Do You Claim Your Freedoms?

Do you realize the Extraordinary Power of Your Freedom? What does Freedom mean to you anyway? Is it just the land of the free and the home of the brave? Because recently that is not how it has felt during this whole Pandemic!

While I recognize we are in a completely different world than most of us have ever experienced, it is crucial that you recognize what your freedoms really are and not just you equality or freedom of speech ones. While those are hugely important, today let’s dive a bit deeper into how you are claiming your personal freedom and what you are giving up. “The Extraordinary Power of Your Freedom” is yours for the taking, and yet, are you fully taking advantage of that Freedom?

Here in the United States we celebrate our freedom with parades, rodeos, parties, barbecues, carnivals, concerts, sparklers, and fireworks! We even have a special Holiday for this. Yes, the 4th of July!!

Although this year’s festivities will be different due to many restrictions and cancelled events, we are still allowed to celebrate and recreate and choose what this day will look like. Some will get all caught up in what feels like it has been taken away, some will hunker down feeling despair, anger and loneliness and many will push the limits and perhaps put us all in more danger.

Hopefully, you are spending it with family and close friends, recognizing the blessings that we have and the opportunities that we DO have and the great blessing we have of our freedom! I encourage you to remember all of those who have served us, those men and women who have put themselves in harms way to protect us and to protect our freedom…AND the many, many, honorable Veteran’s that gave it everything, even their lives for our freedoms!! We THANK YOU for this and honor you on this day!

Our Freedom is a powerful, extraordinary thing that I feel we often take for granted and do not realize the real cost of it. I also know that we live in the Land of the Free & the Home of the Brave, but are you taking Full Advantage of the Freedoms that are truly yours? “Do You Claim Your Freedoms?”

What I have found in my own life, as well as in the lives of hundreds of clients is that we have gotten complacent in even focusing on what Freedoms we have and how we are living and doing our lives! When we get complacent and loose our focus, we do not make good decisions or choices in how we spend our time and what we put our priorities on. This affects our personal freedom. I challenge you to claim your personal freedom. To claim your personal freedom, you must evaluate how your are spending your time, how you are honoring your freedom and what gets to change!

Let’s get into this on a deeper level. What does Freedom mean to you? When you stop and really contemplate the many freedoms that we enjoy every day it is astonishing! Yet, do you find yourself feeling bound or even restricted by things? We can easily feel restricted by money or lack of money, or perhaps even time or lack of enough time to accomplish everything we have planned to do. Recently we have had ”shelter at home”, “social distancing” mandatory shut downs and so many other things placed on us in the name of a world Pandemic and COVID-19, but that is not just what we are talking about.

It is time to break those chains that are binding us and keeping us from feeling true freedom! I feel that Personal Freedom must begin with you. Here are a few areas that I regularly discuss and teach about and would invite you to take a look at:

· Your Thoughts and the Things you Think

· Your Emotions, Your Feelings, Your Attitude and the Way You Choose to Feel

· Your Choices and Making Decisions, Your Accountability

· Speaking Your Truth and Owning Your Voice

· Your Ability to Take Committed Action and Your Willingness to Embrace Change

When we OWN our Freedom, we have tremendous success. We are capable of doing so much more. This begins with having the Clarity and Focus of what Freedom means to you and how you want to own it in your life. We must take ownership of our Freedoms, because if we don’t, other things will take ownership of us and we then feel Bound and Chained to things and that is how we start to second guess ourselves and doubt that we have our own answers or that we know what to do next.

“Freedom is the opportunity to Be More than you were before. To Have more and to Become More. It is the Absence of Fear and it comes from Within!” –Kris Barney

Our choices are so important. Besides our thoughts, emotions, actions and choices, there is a huge effect going on in our world of addictions. When I say that, you are probably thinking of the traditional ones that we go to like:

· Drugs

· Alcohol

· Pornography

Although those are the first ones we think about and are horrific when they take over our lives, today I want you to think about some less obvious addictions that also take over our freedom and have a profound effect on our lives. Here is another list for you to consider:

· Social Media; Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

· Cell Phone, Technology, Computer Time

· Gaming, T.V. time or Audio Books

· Work-a-holic, Addicted to making Money

· Excessive Sleeping or Checking out of life

· Food, Soda, Candy, Coffee, Energy drinks, etc

· Anything that is consuming your time to extensive amounts or makes you feel you have to do or have it.

For some of you this might sound crazy, but if you are spending excessive amounts of time in these areas, it is something you need to take a good honest look at. You get to really evaluate what freedoms you are giving up and what you are choosing to answer to.

“Do You Claim Your Freedoms” is all about taking a deeper look inside and seeing where you can create the improvement you want and take the action necessary to ackomplish it. You will be amazed at how your life will be FREE and CLEAR of things that now control you.

I have a concept that I made up called “Super Beliefs.” Super Beliefs are beliefs that are so big and abstract that they encompass all other beliefs and experiences that could potentially contradict them. As a result, Super Beliefs cannot be proven or disproven, since all experience falls under their umbrella.

Whether we realize it or not, we all have our own Super Beliefs. They’re incredibly common. And we tend to cling to them as though our lives depended on it.

“Everything happens for a reason,” is a Super Belief. It’s so all-encompassing that it can explain every single thought or idea you have in response to it. Therefore, it’s impossible to ever disprove it or show contrary evidence to it.

“Something is only true if there is evidence to support it,” is another Super Belief. “God has a plan for everyone,” is another. “We are all spiritually connected and one with the universe,” is another.

“We all live in a computer-generated virtual reality and are enslaved by machines,” is another super belief. Any argument proposed against it will simply reinforce it. If I try to point out that there’s no evidence that this is a hyper-realistic form of virtual reality, someone can just say, “Yeah, because the machines programmed it that way.” You either believe it or you don’t. Such are all Super Beliefs.

Super beliefs are so common that they define a lot of our culture. Some believe that people always deserve whatever happens to them, that if they suffer through life it’s because they’re lazy or stupid or just not trying hard enough. Others believe people suffer due to karma — i.e., what goes around comes around. Others believe that people suffer because humans are inherently sinful and God is punishing them for not repenting. These are all common, everyday Super Beliefs that have very real consequences on the social order.

If you look at political beliefs. People on the left tend to believe that people are inherently good and pure and corrupted by the oppressive society around them. People on the right tend to believe that people are inherently selfish and mean and the rules and structure of society are the only things that can save us from ourselves.

As a kind of societal Rorschach test, Super Beliefs explain why two people with completely opposite points of view can witness the same event and both believe that it supports their position. One person may see a homeless man and see them as a person who is oppressed and victimized by society. Another person may see the same homeless man and see a person who has succumbed to his baser instincts and deserves the suffering he’s brought upon himself. Because Super Beliefs can explain all experience, all experience, therefore, reinforces the Super Belief.

Super Beliefs can be benign (“Everything happens for a reason”), useful, (“All knowledge must be verified and tested to be believed”), benevolent (“The meaning of life is to ease the suffering of all living beings”), or just plain fucking mean (“Death to all non-believers!”).

You may not be aware of them at the moment, but you carry Super Beliefs around with you everywhere you go. They are the foundation on which you’ve built your whole understanding of the universe and everything in it. As a result, Super Beliefs are often hard to spot because they feel so obviously true to us that we never think to question them.

But as time goes on, you’ll notice your Super Beliefs, and the super beliefs of others, poking their dirty heads up, derailing reasonable conversations, putting a roadblock up to any discourse or progress. And it’s in those moments where Super Beliefs emerge that they must be challenged.

When people do horrible things, they don’t do it because they’re uncertain in themselves or they feel as though they are wrong or damaged in some way. It’s actually the opposite. People who do horrible things do them because they are so sure in their own moral superiority. They are so confident that they are right and others are wrong that they feel justified in imposing their own beliefs on others through force.

Whether we’re talking about Hitler, Mao, napalming half the South China Sea, or honor killing a Pakistani woman for showing her ankles in public, people who do awful shit do it because they are certain in their own moral righteousness, and that moral righteousness is usually the product of some Super Belief which cannot be verified or concretely challenged.

Jim Jones took people in desperate situations and people with mental illness and convinced them to buy into the Super Belief that he was God and he was their only salvation. From there, as with most cults, it was all downhill. Once the followers buy into that initial Super Belief, then convincing them to give away their possessions, disown their families, or even to move to the jungles of Guyana feels like a no-brainer to them.