115: Like the World is Already Free

Speaker 1: How to make love. Now, is that from recipe or from scratch? This is how to make love. Wow. Oh gosh. Oh my God.

Speaker 2: Yeah. A little to the left and faster. A show that tests the edges of what love is, worthiness, empathy, beauty, sex, positive, the borders. It can cross how we do integrity in all of our relationships, and its hidden costs and shadows. In a world where we other people,

Speaker 1: Where we build walls, we just tear down walls, fuck finding it or falling into it. Our

Speaker 2: Future depends on making it, I want to say something that's a little hard for me to say out loud. I look around right now and I see so much oppression, so much pain and harm and grief and violence everywhere and every day in the news, in my community, even inside myself, I see these systems that wound and divide all of us. Sometimes the only thing that makes sense is to hunker down, just to try to survive and to tell ourselves when things change, then we'll rest. Or when justice comes, then we can take X, Y, z, risk or love more fully. Or when we finally get to out there place, then we'll know what peace feels like or then we'll be able to put things down or whatever it might be. But in my practice of Buddhism, I took a vow that really challenges me with this sort of thinking and side note.
Some of you may or may not know, but I practice Buddhism and I am Buddhist and have taken several of my vows as a lay Buddhist. But in one of those vows, the language is something like this May I remember, all beings have always been free, and if you're like, wait, what? Are you serious? Have you seen the world that we live in right now? Have you seen the scale of oppression? Yes. Yes, I have. I have seen this world on fire and still I hold this paradox that liberation is necessary, that we've got to fight for it, we've got to organize for it, and at the very same time, there's a deeper truth. We have always been free. Both are true. If we forget either one, we lose something really essential. But maybe you're asking something a little bit deeper like how can I say that we're free when genocide is happening, when people in Palestine are being forcibly starved, when black trans folks are being murdered, and when indigenous land is still being stolen, when people are caged and brutalized and erased.
I hear all of that. I hear the question and I ask it a lot myself, and here's my kind of gentle response. I don't say that we're free. Instead of seeing those realities, I say, we're free because I refuse to let systems of violence be the only authors of our humanity or of what's possible for us. If we only see ourselves through the lens of oppression, we hand those systems a sort of power to define the entirety of our being. We don't mean to do that, but it's a part of the extension. But when we remember our freedom, we have the opportunity to reclaim authorship of our own story. For me, as a queer person in the various aspects of my marginalized identity, this authorship has been really liberating and really important, but I think it's true for all of us. The freedom I'm talking about isn't something that we're waiting for permission to feel.
It's not something a government can hand out. It's not dependent on a vote or a verdict or a policy shift. The kind of freedom I'm talking about isn't permission from those sorts of power structures. It doesn't come from the systems that benefit from keeping us small or afraid or in violence. The freedom that I'm talking about isn't a freedom that's granted. It's a freedom that's remembered, it's claimed. It's something that we carry inside our bones even when the world is violent and unjust, even when everything in the outer world screams that we aren't safe, that we don't belong, that we aren't whole. There's this part of us deep down that knows we were never meant to live under someone else's definition of our worth. We were never meant to wait to be told that we matter or that we belong or that we're whole. So how can we say this?
How can we say we free when people are dying under oppression? Well, because acknowledging an unseeable freedom is not a denial of violence or death. It's a refusal to let that death have the final word or be the final edict or the ultimate narrative. Because even in the face of genocide, people are singing even under occupation. People are still loving their children. They're creating art. They are resisting with poetry and prayer and looking after their neighbors. This is not just survival. That is a kind of freedom, a defiant freedom, a kind of love, the kind that no settler state, no weapon, no cage can fully take away. So when we say we're already free, it's not because we're ignoring oppression, but because we refuse to collapse our whole selves and do it or underneath it. So if we only see ourselves as victims of a violent world, I think that's a tough place to sustain survival in.
We lose the part of us that knows how to live, that knows how to love, how to imagine, how to reclaim joy, even in the midst of that sort of suffering. That's the freedom I'm talking about today. Not a permission slip from power, but a birthright of everybody. And so today, I want to sit with you in that tension, not to offer any kind of easy answer, but instead to invite you into practice. Because what if, just what if we didn't wait until the world was free of suffering in order to believe that everyone is free? What would happen if we began to live right now? The world is actually free, and so are you and I.
Okay, so I'm going to say this one more time real lovingly for folks in the back. This is not about pretending that oppression isn't real. It's not about closing our eyes to suffering or just thinking happy thoughts. This is not love and light. It's not thoughts and prayers. We're not going to skip over the truth. It's systems harm and violate and extract from and kill people every single day. We're not going to ignore that. Some bodies are more targeted, that some lives are made harder by design. We're not going to say, cheer up or just act free and you will be. No, this is something else. It's about refusing to let oppression dictate the terms of who we are or the entirety of who we are. It's about getting to know freedom now, not after we've gotten somewhere more ideal, but here right now in the mess, in the midst of chaos, in the harm, in the thick of it, learning to create the conditions inside ourselves for it.
Now, because waiting for freedom can keep us stuck, can keep us holding our breath for a day that we may never see in our lifetime. But practicing freedom now lets us breathe. It lets us love. It lets us live even while we work for more just conditions. And when we begin to practice freedom even in small ways, it can change a lot in our lives. It can change our relationships, our communities, even our own nervous system. Here's the paradox that I think trips people up. Liberation is necessary. We fight for it. We organize, we disrupt, we create, we work for it and toward it and underneath all of that, there is something in us that has never been owned. There's something in us that has always been free, something. No system can take something that remembers who we are and it's not easy to grasp.
It can feel uncomfortable. It can even feel offensive in some ways, like I'm minimizing real suffering, but I'm really not trying to do that. I'm saying that even as we work for freedom, we can live from a place that remembers that we're already whole, that we already belong and so does everybody else. So you might be thinking, okay, but what difference does it make to believe that? Why does it matter in practical terms that we should orient that way or that we should believe that we and others are already free? Well, for me, it's because it enables me to stop making choices from fear as my primary motivator, which I have a tendency to do, and I think we have a tendency to do in this culture, believing that I'm whole and that I'm free helps me start making choices from my imagination or from my courage.
If you believe that you're already free at your core, I think you're going to be less likely to wait for permission to create certain things in your life or to connect or to heal. I find that people who believe that they are free tend to not shrink for others or are a little more resistant to trying to fit into systems that were never really built for their flourishing. When you carry yourself as someone who's already free, even your relationships around you can shift. You might stop relating to people as if you need to control them in order to feel safe. You might stop relating to yourself as if you're only worthy after you've proven something to yourself after you've made some big accomplishment. And if enough of us begin to move in this way, the systems around us might actually feel the tremor. They might weaken.
They might fall apart. Structures built on scarcity and dominance lose their hold when people start acting from generosity and from dignity, from shared humanity. When we forget our inherent freedom, our work for justice sometimes tends to be fueled by anger or by fear, and those things tend to burn us out. But when our work is rooted in remembered freedom, it can carry the energy of life, of creativity, and the work we do for justice becomes infused with that creativity and that sort of endurance instead of burnout and exhaustion and depletion. I know this is a big ask considering all of this. It's not meant to be just pretty talk or words. It's a completely different posture toward life and maybe even toward yourself. One that fuels you instead of drains you or might one that makes relationships softer and braver, or it might one that makes your resistance deeper because it's not a struggle against something.
It's for something that's already alive inside you. Believing that we are already free is not a denial of struggle. It's what makes it possible to struggle without losing yourself to the things that we're fighting against. I went to Beyonce's Cowboy Carter tour last month in DC and it was gorgeous and profound and liberating in ways that I both can and cannot fully appreciate in my identity. And it was full of really powerful transcendent political moments, including this moment where Beyonce begins to sing the national anthem. And behind her Jimi Hendrix guitar, like his guitar solo from Woodstock is playing behind her. And there's this giant flashing screen and it's filled with and sort of flashing these distorted images of the American flag. And at one point the screen goes black. And in these giant red letters, there's the phrase, never ask permission for something that already belongs to you.
And with that text in the background, she transitions into the song Blackbird and she starts with a line, we're waiting for this moment to be free. And I can't know as Beyonce herself or as a black woman or as a black person or in many other oppressed identity markers, what this quote means to her or to other marginalized peoples. But to me, it speaks to this underlying paradox that our wholeness is ours, our enoughness is ours, our agency is ours. Even in a world that tries to take it from us, even in the midst of violence and oppression, it is brain breaky to see and believe both, but I think it's really, really, really important. So how do we practice living like the world is already free? I think the first place is in our relationships. I want it to be true for myself that the people around me feel like they can be more whole and more free because of our relationship and because of my presence and proximity to them.
That's my aspiration. So I think we can learn to treat people as whole, not as projects, not as problems to be fixed, even in their messiness, we can see them as whole. And what does that look like? Well, it might be forgiving somebody without erasing accountability. It might be loving someone who hasn't yet learned to totally love or accept themselves. It might be stopping the little ways that you withhold affection until someone earns it or until you feel safe to hand it out. It might be creating a deeper sense of acceptance about someone or something that used to bother you in the relationship. But I think making relationships, a training ground from freedom is a radical and beautiful and rigorous process, and it can be done with anyone, kids, partners, siblings, aunts and uncles chosen, family, neighbors, et cetera. How can we engender more freedom?
How can we treat people as fundamentally whole in the way that we show up and orient in those relationships? Another place that we can practice living like the world is free is in our own bodies. So bring your attention to a part of your body that maybe feels a little tight or stuck or guarded. See if you can touch into that right now. Maybe there's anxiety there, maybe it's shame or it's a sense of feeling like you need to hide when you're in certain rooms like a certain tenseness and fear and tendency to back away or go to the corner. I want you to ask yourself, if I were already free, how would I stand in those moments? How would I breathe? How would I speak? And then I want you to practice it, even if it's just for a few minutes. You can make a phone call from a stance of freedom.
You can send an email or write an email from a stance of freedom. You can move around as you go, do your chores and your errands from the stance, or you can try at work or in a boardroom or whatever it is, but it's embodying this. I'm free. And allowing that to kind of sink into your central nervous system and then move from that place. And it's okay if you can't keep it up for an hour or a day or a week. We start with little bits and then gradually add onto that. Another place that we can practice is in community. We can act as if mutual aid is normal and make it a part of our lives. We can share what we have. We can check in on our neighbors. We can build tiny circles where generosity is the culture, it's the norm, it's the go-to.
We can build these sorts of communities even in virtual spaces, but the point there is to build a community that is counter-cultural, that centers generosity and care and mutuality and reciprocity rather than a lot of the other things that our culture has us tend to bias. And last, we can practice living like the world is free and the stories that we tell ourselves and that we tell the people around us. I want you to listen for the inner voice that says, when I finally get to blank, then I'll be happy. Watch out for that voice and gently ask it. What if I allow myself a taste of that happiness? Now we treat so many things that our lives as if there must be this earned prerequisite for them. Try to stop doing that. It's conditional loving. Try to teach yourself to experience the feelings you most want to experience right now that you and others are worthy of those things right now as your inherent birthright.
Listen y'all, none of this is easy. Living this way will make you feel tender. It will put you out of step with the world that is obsessed with scarcity and punishment and exerting power over people. Some of you are going to feel like it's naive. Some of you are going to be misunderstood, but the gift is so great. You stop postponing love. You stop waiting to feel whole. You stop loving conditionally, and you find yourself able to breathe a little bit easier, even in the hard places, your relationships can deepen because you're no longer demanding perfection before you show up with care or vulnerability. If you can take a nice, deep, big breath with me and then let yourself settle for just a moment. Think of one place in your life where you've been sort of waiting, maybe waiting for someone to change or waiting for the just right conditions or waiting to feel more free, waiting for something different, some other reality.
Now, what would it feel like to take one tiny step in that space as if freedom were already here for you? Maybe it's speaking a little more truthfully. Maybe it's resting even though the work isn't done. Maybe it's opening your heart to someone you kept at a distance, but you long to have closer. Maybe it's letting down one of your defense mechanisms in a relationship. Take another breath. May we remember that all beings have always been free? May we live from that freedom even as we work relentlessly toward liberation, because when we do, our struggle doesn't just resist death and affirm's life. Thank you for being here with me. Friends, if you try this practice, which I really hope you do, I'd love to hear from you. How are you practicing freedom this week in your relationship, in your body? You can send me a voice note or a message. Let's keep walking this path together, and until next month, y'all take really good care of yourselves and one another. I'll see you soon. Bye for now.