Allowing Yourself Greater Freedom

To continue with the theme from last year around the Fourth of July, today I want you to simply notice where you do not allow yourself freedom in your life. Do you withhold love: from yourself or others? Do you try to control everything/everyone because it feels scary to step into the unknown? Do you punish yourself and withhold things that would feel good? Do you allow yourself pleasure?
 
Now you may say, “No, I give myself plenty of freedom.” But do you? Do you really allow yourself the freedom to explore, grow, imagine, and branch out into something you’ve never done before? When you really look, how much do you restrict and confine yourself to what you know? And that may simply be the stories you tell. You’re so used to it, that you don’t give yourself the freedom to see that there could be another way.
 
There’s a difference between adult freedom and adolescent freedom. Believe me, your inner adolescent would love you to define freedom by their terms and have you just go crazy without responsibility, because to them, that’s what freedom means. But that’s not what I’m talking about. You can’t say, “Well Tina told me to allow myself pleasure so I’m going to go out and get drunk and overeat and be careless.” Nope, not giving you permission for those things. Notice that for a second – are you still defining freedom through the eyes of your adolescent? Does freedom mean shirking all responsibility and allowing yourself to overindulge, or not be mindful and instead, be thoughtless, neglectful, and reckless? If so, to any degree, then your adolescent is running you.
 
How can you define freedom from your adult? That freedom is, as I mentioned above, growing, expanding, and letting go of the ways you have limited yourself through control or martyr etc., or where you still punish yourself for something that happened in childhood. Have you bloated the responsibilities of your inner judge and allowed them to restrict you, limit your imagination, and keep you a prisoner to the past? Strip them of their power, you can do that! Unlock those handcuffs, open that jail cell, step into a life filled with more love and light than you have allowed up until now. You are the only one holding yourself prisoner. 
 
It’s time to be free. 
 
With every firework explosion tomorrow night, release more of who you are not in the ways in which you’ve limited and denied yourself, and as those lights cascade down, let them fill you with incredible sparkle to become more, to grow, and to expand into the real you.
 
Freedom awaits.