Having spent a number of Independence Days outside the U.S., the contrast to the way we celebrate is particularly striking in China where I visited a few years ago. One of the freedoms I didn’t have there was access to the website through which I normally send these email broadcasts (or to Google or FB).
Let’s keep a close eye on the freedoms that are being taken from us right now as legislation requiring more personal info for voter qualification threatens privacy and sets up exclusionary practices via profiling. I felt the slightest amount of profiling going on as I walked around and didn’t see another Caucasian person for days on end (not serious–in fact people react very sweetly and positively to me, but it is still evidence of how we separate and label based on attributes that have little to do with who we really are).
I’m taking a potentially more polarized stand than I normally do, but we are each led to speak out when it feels like there is something we can do to bring more awareness, justice, and love into what we see. For now, I just want to celebrate the inner freedoms that I and my amazing clients experience as we go through life.
It’s the anniversary of the sweet realizations I had around July 4 in Florida on one of the last visits to my dad, so I’m updating what I wrote to you then. Much has happened since then, including my father’s death, which tangentially played a part in my arranging this seemingly impossible trip to support my daughter in connecting to the language and culture of her Chinese roots. Read the rest of Shawn’s “sweet realizations” here.
Much of what happens has become possible in my life now that I know how to live it largely from a place I call “fearless faith.” I experience it as this: counting on myself to take one step at a time and trusting what life brings, as well as continuing to build the inner advocacy I call “self-solidarity” (that is committed to questioning the thinking that would cause me to feel scared or unsupported by reality). I am so grateful to have built that muscle or TRUST in myself and in life as it unfolds.
It is truly possible even after years of codependent entanglement to access the “IN-DEPENDENT” part of you–to know how to take care of the thinking that used to make the more vulnerable parts feel so DEPENDENT on the opinions and action of others.
So what does FIDUCIARY have to do with Freedom?
Many of us think the word “Fiduciary” has to do with finances (I always did), but the real meaning has to do with trust. Dictionary.com says the adjective “fiduciary” means “based on, or in the nature of trust and confidence” and “of or relating to the relation between a fiduciary and his or her principal.”
It turns out, in the end, that the shortcut to being happy is simply to take on that fiduciary role on behalf of OURSELVES, the innocent “principal” whose care is entrusted to us.The noun version is the role we can play for ourselves: “a person to whom property or power is entrusted for the benefit of another.”
When it comes to happiness and quality of life, I have found that “ANOTHER” is the part of us that is scared, confused, hurting, innocent, and that leaving that part in the hands of others simply does not do the trick once we are old enough to be laboring under the edicts of our own programmed thinking.
This July, I celebrate with you the fact that so many of my clients have found the true meaning of freedom — freedom from the tyranny of their own well-meaning monkey minds. As one of my dear Masterminders said, “It’s not like I’ll never have another judgmental thought toward myself of others — the big thing that has changed my life is that now I know what to DO with it. I know I don’t have to stay stuck in pain for long, and I no longer have to turn on myself and others.”
FEARLESS FAITH (FREEDOM) TO YOU!
So much love,
Shawn