The Five Freedoms

Spending two months of pure leisure in Central America with my family is the culmination of four years of hard work on my own personal freedom (and a couple of decades of less focused but still directionally compatible actions on my part).

There seem to be five fundamental freedoms you need to find on the path to personal fulfilment - emotional, mental, financial, relational, and circumstancial.

Emotional freedom means the ability and the will to feel all emotions to completion. This usually requires a spiritual practice of some sort (my favorites are The Sedona Method and The Work but meditation, yoga, prayer and other forms work well too). Some experience with psychedelics is very helpful because it shows you the destination before you're able to reach it naturally.

Mental freedom means peeling off all the identities you carry around that cloud your judgement if what's actually true FOR YOU. My bio is a brief list of the ones I needed to shed, but there are lots and I keep discovering more. Any time you say "I am X" you express an identity. Any group you feel you belong to is an identity. Any identity clouds your independent judgement. They are all crutches, they are all painful to let go of, and none of them are ultimately necessary.

Financial freedom is the deep realization that money is abundant and that making money is easy. This one is very hard, and seems to require complete financial ruin as a necessary step. The fundamental skill you'll need to build here is the ability to sell. Best guides I found for this part are Kyle Cease (The Illusion of Money) and Harry Browne (The Secret of Selling Anything). Importantly, it doesn't seem to be about building a single successful business (which creates another identity), but about finding your unique way of creating money on demand. Having formal education and a profession seem to be detrimental to learning how to do this.

Relational freedom is about putting your own wellbeing ahead of the wellbeing of others - including your partner, kids, family, friends, community, country, etc. This one is very hard to swallow and brings up tremendous guilt and criticism, but is essential. I'm convinced you can never find personal freedom until you give yourself permission to put yourself first. Doesn't mean you won't care about other people, but like the safety instructions on airplanes say, you out the oxygen mask on yourself first, and on other people second. As part of this you may need to renegotiate your marriage (or get a divorce), leave your parents to fend for themselves in a collapsing country, change your relationship with your children, and in many other ways "betray" people who (supposedly) depend on you.

Finally, circumstancial freedom means changing everything about your circumstances to fit your unique sensibilities. Each of us is absolutely unique. Not just in attributes and talents but in the infinite richness of our inner world. What works amazingly well for one person is awful for another. Adjusting your circumstances may require moving to a different country, acquire a more flexible passport, change your occupation, and redesign your living arrangements. More than anything, accepting your idiosyncrasies, fetishes and preferences even if they are in complete contrast with what "society" deems acceptable.

Finding freedom is hard work.

But it is very rewarding.