Today I would like to take a look at one of my favourite topics and values: Freedom! I confess, my personal freedom is pretty much above everything and I enjoy it very much. I love to travel, visit my friends all over the world, try new things, immerse myself in cultures or even start a new project and my own company. Life is simply too beautiful and colourful for me not to want to experience it in all its diversity and beauty! If I have the feeling that my freedom is being restricted, I immediately get anxiety attacks and tend to break out ;-). I think this is a natural act of liberation and a very healthy mechanism for self-preservation. Freedom is something very precious and beautiful!
We are often not aware that we have freedom. We are usually more aware when we no longer have it. That is, when something is taken away from us, when we are told how and when we have to do something, where we have to be or HOW we have to be. Especially the latter is particularly difficult for us when we start to bend ourselves. Freedom and lack of freedom have many facets and they range from the psychological to the spatial. I had an exciting conversation the day before yesterday that got me thinking. I've already written that freedom is one of the highest values in my life, along with love and growth. Without freedom I feel no joy, no happiness and cannot enjoy life. Without love, life is not worth living either, and without growth we stand still and fall into a kind of stagnation. Life is growth and a healthy person needs growth like the air we breathe, just as we need love and freedom. We have been talking about what freedom means to us and how important freedom is to us in life. I have been thinking about this a lot over the last few days because I think the question of the definition of freedom is totally important. How do I want to live my value or communicate it to other people if I don't even know what freedom means to me?
So: What is freedom?
I already talked about the fact that freedom has different facets. We can feel mentally free, spatially and temporally free or materially free. Financial independence is also a kind of freedom, as is our freedom of choice. For me, freedom means, for example, that I can determine my own life. I decide with whom I want to share my life, where I live, what and how I work, how I spend my free time and what goals I strive for in life. But for me, freedom is also about expressing my feelings, being able to live according to them and following my intuition in life. And who knows where my intuition will lead me. I'm sure there are some exciting things waiting for me :-)! But freedom is also about deciding which people are in my life, consciously setting my boundaries, standing up for myself, speaking my truth or leaving again when it no longer feels right. For me, freedom is doing what is good for me and taking responsibility for myself!
I find it a little more difficult to define freedom in the context of relationships. If you decide to let a person into your life, then you will always have your eyes on them. There is no longer just a "I" but also a "YOU" and a "WE". There is a unity. And this unity is characterised by equality and common ground. But two people are never the same, they are different. There are things and characteristics in which one is similar and some that are completely different. Equality therefore also presupposes agreement, which means that you want to find a compromise or even a deal on points where you differ. An author once said that a good deal is only successful if both get what they want and no one has to make concessions. I think it is possible to reach agreements where both get their money's worth and sometimes there will have to be compromises.
An example: One lives in Timbuktu (I know ;-)) and the other wants to move to Australia. In this situation it will not be easy to find a 100% solution. So you can agree on one place together (compromise!), you can do 50/50 and live in both places temporarily (compromise!) or both do their things and still stay together (good deal!). The last option is probably the least established socially, but why not try unconventional ways if it's good for both of you? Is their freedom restricted in the first two cases? I would say yes, to a certain extent, because neither of them gets exactly what they want. In the latter case it looks different again, provided you have the guts (translation for non-Bavarians: courage), the connection and a common vision that holds you together and shows perspectives. But that's a completely different topic.
Often we are just afraid of being constricted by a relationship. But I think that there are components that make us freer through a partnership. When I live and am alone, I am responsible for myself and can do what I want. I make my own experiences and live in my own perception. I see the world through my own glasses every day. In a relationship, I get the perception of the other person for free, so to speak. My partner directs my gaze to things that I would not recognise myself. He shows me new things and leads me to experiences and experiences that I might never have had myself, because I might not even know that they existed or that I would like them. This expanded spectrum of perception also means freedom for me because I am allowed to experience myself as a human being more intensely. I can experience and get to know myself as a human being even more deeply and feel enriched and fulfilled in my life as a result. Everything is more colourful! Fulfilment and happiness are also a kind of freedom for me! In addition, my partner activates issues in me, such as fears, which I am then allowed to dissolve by dealing with them and accepting them. This is certainly anything but pleasant at times, but I can say from my own experience that there is nothing better than throwing off all the ballast and feeling lighter afterwards. I can gradually detach myself from everything that does not belong to me and thus become more and more the person I actually am at my core, before we started to adapt. I free myself! So in a partnership I get something like a growth booster through this close and intimate connection in which I show myself as I am. It helps me to meet myself at a depth that I couldn't on my own. And as I said at the beginning: For me, growth is life and a fulfilled life is also freedom!
I think the goal in life is to remember our inner core and become the person we want to be. How we take this path is entirely up to us. Some prefer to do it alone with various other encounters, others in the form of a close consciously chosen connection that becomes deeper and deeper over time and brings all the layers of our being to light. How exactly we define and live relationship is up to each of us. I believe that we are allowed to go into ourselves and feel which path is the right one for us in order to come into our full power and to lead a fulfilled, beautiful and colourful life!
What does freedom mean to you? How important is freedom? What does the term trigger in you? How do you currently live your freedom in your life? What would you never want to miss? Does partnership mean a restriction of your freedom for you? Or do you also see it as an extension of your freedom? What does a fulfilled life mean to you?