532: How to Cultivate Inner Freedom

[INTRODUCTION]

 

Hal Elrod: Hello, friends. Welcome to the Achieve Your Goals podcast. This is your host, Hal Elrod, and today we are talking about how to cultivate inner freedom. What does that mean? Well, inner freedom is defined or I define it as the ability to choose, the freedom to choose your optimal mental and emotional state in any given set of circumstances. Imagine that. I think it’s the ultimate superpower to be able to choose how you experience every moment of your life. If you want to feel at peace and happy and grateful and excited and joyful or whatever you want, you choose. That is inner freedom.

 

And today, I’m going to read you a couple of passages from two different books, short passages, and then we are going to unpack inner freedom, and we’re going to lead into just two really simple but powerful steps that you can take every day to integrate inner freedom in your life, make it your default way of experiencing the world, and do so in five minutes a day. It’s a really simple, simple process.

 

Before we dive in, I want to share our sponsors, thank our sponsors, all of whom I personally use their products and wouldn’t recommend anything that I didn’t personally believe in. And first and foremost is if you want to improve your health, lose weight, have more energy, enhance your ability to focus or achieve any of your health-related goals, I highly recommend our first sponsor, Organifi. Personally, I start my day with Organifi and I use their Focus nootropic to help me think more clearly and concentrate in the morning. I then take their Red Juice before my workout to help boost VO2 output and nitric oxide levels, increase blood flow, and improve cardiorespiratory endurance efficiency, all of which it does very well. And then I use their Vanilla Protein Powder plant-based organic protein powder after my workout to build muscle mass and repair the micro-tears that naturally occur in muscle fibers when you lift weights. Now, if you want to improve your health and fitness and energy, even your sleep, head over to Organifi.com/Hal and use the code H-A-L, my first name, HAL, to get 20% off your entire order.

 

And if you want to improve your sleep specifically, one of the best solutions I’ve found to do so is combining CBD and CBN oil and the best product I’ve found that does that combining both of those is Night Oil by CURED Nutrition which also comes in capsule form called Night Caps. Now, the CBD has a relaxing effect while the CBN oil has a sedative effect. And when I was going through a period of chronic insomnia, Night Oil and Night Caps were a crucial part of getting my sleep back on track. And I’ve personally given these products to any one of my friends, family, and neighbors who are struggling with sleep and their results have been as effective as mine. So, if you want to improve your sleep, head over to CuredNutrition.com/Hal and use that same discount code, HAL, to get 20% off your entire order.

 

All right, without further ado, let’s take a deep breath, everybody, and let’s talk about how to cultivate inner freedom in your life.

 

[EPISODE]

 

Hal Elrod: Hey, goal achievers. How are you feeling right now? And what I mean is how are you feeling lately? What does life feel like for you? And maybe take a moment, put your hand on your heart, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and really sit with that question. What does life feel like lately? Is it stressful? Do you feel overwhelmed? Do you feel uncertain about the future, maybe afraid or worried? Does life feel heavy? And I’m sorry to be like Debbie Downer right off the bat here but I can answer yes to all of all of those. I can answer yes to all of those that life, it feels stressful. It feels heavy. The future feels uncertain. All of that is true for me. And also, what is also true, what I would ask you to consider is do you feel joy?

 

And for some of you, it’s, “Yeah, I actually feel joy more often than not. That’s how I feel. I feel grateful. I’m present to all that I have to be grateful for each and every day. And I cultivate a state of gratitude, a state of joy, a state of happiness.” Maybe that’s true for you. Maybe it’s not, though. Does life feel light? Do you feel hopeful? Optimistic? Are you working towards your goals? Are you excited? You know, one thing that’s interesting about goals is having a goal, having a meaningful goal that you’re working towards, just writing the goal down and putting energy and thought into that goal, it creates lightness. It creates hope. It creates optimism just having a goal.

 

I know, for me, when I’m just focusing on what I’m doing today and what I need to get done, and when I’m just busy, and I’m not necessarily progressing towards a predetermined worthwhile goal, life feels heavy. Life feels stressful and overwhelming. But when I’ve got a goal that I’m excited about, whether it’s a health goal or a goal with work or a goal with my relationship, life feels different. I’m constantly reminded of the quote by Wayne Dyer that, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change,” and it is so true. It’s that when you change your perspective, how you feel and how you approach life can completely be transformed almost instantaneously.

 

So, last night, let me get to what brought me to today’s topic, last night, I am rereading, probably for the third time, Living Untethered by Michael Singer. It’s one of my bedside books, right? I have a whole drawer full of probably about a dozen or so books that I just reread at night. I reread the underlines and the circles and the highlights that I have in the book, so I don’t have to think too much. I’ve already identified by underlining the book the first time I read it what I deem worthy of reading again, and that way it takes the pressure off of me having to, like, think too hard at bedtime when I want my mind to relax. So, I just want some reminders of presencing myself to some perspectives that bring me peace as I fall asleep at night. And so, last night, I’m rereading Chapter 27 of the book, Living Untethered, and the chapter is called The Paradigm Shift. And it was a really powerful reminder for me, and I think it’ll be for you, too.

 

So, I just wanted to read it, not the whole chapter, but just a passage. Some of the things I’ve underlined from that chapter. And then I want to read you a passage from the New Miracle Morning, Updated and Expanded Edition, specifically from Chapter 12 of that book, The Miracle Life. It’s the final chapter in that book. I think it’s my best writing ever, potentially. And I’m going to read you a bit of that, and then we’re going to talk about it and talk about how to cultivate inner freedom, the freedom to choose how you experience every moment of your life.

 

So, let’s start with this passage from, Living Untethered. Great book by Michael Singer. And this passage or this chapter is called The Paradigm Shift.

 

Everyone wants to improve their experience of life. People are always looking for more joy, love, inspiration, and meaning. The question is how to achieve this? Let’s do an experiment. Imagine an all-powerful force has asked you to write down some things that need to happen for you to totally enjoy your life. If you’re like most people, you will write down things like a new house, a special relationship, a higher paying job, and perhaps a yearlong vacation to your favorite spots around the world. The same thing holds true for the new job, the million dollars in the bank, and the respect of other people. You can have it all. But what if it creates so much stress and worry that you’re miserable? You didn’t really want the job, the money, or the acceptance. You wanted what you thought they would give you. You wanted happiness, joy, and a sense of total well-being. How about a constant inner state of love, beauty, and inspiration at the highest level you’ve ever experienced? Why didn’t you ask for that?

 

There are plenty of people that have what you wrote down on your list, and they’re not always happy. There’s nothing you ever experienced that left you totally fulfilled for any length of time. You have always needed more. Your entire life you’ve been saying, “If I get this thing I want, then I’ll be okay. And if I don’t get what I want, well, I won’t be okay.” When will you realize that doesn’t work? Why not go directly to the root and say, “What I want is to feel love and joy. What I want is every moment of every day to feel complete well-being, as high as I’ve ever felt before, and to be inspired by everything I do.” Now, there’s a list. Let’s turn that one in.

 

So, that’s a reminder that what you and I really want are not the things that we think we want. It’s the inner states that we think those things will present to us or will give to us, states of I want to feel safe. We all want to feel safe and seen and loved and important and valued and like we’re making a contribution. I want to feel those things. What we’re really after the feelings, after the states. All right. Now I want to take a moment to read to you a passage from the Miracle Life chapter.

 

The Miracle Life is based on a timeless concept, but one that escapes most people. We were born with the inherent freedom to choose how we experience each moment. This ability is harnessed by actively elevating and conditioning our state of consciousness to that of inner freedom. Inner freedom is not a new concept and has been a primary aim of not only sages and philosophers but also anyone who has aspired to experience life in a truly liberated state. In 1941, Paramahansa Yogananda, author of the spiritual classic, Autobiography of a Yogi, wrote that inner freedom is the ability to do all things guided by wisdom. Deepak Chopra advocates that the most precious freedom is inner freedom.

 

In the 21st century, millions have been introduced to the concept of inner freedom through Michael Singer’s books, The Untethered Soul and Living Untethered, in which he states, “Only you can take inner freedom away from yourself or give it to yourself. Nobody else can. It doesn’t matter what others do unless you decide that it matters to you.” While emotions are short-lived and fleeting, states of consciousness are our underlying way of experiencing life. Inner freedom is a fundamental state of consciousness that is based on being completely at peace with all aspects of life so that nothing external has the power to determine your mental or emotional states. When that is the case, you get to choose how you experience any given moment that you are alive.

 

And I want to read you one more quote from Michael Singer to wrap all of this up. And this is actually what I open the Miracle Life chapter with on the cover page, the title page. Michael Singer said, “What you’ll find is the only thing you really want from life is to feel enthusiasm, joy, and love. If you can feel that all the time, who cares what happens outside? If you can always fill up, if you can always feel excited about the experience of the moment, then it doesn’t make any difference what the experience is.” So, let’s explore this. Let’s unpack this and look at how you can cultivate this inner freedom that we’re talking about in your daily life. So, the first thing that I want us to look at, to create a little bit of a frame here, is that there are really two realities that we’re all experiencing. There is our external reality and our internal reality.

 

So, our external reality represents the circumstances in our lives, the situations, the problems we’re facing, the challenges, as well as all of the wonderful things that we have going on in life but all the things that we are stressed and worried over, right, that’s all in our external reality. But the stress and the worry are our internal reality. The joy, the gratitude, it’s our internal reality. And we, while we are all working on making our external reality as pleasant as it possibly can be, there are many things that are out of our control in our external reality, including our external reality being any different than it is in this moment. That is always out of our control. Think about that for a second. Like, in this moment, while you are listening to me, you’ve got an external reality made up of how much money you have, made up of your job and your career, or the people in your life and the issues that they’re dealing with.

 

Like, for example, my dad has cancer right now. My dad has cancer and nothing that I can do right now, no meditation, no podcast episode, no shifting my internal focus or perspective, none of that, nothing changes the external reality that my dad has cancer. I am suffering all sorts of health challenges, health problems due to the after-effects of chemotherapy and nothing that I can do in this moment, nothing I can say is going to change some of the internal, now internal being physically, but it’s really external in terms of my consciousness. Although they are related but that’s an episode for another time. But nothing that I say or think or do is going to change my external reality and same goes for you.

 

So, to Michael Singer’s point, what really matters and what we have control over, yes, we can take steps to change our external reality in the future. You can take a step. You can leave the job you don’t like. You can find a job you do like you can start a new business. You can work on your relationship, right, and change the external connection you have with another person. You can exercise and change your external reality of your body, your physical fitness. So, we can take steps to change our external reality moving forward. But at the end of the day, our internal reality is what determines our quality of life and how we feel more than anything. Again, it’s not that both aren’t important. It’s that even if you have everything that you want in your external reality perfect, as so many people show, you can still be miserable. You can still be unfulfilled. In fact, think about what you have right now in your life. You probably have things you used to pray for, things you used to dream of.

 

And like Michael Singer said, we’re never… I’ve read how he said it. Let me look, actually, I want to word what he said. He said, “There’s nothing you ever experienced that left you totally fulfilled for any length of time. You have always needed more. Your entire life you’ve been saying, ‘If I get this thing I want, I’ll be okay.’” So, think about that. You have many things that you dreamt of, right? And you also have many things that other people would love, a roof over your head, maybe a person in your life that loves you. And so, ultimately cultivating inner freedom begins with this paradigm shift that Michael talked about, which is realizing that ultimately what we want is to be able to enjoy life, to enjoy our experience of life. That’s what we’re trying to improve.

 

And what we have been conditioned to think is that if we improve our external reality, our external circumstances, our internal reality will improve. And it’s true to a degree but like Michael said, it is usually short-lived. So, how do we make all of this very practical and actionable for you right now, today in your life? Well, remember, that if nothing changes, then nothing changes. So, you have to make some meaningful changes or improvements in your life. And so, by the way, which is why I’m recording this episode for you because I realized that I often forget. It’s one thing to know what to do. It’s another thing to do what it is that you know.

 

And so, I’m going to give you two tips today, really simple tips to cultivate inner freedom. And the first tip is to write down what inner freedom means to you and specifically what you want to feel and how you want to experience each moment of your life, every moment of your life. So, write down what inner freedom means to you, how you would define it, right? Free from stress, free from fear, free from overwhelm, being at peace with what you can’t change, being grateful for all that you have. I’m just giving you ideas or giving you some thought joggers but I want you to define inner freedom because this is your ideal state of consciousness. And how exciting is that? I talked about how exciting it is when you have a goal that you’re working towards. Well, what goal is more important than for you to live in an optimal state of consciousness? To be completely free to experience every moment of your life as you want.

 

And so, to do that, we’re going to start by writing down, defining what that means to you. What does inner freedom mean to you? And that is your inner freedom affirmation. And again, an affirmation that articulates what you want to feel and how you want to experience each moment of your life. And step two or the second tip, the second step is to spend five minutes each morning, every morning doing an inner freedom meditation. And that is simply reading your inner freedom affirmation and then contemplating it for five minutes. Now, the time is arbitrary. You can do this for 5 minutes or 10 minutes, or even one minute. But the point is that you are presencing yourself to what inner freedom means to you, to how you want to feel, how you want to experience life, you’re presencing it, and then you’re investing time. And the more time you invest, the better the payoff, right?

 

If you spend one minute doing an inner freedom meditation, you’ll make some progress. Put five minutes or more and you’re going to really make this a part of your conditioned state of consciousness that will become automatic, it will become unconscious. Your consciousness will become unconscious in that this state of inner freedom is how you can experience each moment of your life. And I know for me, part of feeling free is trusting God. Inner freedom for me is trusting God, who has always, I feel, delivered everything I’ve needed when I’ve needed it, often miraculously. And so, I have faith that that will continue based on the evidence of the past. So, part of inner freedom for me is like, “Hey, stop worrying. Surrender. Give it to God.” That’s a big part of my inner freedom affirmation is to trust the universe, to trust God, to trust life, to do what it’s going to do. And it also is about being at peace with the things I can’t change. That’s a part of my inner freedom affirmation.

 

So, again, this is your definition of inner freedom, and it becomes an affirmation when you read it day after day because you’re affirming it. Anything we read or revisit or focus on, we are affirming to ourselves. And it doesn’t matter if it’s worded as an ‘I am’ statement. That’s not necessary. Anything that you focus on, that you read, you affirm to yourself, you keep it top of mind, and present for yourself. So, that’s why the first tip is to create your inner freedom affirmation, and then spend five minutes each morning doing an inner freedom meditation, which again, is just focusing on that affirmation and allowing yourself to sit with it, to contemplate it, to consider it, to receive the truth in that message.

 

All right. Goal achievers, I hope this is helpful today. You deserve to live life in a state of inner freedom. And the only thing that’s preventing you from doing that is not making it a priority. It’s allowing external forces and circumstances and people to determine how you feel inside. And today’s episode is just a reminder of, “Oh, yeah, I’m in charge of how I feel inside. I don’t have to let external forces dictate my internal state anymore.” But if we don’t do these two steps, if we don’t take time to define what that means for us, what inner freedom means, and reinforce it through daily meditation, then we’re likely to fall back into old patterns of stressed, overwhelmed, unfulfilled, and other states that do not serve us and prevent us from living this life in the way that we want and deserve to live. So, goal achievers, I love you and I hope you’re well. And I will talk to you next week. Make it a great one.

[END]