Spiritual Freedom

When I was training to be a spiritual director we talked a lot about freedom. We talked about how we might avoid limiting the freedom for those who came to us for direction. It’s funny how subtle those limits can be. A casual comment like “you must feel very sad” can put your directee in a bind- you’re the authority, if you say they must feel sad, they might look at their inner experience through that lens. But what if that’s not quite what they are feeling? What if they are actually feeling angry, or ashamed? Then they have to choose between disagreeing with you or putting aside their own experience to follow your suggestion. So we were advised to mostly ask questions- “how do you feel” or “do you feel sad?” so that our directees felt free to respond out of their own inner truth.

It turns out I am particularly susceptible to such things. I really want to give the right answer, I really want to be agreeable, to be easy to work with. I feel a sense of constriction trying to make the right choice, the perfect choice and agonize about whether I am “going the right way.” I was agonizing over one such choice when I heard an interview with Kiran Trace who proposed that our true nature is freedom, that in fact we have “oceans of freedom.” I really liked the sound of that -- “oceans of freedom.” I felt better just hearing her say it. But what did she mean? I think she was pointing us toward a spaciousness that is available in us and all around us if we open ourselves to it.

Once, on retreat, we were given an assignment to write in our journals, and some starter questions to answer. Ugh. I thought, “I literally write about my spiritual reflections for a living. I love my work, but I’m on retreat.” I was filled with a rebellious spirit, determined to claim my freedom. I noticed there was a craft room right off our meeting space. I boldly went right in a signed out a box of colored pencils, and did much of my journaling for the remainder of the retreat in doodle form. I had seen that assignment as a narrow box and had resisted wedging myself into it. But that was my projection, my assumption. In truth, none of the facilitators were bothered by my choice. I noticed that other retreatants began to visit the craft room -- most likely that is what it was there for.

A full set of colored pencils as we "shelter at home"

Some of the images I doodled in my journal during that retreat turned out to be powerful and useful in my process -- transformative even. I think some of the freedom I found to express what needed to be expressed came from the fact that I never draw. I have no confidence or expectations of my drawing. Whereas I’ve come to expect my words to be measured and thoughtful and grammatically correct; with my colored pencils I had escaped expectations of form or technique. Such a small rebellion led to a huge opening of inner gates and locks. There was freedom available to me when I went looking for it. And the greater part of that freedom was not the freedom to choose colored pencils, it was an inner spaciousness.

In his wonderful book Everything Belongs Richard Rohr puts it this way “We have defined freedom in the West as the freedom to choose between options and preferences. That’s not primal freedom. That’s a secondary or even tertiary freedom. The primal freedom is the freedom to be the self, the freedom to live in the truth despite all circumstances.” That primal freedom is not contingent on anything external. That is a way of being in the world, a way of being in our own hearts and minds.

It may be hard to believe in oceans of freedom, but no matter how tightly we squeeze our fingers together water will always find a way to trickle out of our cupped hands. Could we believe at least in a trickle of freedom? Could we see the gaps and spaces where freedom flows all around us? Every living being is limited by our biology, by our community, by the times we live in. And yet filling every gap like a river flowing in its bed, surrounding us, permeating us, like the air we breathe, freedom is there too. All around us are oceans of freedom, the freedom to think what we think, the freedom to love what we love, the freedom “to be the self, the freedom to live in the truth despite all circumstances”