Intuitive healing expert Katarina Winslow reflects on what it is to be free.
After the year 2020 when our lives were hampered by many rules and restrictions, I find it interesting that one of the definitions of freedom in the dictionary is ‘non-confinement and immunity’. To embrace freedom, we must first understand what freedom is, at least take the time to reflect on what it means to be free. I wish for all of us that 2021 will be the year when we begin to reclaim our freedom, by building up our physical, psychological, emotional, and existential immune systems instead of weakening them by holding our breaths.
May 2021 be the year that frees us all from the old and invites the new and inspiring into our lives. In personal healing, you could say that you become truly free once you remove all the false beliefs you have about yourself. Many of us walk around in life with a lot of surplus baggage. We are carrying our mother’s sorrow or our father’s anger, or the guilt of our sister or the resentment of a friend. We also take on extra baggage in the form of opinions that other people have and have had about us and our ideas about others. For example, the schoolteacher who categorized you as slow or too troublesome, or the neighbours that find you find weird and flaky.
The boss that looks at you like you do not exist, or the partner that pressures you to ignore your own desires and live in a mould they have created for you. Or the colleagues you dismissed from intimate conversation due to a preconceived judgment. Or the stranger in the street that is just not at your level. Often, it is sensible to go beyond first impressions and preconceived ideas about others. You never know when you will find the treasure of another human being. There is much love to be found, and beauty, too, once we strip off the illusionary layers of emotional, psychological and existential ‘viruses’ that we all carry.Whether the illusions be from childhood, past lifetimes, or accumulated on our journey through life, accepting false beliefs and (self-)imposed obligations will keep us from being free. Then, of course, we have the pressure from society, the unspoken rules of ‘how to be’. What it means to be a successful person, to fit in, beliefs that are often far removed from being human. The codes and ideas built into our system and our societies are sometimes very compelling. There is an ocean of subtle messages that has taken humanity on the road away from the free-spirited, the authentic, and the true. The truth is, you are love, and life is love. But let us be honest. It is challenging to be free in a world infused by subtle messages about our own individual selves and human nature at its base that have nothing to do with the freedom of being human. Are you free when you believe human nature is bad? Isn’t it that you are freer when you believe human nature to be good?
This makes me think of Nelson Mandela and his famous words, “As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.” Even though he had experienced much pain, hatred and the worst of human nature in prison, he decided that he wanted to be free. His freedom was so important that he instead forgave what had been and chose to believe in the good to keep his inner world at peace – free and beautiful.
More words of wisdom that may inspire us to become freer are from the woman that said, after being released after two years in a concentration camp: “Hitler took two years of my life, but he will not have another second of my life.” When you carefully think it through, you realize that freedom is a choice, and that in freedom there is a catalyst that is called forgiveness. If you do not forgive, you cannot be free. This holds true psychologically, emotionally and existentially. Moreover, if you do not believe in the good, if you do not feel the love and life in your heart, you are not free either. You are imprisoned in negative beliefs about yourself, others and the world.
I am not saying these negative energies do not exist, they still do and probably will for some time to come, but you have the power to ‘make’ yourself free – cast off all that is not you. Cleanse yourself on a personal level of all your false illusions about who you are and what it means to be alive. As Krishnamurti said: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
Why? Because to make this world free, we need a lot of healed people. To make a person free is what a healer does. Personal freedom, the freedom to be you is the essence and the driving force of any therapeutic work and at the heart of making this world better by revealing a freer version of you. Make this year the year where you strip off all the illusions you have about yourself that keep you from your authentic core, from the source of life itself. And at the same time, let us strip off the illusions we have about each other and the illusions we have about what is possible.
We are in for a significant shift in consciousness, and it will be epic for you, for me and for the world. When you have ‘cleansed’ yourself of the surplus baggage, from the paint buckets that have been thrown at you and the programmes that have been installed in you by society and false beliefs, you will wake up one day to be free. Let us all hold hands this year and realign our individual and collective compasses to a world where we are free, and where the world is free. Let us all take a deep breath and feel the joy of being alive.
Together.
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