Freedom: Self-Expression and (Re)Writing Your Own Rules

A moment of flight, falling out of a yoga pose, freely and joyfully existing beyond the dogma of shapes with names and alignment :)

Our last chapter was a heavy one of confronting our suffering and cultivating self-worth and self-love. From a place of true self-love, it is only logical that we’d be drawn to freely self-express and share our beauty, abilities, and existence with the world. To properly love ourselves, we must be free: liberated from delusion, distractions, oppression, and rigid external rules and structures that get in the way of our fullest self-expression. In a country where freedom is a glorified founding principle, we often get confused that freedom means getting anything we want despite behavior, not having responsibilities, or a complete lack of restrictions or discipline. Throughout this chapter, we will explore that a human’s freedom in its highest form is most fully expressed when they are free to discipline themselves and choose to do so with vigor. Put more succinctly, self-discipline is the way of true freedom; forced discipline is oppression. Like any discussion about freedom and, by extension, free will, parts of this will get a bit mind-bendy, so buckle up. This sort of bending of the mind is what we train for when we bend the body.

Freedom: Truth, Rules, Discipline and 80/20

Rules Steer Your Freedom Where You Want to Go

A human completely free from rules and discipline is essentially nihilistic, chaotic, and directionless, which hardly sounds useful. Without restrictions, you are an engine without obstacles but also without a steering wheel.

Paradoxically, to fully exercise your freedom, you must iteratively choose rules to discipline yourself. These rules and your discipline/adherence are what direct your efforts in a useful direction. That direction is driven by your intentions, which we discussed in our last chapter. Align your rules with your intention, follow the rules, profit, refine the intention, refine the rules, profit more, repeat til death. A rule is a guiding principle that restricts behavior. Most rules we think of are written in absolutes by some authority. This will quickly perk up the ears of a well-studied yoga or Buddhist philosophy student and say, “Ew, no, rules must be dogma, and dogma is bad because it is a formalized attachment that will inevitably draw us away from the truth.” To address this, we’ll take a brief detour to discuss dogma and dharma and then come back to the usefulness of rules in your path to freedom.  

Dogma v.s Dharma

For those less familiar, dogma is a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true. In yoga, we believe that change is constant. Even during a moment of stillness in a pose, our breath swells, blood flows, and every cell that makes up our body vibrates. Therefore, anything presented as “incontrovertibly true” should be scrutinized. To newer yoga students, this may seem ironic because of how rigid yoga teachers can be with prescribing the seemingly “incontrovertibly correct alignment” for a pose. The teacher’s intention is to keep you safe and encourage you to have a deeper experience. If a teacher were to express before each alignment cue is an invitation to find more safety, strength, and depth that you are welcome to take or leave, it would be a waste of space for valuable other words to help guide your experience. Reminding students that they're free to express poses as they please is a great way to bring this dharma of freedom into your class.
In yoga and Buddhist philosophy, we have a concept of Dharma, “the eternal and inherent nature of reality, regarded as a cosmic law underlying right behavior and social order.” At first glance, this sounds a lot like dogma, which we just acknowledged must be scrutinized. The difference here is quite subtle and sometimes lost in the language of these definitions. Dharma is the pursuit of truth, an ever-changing truth, experienced in many different ways and sometimes, if not always context, specific. When we talk about Dharma, we are talking about strategies of pursuing that which is true so we might align ourselves with these truths and live more harmoniously.

Dharma talks are given on meditation and yoga retreats. They discuss truth and the “right” way of being in the world, including “how to take yoga off your mat into your daily life and relationships.” Traditionally, a teacher leads the discussion, and the audience can participate. This creates space for different perspectives to better pursue truth and avoid prescriptive top-down dogma. Each chapter of this book is essentially a Dharma talk. 

Self-selected Rules are not Dogmatic.

When we intentionally choose rules for ourselves, they are not dogmatic. We remain free to revise or reject rules as we go along our lives when they cease to bring us closer to the truth. This choice, this impermanence, frees us. We get to experiment with restrictions and see how they serve. To do what we want with our lives, we have to intentionally not engage with an infinite spectrum of behaviors that don’t serve our intentions. We do this by testing out rules.
People often considered to be especially ‘free’ are creatives as they have imposed their consciousness onto the world through their creations in a way that is the ultimate self-expression. It can be awe-inducing to see these creations connect with an audience. In my experience speaking with successful creatives, they pair their open mind for what is possible with rather rigid rules that guide their creative process. These rules and restrictions can range from staunchly defending certain times of day or rituals around their creative process to coming up with “gimmicks” or restrictions that turn their creation into a puzzle to solve. A tangible example of these creative restrictions is when rappers restrict themselves to a single flow for an entire verse and challenge themselves to find words and meaning that fit into that meter. This restriction method gave us masterpieces exploring the internal and external experience of being black in America (DNA by Kendrick Lamar) and being black in the UK (Heart Attack by Dave). Andrew Huberman describes the creative process as a divergent phase followed by a  convergent phase in his podcast episode “The Science of Creativity.” The divergent phase is characterized by brainstorming and considering all sorts of possibilities almost chaotically. The convergent phase is where the rules come in, and the brilliance of the divergent phase is sorted from the fluff and materialized into a tangible, digestible creation. Similarly, we can think of our freedom as creating our lives by cyclically visiting divergent and convergent phases with our consciousness. Phases of expansion and contraction: inhales and exhales.
There are many kinds of rules that people test out when trying to take control of their lives, and the appropriate rules will vary wildly based on your understanding and acceptance of your current circumstance and your intention. I’ve seen people suggest “say yes to everything” and “say no to everything” as advice; each could be equally valid based on the exact position you find yourself in and the direction you’ve identified for yourself.

Are Your Rules Restrictive or Empowering?

One of the most significant perspective shifts I’ve ever had on freedom was a lesson I learned from an old friend, Brittany Hogan, a practitioner of balance at scale as an accomplished model, marketer, and yoga teacher. I once described Brittany’s paleo diet (gluten-free, dairy-free, no added sugar, no legumes, etc.) as “restrictive,” and this was met with a cheerful rebuttal:

“Ha! I don’t see my diet as restrictive at all! I get to choose how my gut, muscles, skin, and energy feel! By understanding how food affects my body and choosing to adhere to a few rules, I get to feel how I want to feel. Choosing to engage with healthy foods is my tool for expanding what I get to do with my life.”

She went on to describe how these rules were her guide-rails. She followed these restrictions about 80% of the time to remind herself that it was always a choice and allow for indulging in “off-limits” foods when they brought her joy.

We can apply this process to any rules we choose to engage with: follow them most of the time and constantly review whether this rule serves our intentions in an empowering way or feels restrictive. Iterate on your rules often.

You can be Free in Ideas and Beliefs but not from Truth; Be a Scientist.

Freedom has to do with actions, not reality. We aren’t free to redefine that which is real or transcend truth. In the example of diet, we cannot choose to eat large quantities of added sugars and expect not to be prisoners to energy instability and cravings; these are a reality of our physiology. Interestingly, sugar sensitivity and insulin response will be wildly different between individuals, and in this way, their realities are different. For this reason, it is crucial for freedom that individuals are given autonomy to explore their reality by experimenting with different rule sets rather than being prescribed the one-size-fits-all rules. If you’re looking for inspiration along this path of self-experimentation, consider Tim Ferris’ The 4-Hour Body, which spurred a nearly religious following of “n of 1 experimenters”. Of course, our rules need not be purely focused on physical health. Still, physical health does provide easy-to-understand analogies, and starting here can help us find freedom from the limitations of sickness and pain that might otherwise limit our self-expression.

I see no path to freedom that does not include intense curiosity about your physiology. We are physical beings, and our physiology is the vehicle for our consciousness. I don’t mean this to say every person needs a Ph.D. in physiology or to understand every neural pathway or hormone that affects their experience. However, we should constantly curate an owner's manual for the human body we’re graced to inhabit.

Yoga teachers are constantly introducing tools to work with the nervous system into your yoga classes: breathing techniques, cues on how to use your visual field, etc. By curating an awareness of the spectrum of sympathetic to parasympathetic states of our nervous system and the actions we can take to direct it, we gain more freedom to feel how we want to feel. Equally, by understanding our activated nervous system states, we can understand our anxiety, mania, or laziness as all parts of our physiological existence, rather than thinking there is something wrong with us when we end up in a less-than-desirable state for longer than serves us.
Many spiritual practices are dedicated to transcending your physical form, becoming pure energy, and ascending. Championing self-study through the lens of physiology does not discredit these practices. However, while living on this plane, these states of ascension are fleeting experiences that are most valuable when integrated into your more worldly existence. That is until you leave this physical form for the last time, and who is in a rush to get to that!  My teacher, hero, and bad-ass champion of the yoga nidra world, Caley Alyssa, says it well:
“The Myth: In the new age spiritual community, one might have you believe the goal of your practice is all about ascension. About becoming so light (or raising your frequency so much that you float off into the heavens. It’s not. It’s about ascension, descension, awakening, and light-body integration. These are all parts of becoming a liberated soul on Earth.” 

Mindbody and the Layers of Consciousness

In the West, we consider the human mind to consist of conscious, subconscious, and unconscious processes. These processes exist not only in the brain but throughout the nervous system, the gut, and the entire body. By studying the body, we are studying the form and function of our subconscious mind. 

1. Conscious mind: what we do and experience and are actively focused on.

2. Subconscious mind: This is our auto-pilot mind. The subconscious is what we are doing and experiencing but is outside our immediate focus, e.g., automatic repetitive task completion and nervous ticks like emotional eating. These are patterns we are aware of but don’t necessarily happen intentionally.

3. Unconscious mind: that which lies beneath the subconscious, deeply seated beliefs and ideas that affect our behavior but we are not even aware of. This also includes the built-in operating system level programs built into our bodies to maintain homeostasis, e.g., sweating when overheating. We’ll largely lump this into the subconscious mind for the remainder of this conversation. However, it’s worth calling out here that our biggest blocks and trickiest patterns to address often lie in the unconscious mind because, by definition, at this level, we aren’t aware of them. The practice of plunging the conscious mind as close to the unconscious realm as possible is called yoga nidra, also known as yogic sleep. Yoga Nidra holds the unique power to provide near-instantaneous “uploads,” surfacing this unconscious material to our conscious awareness that could take years in talk therapy or by other modalities.

All three layers can host patterns that serve us and those that don’t. In yogic tradition, we call these repeating patterns samskaras. In our brains, these repeated patterns literally form stronger, more myelinated connections between neurons that fire together to create this pattern. As one begins to pay attention, it can be almost startling how much our subconscious patterns drive our actions. In a way, these subconscious patterns aren’t precisely chosen and may seem antithetical to freedom and liberation. Of course, there is great utility in this, like effortlessly allowing the subconscious to perform all the complex calculus of driving a car as your conscious mind ponders some idea about an upcoming meeting or reflects on an essential relationship in your life. This example highlights an interesting division that we will revisit: our subconscious mind deals with the present moment, and our conscious mind analyzes the past and forecasts the future. These two pieces of our consciousness do an elaborate dance throughout our lives. When we are infants, our conscious mind deals with all sensory inputs. It’s incredibly overwhelming, and the conscious mind trains automatic patterns into the subconscious mind, so in theory, the conscious mind can shift to higher-level abstract thinking rather than constantly being concerned with survival reactions. Over time, our conscious mind trains patterns into our subconscious mind, some useful, some destructive.

Our conscious mind is rather single-threaded; it can context switch but generally has one object of focus at any given instant. The subconscious mind is a vastly multi-threaded state machine that processes the inputs of the senses. What I mean by this is your subconscious mind is like a machine learning model: it’s trained on a large history of prior information, but given an input, it produces a consistent output without judgment (until new information is introduced, which is happening all the time). The subconscious mind performs actions as “simple” as maintaining an oxygen balance in our tissues by modulating our breathing to as complicated as traversing uneven terrain in the woods and keeping pace and eye contact with a hiking partner, while the conscious mind can remain focused on the conversation with your hiking partner. In ‘Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself,’ Joe Dispenza describes this dance of conscious mind encoding instruction sets into the subconscious mind during skill learning as moving your sense of knowing from the what into the how. The conscious mind first grasps the abstract ivory tower of what you’re trying to do (perhaps playing the piano), and the subconscious bakes into the body the how. In the beginning, new patterns or new skills take every shred of our conscious focus to carry out. The more we focus on a what, the more we bake the how into the body so we can move on to consider the next objective of our conscious focus (perhaps now singing while subconsciously playing piano). The subconscious also learns reactive patterns to avoid discomfort or attach to familiar comfort. These reactions of attachment and aversion can be detrimental to our self-realization and self-expression.

Doing, Feeling, and the 4 Phases of Breath as a Model for Freedom

I was recently on a spiritual journey with my dear friend Johnny Kemps, an LGTBQ advocate, fitness phenom, and a true inspiration for living joyfully and cultivating community. He shared this wise aphorism: “I cannot be doing and feeling at the same time.”  This is a brilliant case for moments of pausing to feel with practices like meditation. Let’s take our time unfolding this one. In the spirit of this chapter on freedom, we get to ask a fascinating follow-up question: “Is our freedom in the moments of doing or the moments of feeling?”. At a cursory glance, it may seem like “well, obviously the freedom is the doing.” However, I am my parents’ child: my father taught me to be a bit contrarian, and my mother taught me how to feel, so bare with me as I make a case that freedom resides in the feeling moments, it will get a little technical. 

Consider the architecture of your attention while context switching (this short AMA from Huberman Lab explains this well). It takes some warm-up period to drop into a state of focus on the doing of the task at hand, but once you get there, your perception of time is warped, and attention to other things fades away (that’s kind of the definition of focus). We’ll call this the continuity bias, a tendency of the mind to stick to the task it is focused on. By this logic, little to no attention is paid to considering alternatives when we drop into a “doing” state. In this way, once we start “doing,” we are engrossed in the task at hand, and we stop choosing. Getting into “the zone” is amazingly powerful in manifesting a particular object of our will, but it can lead to tunnel vision. The choosing of tasks happens between tasks, between the doing. Most of the architecture of your day looks like this:

1. Start a task, get engrossed in the task, and stop considering other things

2. Get distracted and consider task-switching

   1. by a physical need:  to eat, to rest, to change position to avoid pain, or to *ahem* eliminate waste.

   2. by request from another human

   3. by an intrusive thought or emotion

3. Then, you enter the transition time. This is where your freedom to choose your next task lies or to return to the task at hand.

4. (repeat) Engage in another task, often addressing whatever distracted you.

Note that if we deny our physical needs for too long, the lizard brain and the body chemically force us to take a reactive action to address the need; these are hardly times of freedom. By tending to our physical needs, we are then gifted another transition time of what to do after the snack or pee break. It’s very ironic to view the limits and needs of the physical body, once tended to as reminders of opportunity to engage with a higher level of consciousness and exercise your freedom. But Brad Sthulberg makes the case in The Practice of Groundedness that part of the value of hydrating, beyond the physiological, is the interruptions that needing to urinate creates in our day.

Transition time, our freedom time, is quite uncomfortable for most of us. Why? Shouldn’t freedom be fun? Not really. Freedom is a process of taking off the focusing blinders. It’s over-stimulating to think about the possibilities of what to do next and compare their opportunity costs. It’s during times of transition when we are extra susceptible to bypassing practices like scrolling social media just not to be overstimulated by the choice of what to do next. Doom scrolling is this weird phenomenon of a filler activity we’re doing just to escape transition time until something distracts us from the filler. At this point, hopefully, we engage in a more meaningful transition. It’s a bit frightening to think that when we’re uncomfortable with choosing what to do next, what to do with our lives, it is at this moment that we turn to an ad-serving machine in our pockets that is literally selling us what to do next. The capitalist machine is served by silently enslaving the masses by convincing them to spend all their time doing and having no time to feel and steer the ship against the for-profit-of-corporations status quo. Be aware of this trap.

To quickly recap, freedom and choice exist in conscious moments of transition. Doing tasks is a mere formality of manifestation of that freedom in the physical world. We spend the vast majority of our life doing. Your higher (S) Self is pure consciousness; your higher self doesn’t do anything; it transcends doing and delegates the procedural tedium of action to the lower self.

Now, it's time to connect this all to the breath because this book is steeped in yoga, and “it’s ALL about the breath, man!” There are two archetypes of actions that we use different language for: 

• leaning towards or leaning away

• beginning or ending

• expansion or contraction

• inhale and exhale

Breath has two action phases: inhalation and exhalation. Additionally, there are two pauses between the action phases. Breath has been an intense object of focus in so many spiritual practices because it is the fundamental unit of the fractal human experience. What’s fascinating is that the breath lies at the barrier between our conscious and subconscious minds. The breath is constantly and effortlessly maintained through our autonomic nervous system, but it can also be easily consciously controlled. We consciously control our breath for all sorts of reasons: intentionally avoiding the smell of something foul, to help concentration, and even for non-verbal communication. The breath gives us the ultimate cue as to where our freedom lies, and it is hiding in plain sight. Our sovereign, conscious human life begins when we come out of the womb with an inhale, and this human life ends with one final exhale. Thus, our entire human experience of consciousness and freedom exists between inhalation and exhalation, between the doing phases. Like tasks, we do inhale or exhale until we are distracted by some physical pressure arising in the body: a chemical pressure from oxygen exchange with our tissues, a mechanical pressure of reaching the limits of how far our lungs can comfortably expand or contract, etc. Much like the discomfort of transition time between tasks, the transition time between inhaling and exhaling can be quite uncomfortable. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that you literally try to prolong breath-holds to experience more freedom; it’s more of an interesting analogy. By drawing your attention to your breath during meditation, you are drawing your attention to a fundamental physical analogy for attention itself. Meditation is spending time studying how our own attention works. Meditation is the least “doing” we can do other than sleep. It creates a pause where we can tap into a deeper understanding of what we’re meant to do next, not clouded by the continuation bias of the task at hand. Meditation is the process of drawing out conscious awareness to study the subconscious realm that lies within us.

Changing your mind == Changing your Body.

There is no changing your mind without also changing the body. The more we study human consciousness, the more we realize how much of our thinking and actions are dictated by patterns that lie below our conscious mind. There is great power and healing to be had in mindfulness and practices like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), becoming aware of your thoughts, evaluating their usefulness, and replacing them with more useful thoughts. However, this is, at best, half the battle of manifesting meaningful change in your mind and, by extension, your life. Mindfulness and CBT are reactive rather than proactive. They lie in the space of addressing thoughts as they arise. You can imagine the utility of flexing the skill of replacing a harmful thought with a more useful one, but what happens when you want to go upstream, proactively changing how we think so we can replace the harmful patterns of how we think, not just what we think? To do this, we need to take a more complex view of our thinking mechanism and to address this complexity with our actions. This starts by confronting something that can be sort of scary: how much of our waking lives are driven by our subconscious mind and how it can operate in a way wholly divorced from what we are consciously thinking about in a given moment. Consider revisiting our example from earlier of being on a hike with your friend and holding a stimulating conversation about your dreams and philosophies. Your whole body carries out the complex calculus of maintaining balance and controlled motion through uneven surfaces and tracking to walk at a similar pace as your friend, all while your conscious mind is floating in the ether of the abstract cosmos. Similarly, you’ve never really thought about how to digest your food and rarely focus on intentionally changing the heart rate. The subconscious mind also does not reside only in your brain. It’s distributed throughout the nervous system and all living tissues of the body. A classic example of this is known as the patellar reaction; this is what the doctor tests when they take a little hammer to the patellar tendon and observe a contraction of the quad to extend the knee. This entire neurological phenomenon occurs without an electrical signal consulting the brain on what action to take. There’s no conscious weighing of priorities or analyzing; if you overstretch the patellar tendon, the quad contracts to extend the knee. However, your subconscious world is so much more vast than these physiological and kinesiological functions! Your body responds to stress in stimuli by holding tension throughout the body in a way that is not so “logical.”
The conscious mind tends to avoid the present by dwelling on the past or forecasting the future. By engaging in novel and challenging physical activities like yoga asana practice, we use the body to put the conscious mind in situations where it needs to be present to avoid injury. These physical practices also help to rotate our consciousness throughout our body. This rotation of consciousness through the physical body releases emotional and energetic tension in the subconscious. In Yoga Nidra, we seek to achieve the same rotation of consciousness without the physical challenges, which themselves can be distracting from the emotional and energetic material.
A brief aside. We’ve mentioned Yoga Nidra twice now. It is a magical practice and will be the main focus of a future chapter on the value of balancing effort with ease. For those curious and unfamiliar, yoga nidra is a practice of lying down meditation where we put the body to sleep while keeping the mind awake. 

The subconscious can directly affect our conscious experience. Positive or negative thoughts that seem to come out of nowhere are often thoughts that originate in the subconscious and bubble into our conscious awareness. They didn’t come out of nowhere; they just came into our awareness. This can create really funky cascades and patterns that are tough to shake because we don’t engage with them until they enter our awareness. We call these patterns samskaras, deeply entrenched patterns wired into the brain and body that can hijack our lives. Our body can have subconscious reactions to social situations that we aren’t consciously choosing but end up affecting how we experience the world, like feeling socially disconnected for a moment, the body collapsing our posture, and all of a sudden, we appear less confident potentially driving further disconnection with those around us. It’s futile to seek total control of the subconscious. However, deepening your awareness of how it works and how it affects you can empower your conscious mind to take action and deal with the situations the subconscious presents intentionally.

Spiritual Liberation and Scaling Freedom

By choosing your rules, you take agency over the direction of your life. Each chapter of this book follows the pattern of addressing some aspect of spiritual growth in yourself, bringing that into your immediate relationships, and finally considering how that connects to the universe of all beings. Of course, so much of what we want to do with our lives is not solitary but collaborative and connective with other beings. When interacting with others, we quickly run into the challenge of fully expressing our freedom without infringing on the freedom of others. As history will show, humans aren’t naturally very good at respecting the freedom of “others.” There have been countless different expressions of defining arbitrary boundaries between human groups on the basis of gender, race, age, sexual orientation, country of residence, religion, etc., that have been used to define “us” and “them.” As we discussed in the previous chapter, “your suffering is not independent of anyone else’s,” and a corollary to this is “your freedom is not independent of anyone else’s.” Freedom is a funny thing to reason about because it is not like the physical world. Freedom is a truly abstract concept that exists only in consciousness. By nature of existing only in consciousness, freedom is an unlimited resource. Our lower lizard brains concerned with scarce resources have convinced us throughout history to draw these arbitrary boundaries. We think that in order to hang onto “our” freedom, we must oppress “their” freedom. Unfortunately, oppression does not exist only in consciousness. Oppression is very tangible in our world. To fully acknowledge our inner divinity, we must acknowledge the inner divinity, the inherent goodness in all beings. To fully liberate our inner divinity, we need to challenge the status quo of structures that oppress the freedom of others. The more freedom, the more genuine, colorful, and nuanced self-expression there is in the world, the more we will learn from each other. With less suppression of quirks or out-of-pocket ideas, our discourse and collective consciousness can elevate faster through collaboration.

Takeaways for Everyone

• Cultivate curiosity about how you think on a physiological and psychological level; working with this thinking is the foundation for freedom.

• Iterate on your intentions and the rules that serve them often. Be disciplined in following these rules at least 80% of the time, leaving a little room to explore if the rules still serve you or have been outgrown.

• Take time between “doing” to feel. Your opportunities to freely direct the course of your life are proportional to how mindfully you pause between tasks.

Takeaways for Yoga Teachers

• Intentionally give your students some space to exercise their autonomy in class by inviting some intuitive motion into a static hold, releasing the class to flow on their own, or offering permission to take another shape entirely in less accessible shapes.

• Liberate your students by educating them on how to be expert operators of their nervous systems. Don’t shy away from being technical! Draw attention to the benefits and mechanisms of the practices you’re leading:

  • Breathing techniques (pranayama):

    • Breath of Fire stimulates the sympathetic nervous system preparing for action

    • Box Breathing helps regulate the nervous system.

    • Physiological sighs and 4-7-8 breathing (or, in general, longer exhales than inhales) help engage the parasympathetic nervous system, preparing the body for rest.

  • Visual Focus (Drishti)

    • narrowing the visual field to a single point engages the sympathetic nervous system to heighten focus and aid balance

    • softening or widening the visual field engages the parasympathetic nervous system

  • Poses

    • Backbends energize the body by engaging sympathetic nervous system

    • Forward folds cool the body by engaging the parasympathetic nervous system

• Always set aside time at the beginning of class to set an intention, offering the opportunity for students to form their own intentions.