❤️ Dispatch #9: Liberation
Move thoughtfully, give others freedom.
In the steam-punk meets fantasy series of novels called The Founders Trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett, a key character utters his manifesto in life after thousands of years of existing:
“Move thoughtfully, give others freedom.”
This line captures a thread throughout the stories (I’m on book 2) that include themes of slavery, same-sex love, class warfare, power, and other ways we struggle with each other and ourselves to experience freedom.
In my own life, the word “liberation” keeps bubbling up.
Over and over again.
As I work with more and more people in my coaching practice,
people from all walks of life -
That word liberation keeps coming up.
See, nobody comes to coaching because they’re fine with life as it is.
They want change.
They desire difference.
These desires take many forms,
usually related to work and love.
When you listen long and attentively enough,
you can feel an urge beneath the cravings.
A pulse of feeling, a surge much like the ways a moth pushes against the shell of the cocoon.
Unspoken, and often unknown.
But it has a name:
Freedom.
This has led to an insight:
The core desire underneath all desires is freedom.
Free from what?
Freedom to do what?
I recently attended a two-day martial arts intensive in the UK countryside.
The theme of the intensive was “Inner Power”,
and the core principle we worked with over hours of training was simple:
Notice when you’re tense, and let go of that tension when you notice.
This is the difference between moving, striking, being struck, and navigating conflict with force (tension) and power (relaxation).
How can you move from power with just enough structure?
Of course, we all hold tension in one way or another.
The dance between tension and relaxation is a core dynamic in the play of life.
All movement oscillates between these polarities.
An arm lifts,
a million nerves and muscles fire,
tensing in some parts of the movement,
relaxing during others.
Yet, we often hold tension chronically in certain areas of our bodies.
Even deeper, we hold chronic tension in the form of maladaptive defense mechanisms.
They keep us safe,
but limit the extent of our expressions.
So, a version of freedom could be expressed as a kind of inner freedom,
the ability to move and express freely without the restrictions of our own constraints.
Simply put,
the freedom to expand in all of our wholeness and fullness.
There’s another form of freedom we want as well.
A structural, cultural freedom.
The freedom to be who we are with others.
To allow our bodies to love those they want to love.
Freedom to pursue meaningful work and have our survival needs met.
To be free from threat of harm and injustice.
We want equitable structures.
And a way to influence their change when they begin to oppress.
I live in Berlin,
a city that holds this tension of radical personal expression within the context of a culture that tolerates it much more willingly than others.
Berlin exists as a living record of how we can both allow freedom,
then try to restrict it with structures made to protect the freedom of some at the expense of others.
Fascism, the Berlin Wall, and other periods of restriction,
followed by explosions of freedom,
like the culture of free expression that followed the fall of the Wall in the 90s.
We seem caught in this dance of trying to define what freedom means,
regulate forms of freedom that are harmful to others,
find ourselves in an authoritarian rigidity that oppresses some groups in favor of others,
resist that rigidity and attempt to break it down,
explode into a form of anarchy where anything goes,
then start it all again.
We move through culture with our own inner authoritarianism,
the things we will allow ourselves to do,
and not to do.
The ways we criticize and control ourselves to fit a norm,
or refuse to accept external authority to preserve autonomy.
Inner complexity manifesting within the context of infinite outer complexity.
And all the while trying to capture the shapes of these movements in our art,
to express the vitality of a moment that leaves and leaves for good.
No clear answers,
just a fall and surrender to Grace,
then a resistance to that surrender,
then more falling.
Berlin pulses to the movements of the sun.
The sun comes out,
and the streets fill.
People chatting in front of cafés.
Walking and running along the canal.
My favorite thing is the sight of Berliners standing in the sun,
eyes closed,
feeling the warmth of it on their face.
No culture I’ve embedded within respects the sun the way they do here.
They know what it feels like when the sun goes missing for stretches of time.
The winters are brutal. The Spring after makes it all feel worthwhile.
You can’t escape the finality of Nature doing what she does.
A dark day is simply a dark day.
How does freedom work then?
The age of Solid Identities is dying its final death.
We can no longer cling to static images of who we are,
reified by psychological structures that exist to keep themselves intact.
The average person will have multiple careers in their life time,
and the idea of career is continually challenged as notions of work break down in the face of new paradigms fueled by technological evolution.
No, the winds of change sweep aside the known,
and we find ourselves sensing difference with curiosity.
What’s here?
What’s it like?
How does it feel to experience it?
What label can we give to the unknown and the unknowable?
As we embrace the shift into Fluid Differences,
we wonder what structures can contain this dance of tension and relaxation,
the ways we crave freedom to belong to ourselves and each other.
What deeper structures may emerge?
How does the dissolution of hierarchy lead to something grounded,
in a fundamental trust in Life?
What guidance, both inner and outer, will we look to?
How will we learn to share in the pain and suffering of what it means to be alive,
and offer each other freedom as we do so?
Thanks for wandering and inquiring with me.
There was no point to be had here.
Just a float down the river with the current keeping things moving along.
It’s funny how much better a relaxed body floats.
How a moment by moment acceptance of the uncontrollable and the uncertain,
leads to a new freedom.
Flow on. 🌊
For years, I've claimed freedom as my corest of internal drivers. Everything I do is geared toward securing my perception of freedom. I've always suspected there was something slightly flawed in that claim, but I didn't realize it was that freedom was never mine, not mine alone anyway.
Your most beautiful and poetic piece so far. Thank you for capturing with words what has been occupying my mind since the retreat but haven't been able to put into words...
Freedom and my need for it has definitely been a theme for me for the past few months and will continue to be, of that I'm certain.
I recognise snippets of our recent conversations. I love how they found their way into your beautiful post.
The description of Berlin, the contrast of total freedom existing alongside punishingly precise and orderly culture is striking.
I shall float on, moment by moment, however with less tension and contraction, thanks to Matt and the retreat.
Thank you so much for this, my friend. 🙏