On Unshackling

What if freedom isn't something we achieve, but something we remember?

I have been thinking a great deal about freedom lately. Not freedom in the political sense, though that certainly lives beneath these reflections. Not freedom as financial independence or the ability to travel where we please. Not even freedom as the absence of pain. Something quieter than that. The kind of freedom that allows a person to fully inhabit their own life. The kind that softens the body. The kind that makes room for wonder. The kind that returns us to ourselves after years of believing we had to become someone else in order to belong.

For much of my life, I assumed freedom would arrive as a destination. There would be a version of me - wiser, more healed, more successful, more certain - who would finally exhale because she had earned it. Freedom lived somewhere over the horizon, always just beyond the next accomplishment, the next certification, the next relationship, the next milestone. It was never here. It was always there.

The problem with organizing your life around arrival is that you unknowingly begin postponing your own existence. You become remarkably skilled at preparing for your life while forgetting to participate in it.I've done this in beautiful ways. I've called it ambition. I've called it discipline. I've called it purpose.

And while there has been truth in all of those names, there has also been something else living underneath them. Fear. Not always loud fear. Not panic. Not crisis. A subtler fear. The fear that if I stopped moving, everything I had built might disappear. The fear that if I rested too long, I would somehow lose my place. The fear that enoughness was conditional. When I began paying attention to these fears, I noticed something surprising. They did not sound like my own voice. They sounded inherited. There is something profoundly humbling about realizing that much of what we experience as "ourselves" is actually a conversation that began long before we arrived.

Some of us inherited hypervigilance from families who survived war, migration, or instability. Some inherited perfectionism from generations who learned that excellence was the safest way to navigate systems that were never designed for them. Some inherited silence. Others inherited performance. Some inherited the belief that love must be earned. Others inherited the belief that safety could disappear overnight.

None of these inheritances make us weak. They make us human. They tell stories about people who adapted with extraordinary intelligence to extraordinary circumstances. Our nervous systems are remarkable archives. They remember what history forgets. They carry songs, rituals, recipes, languages, grief, resilience, tenderness, and fear. They also carry unfinished stories.

This has become one of the most meaningful intersections for me between psychotherapy and yoga philosophy. Both begin with a similar invitation. Become curious. Not because curiosity magically erases suffering. But because curiosity creates just enough space between us and our conditioning that we begin to recognize it as conditioning instead of identity.

In yoga philosophy there is the concept of samskaras - the grooves left behind by repeated experience. Like water carving a riverbed over centuries, every experience leaves an impression. Some grooves become wisdom. Others become reflex. Eventually we stop choosing our responses because the groove has become so familiar that it begins choosing for us. Modern neuroscience speaks about neural pathways. Attachment theory speaks about internal working models. Trauma researchers speak about adaptations. Different languages. The same observation. We become shaped by repetition.

But yoga offers something I find deeply hopeful. It never suggests that these grooves define us. Only that they influence us until we begin paying attention. There is immense freedom in that distinction. Because if I am not my conditioning...

Who am I?

Costa Rica has interrupted that question. Not by giving me answers. Nature rarely does. Instead, she has offered different evidence. Every morning I wake to the sound of howler monkeys whose existence seems entirely unconcerned with productivity. The trees outside my window produce fruit whether anyone is watching them or not. The tide arrives with astonishing consistency without once asking whether it is enough. Nothing in this ecosystem appears interested in proving its worth. Everything participates. Everything belongs because everything is in relationship. The forest does not ask the vines to become trees. The river does not apologize for changing course. Even decay has a place. Especially decay. There is no hierarchy of usefulness here. Only interdependence.

I have found myself wondering how different our lives might become if we understood ourselves less as isolated individuals trying to optimize our existence and more as participants within a living ecosystem.

What if healing isn't about becoming exceptional?

What if it is about remembering relationship?

The older I become, the less interested I am in self-improvement. Not because growth no longer matters. But because I think we've confused improvement with liberation.

Improvement often asks,

"How can I become more?"

Liberation asks,

"What can I finally lay down?"

Those questions lead us in profoundly different directions. One accumulates. The other releases. One assumes we are incomplete. The other wonders if we have simply become buried beneath everything we've been taught to carry. Perhaps that is why unshackling has become such a compelling word for me. Not because it suggests breaking free in one dramatic act. But because shackles are rarely forged in a single moment. They are made link by link. Expectation. Comparison. Scarcity. Performance. Fear. Certainty. The belief that our worth depends upon what we produce. The belief that rest must be justified. The belief that there is one correct life we must discover before time runs out. None of these links were created by one person. Many are cultural. Some are colonial. Some are ancestral. Some are simply the accumulated weight of generations trying their best to survive.

To unshackle ourselves is not to reject those who came before us. It is to continue their longing. To imagine that perhaps survival was never meant to be the destination. That maybe our ancestors dreamed - not always consciously, but somewhere in their bones - that someone after them might know a little more ease. A little more spaciousness. A little more freedom than they did.

I don't believe healing is linear because I don't believe life is. Nothing in the natural world asks us to become in straight lines. The moon disappears before she returns. Seeds split apart before they grow. Forests regenerate through cycles of death and renewal. The tide advances only because it first retreats. Why, then, have we become so convinced that our own unfolding should look like constant forward movement?

Maybe we have mistaken repetition for failure. Maybe returning is not regression. Maybe each return offers another opportunity to loosen what no longer fits. To love a younger part of ourselves with greater tenderness. To choose differently - not because we finally became perfect, but because we finally became present.

As I prepare to leave Costa Rica, I realize I am carrying home very little certainty. And strangely, that feels like freedom. Not knowing exactly what comes next no longer feels like something to conquer. It feels like something to enter. With curiosity. With reverence. With enough spaciousness to imagine that life may still surprise me. Perhaps freedom has never been waiting on the other side of certainty. Perhaps it begins the moment we stop asking certainty to hold what only trust can. Perhaps unshackling isn't about becoming someone entirely new. Perhaps it is the lifelong practice of remembering that beneath every inherited story, every protective strategy, every identity we've learned to perform, there remains something ancient, whole, and profoundly alive. Something that has never forgotten how to belong.

And maybe that is what the forest has been trying to teach me all along. Not how to slow down. Not how to escape the world. But how to return to it - with open hands, softened shoulders, and enough courage to believe that another way of being human is not only possible, but already quietly taking root.