; free your mind.” Morpheus
Every Fourth of July, we celebrate Independence Day, a day to commemorate and appreciate our freedom. All men and women seek freedom to live as we choose. It is a part of both our human and spiritual nature. But regardless of all the political, economic and social freedom that we may enjoy, many of us remain detained in prisons of the mind.
Viktor Frankl was a Jewish medical doctor who was confined to a concentration camp by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. He was a Holocaust survivor, and went on to teach survival and living skills. Regardless of all the inhumane ways that he and his fellows were treated while incarcerated, his dire circumstances taught him that the real meaning we derive from life comes from within. While his body was confined in prison, his mind remained free and he maintained a will to live that carried him through the worst of life’s experiences.
There is a lesson for us in this today. Let me start by sharing with you all about my prison stay.
For the lion’s share of my life, I lived in a mental and emotional prison. The walls were built and fortified with fear. The ceiling was pure self-doubt. The floor consisted of obsessions and compulsions. I was surrounded by bars of disbelief. It was a small, dank cell where the door was always wide open, but I chose to sit there and wallow in my incarceration and pity myself for it. Never in all my years before recovery did it ever dawn on me that I was the one that passed my own sentence, that it was me who condemned myself to live like that. No matter how free I was in the temporal world, I was just another spiritual inmate. And I did some real hard time there.
My unconditional release from my confinement came when I chose to pardon myself. I forgave myself and everyone else all the terrible things that we did. I surrendered my fear, doubt and disbelief. I relinquished my resentments and hard feelings. I quit judging myself and others. Court was adjourned.
It is this fine day that I encourage you to assess the constraints in your life. We no longer need to spend our lives in solitary confinement. We require no further punishment. Today is the day to accept that our circumstances do not determine our happiness. Whatever is going on out there has little to do with what is going on in us. That is the first step to a truly free existence.
Today, make a prison break.
Thank you
Jim
James A. Francetich is a freelance writer and author. The opinions expressed are solely of the author and do not represent any community based recovery programs, private or public entities or any governmental agencies.