What If You Have the Key to Your Freedom?

“So oftentimes it happens that we live our lives in chains
That we never even know we have the key . . .”
~ Lyrics from Already Gone, Eagles

Earlier today one of my clients sent me these lyrics because they reminded her of some of our coaching conversations. The Eagles were my sister’s favorite band when we shared a room in the mid seventies. I’ve probably heard that song a thousand times and never heard those lyrics on their own.

It’s strange that I had never picked out those specific lyrics because they are meaningful to me. The foundation of my life purpose involves helping us free ourselves from our innocently self-created prisons. Thank you Eagles for planting seeds in my teenage psyche!

So what is this key?

Over and over again, as I grow and evolve and as my clients grow and evolve, I see that the less involved we are with the content of our thoughts, the more free we are.

When we recognize there is actually a witness to all these thoughts – and that we are that witness – we begin to realize we may not be as crazy as we have feared. Indeed, we tend to have some crazy thinking, but we are not that. We are the witness of that.

And, when we recognize that we can choose to not engage with trying to take care of all the problems that seem to be in our thoughts, we have freed up a whole bunch of time and energy for living.

Ah, to living!

Imagine if we never again tried to answer the question, “I wonder what he is thinking about me?” Or, if we simply noticed that we were once again upset for being upset but allowed ourselves be okay with it. Nothing to fix. Or, we started to rehearse what we were going to say and realized we didn’t need to rehearse.

So, what about you? What if you are not your thoughts? What if you don’t have to fix the problems of your thoughts? What if you don’t have to attempt to control every aspect of your existence? What if you notice that your true identity is part of All That Is? And that life is organizing itself beautifully without addressing all that repetitive thinking inside you?

What a glorious key to our freedom . . .

(Excerpted from my forthcoming book, “Strong from Within: Simple perceptions and practices for transforming stress and overwhelm into clarity and purpose”)