When I Looked at You, I Saw Freedom

I think it may be one of the most profound things anyone has ever said to me.

Recently, I received a handwritten letter from a woman I spent a relatively short amount of time with. We had done some deep inner work together. Shadow work. Somatic work. The kind of work that asks you to look directly at the things you’ve spent years learning how not to see.

In her letter, she thanked me for seeing her, for calling out her shadows, for staying beside her when things began to unravel, and for showing her that vulnerability and strength could exist at the same time. But there was one thing she had said to me that caught me completely off guard.

“When I looked at you, I saw freedom.”

I think it may be one of the most profound things anyone has ever said to me. Because the irony is that I have spent much of my life feeling anything but free.

I’ve felt trapped inside my own mind. My own body. My circumstances. My relationships. My businesses. My country. My conditioning. My own unconscious patterns. I’ve known what it feels like to be imprisoned by things nobody else can see.

So when someone looked at me and saw freedom, part of me couldn’t understand what she was seeing.

Then something interesting happened.

Yesterday, I shared this story with two women I’m going to be working with on a much larger project. I told them about the letter and what this woman had seen in me. Their response surprised me. Essentially, We’ve always seen you that way.

They told me that I have always represented an immense amount of freedom to them. That there is something about the way I move through the world that reads as free. Now I had three women reflecting something back to me that I wasn’t entirely capable of seeing in myself.

And then this morning, I went to ecstatic dance with a room full of women around my age. The DJ played George Michael’s “Freedom! ’90.”

At that point, I had to laugh. Okay. I’m listening.

One woman saw freedom. Two more women mirrored freedom. And then I found myself dancing to freedom. A trifecta.

And there is something in that song that suddenly meant something very different to me: You don’t belong to me, and I don’t belong to you.

Maybe that’s part of freedom too. Knowing the difference. Where I end and you begin. What belongs to me and what belongs to you. What I am responsible for and what I am not.

It made me wonder what happens when other people can see our becoming before we can. What if freedom doesn’t begin when all of our chains disappear? What if it begins when we become willing to examine them?

I have spent years doing a diagnostic on myself. Why did I react that way? Why does this person activate me? Why am I repeating this pattern? What am I afraid of? Whose voice is that? What happened here? What is my body trying to tell me? What part of me is driving right now?

I sort the pieces. I follow the patterns. I pay attention to language because words matter. I excavate the unknown. And when I find another layer, I keep digging. Not because I believe I’ll eventually become some perfectly healed human being. I won’t.

At 51, I can say I am the happiest, healthiest and wealthiest I have ever been. And I still have gremlins. I still get triggered. I still project. I still expect things from people I love. I still occasionally discover an old piece of myself sitting behind the wheel when I thought I had taken the keys away years ago.

That’s the human experience. We are trying to live in a material world while remembering that we are more than the material.

Flesh and spirit.

Survival and soul.

Money and meaning.

Attachment and autonomy.

Human limitation and something inside us that keeps reaching toward freedom.

That’s The Bridge we’re actually here to walk.

Looking back, I can also see that some of what people interpreted as freedom in me wasn’t freedom yet. Sometimes it was overcompensation. I learned very early how to make life a playground even while life was kicking my ass.

From bullies on the elementary school playground to bullies in business decades later, some stubborn part of me kept saying:

I’m still here.

I’m still curious.

I’m still going to play.

I’m still going to find out what this experience has to teach me.

That may have looked like freedom from the outside. Eventually, through the work, it began to feel like freedom on the inside too.

And perhaps that’s one of the strangest things about becoming more free. Some people see your freedom and move toward it. They think, There is something there that I want to understand. Show me what you learned so I can discover it for myself.

Others may experience the exact same freedom as a threat. Your autonomy touches their dependency. Your expression touches their suppression. Your willingness to look at your shadow touches the places they aren’t ready to see. And sometimes people punch their own shadow while believing they’re punching you.

That isn’t a reason to become smaller. It is a reason to understand yourself more deeply.

It has also made me think about the importance of who we allow to mirror us. We talk a lot about shadow work as though it is something we do alone. I don’t think it is.

We need other people.

Not to tell us who we are, but sometimes to reflect back what we cannot yet see from inside ourselves. Healthy people can hold up a clean mirror. They can see your shadow without reducing you to it. They can see your gifts without needing to diminish them. They can acknowledge your growth without feeling threatened by it.

And when you’ve spent time in relationships where that kind of reflection was absent, distorted or withheld, you realize how powerful a clean mirror actually is.

The reflection of these women didn’t give me freedom. But it helped me recognize something in myself that perhaps I was finally ready to see.

Because I don’t believe freedom is something another person can give you, and I don’t believe anyone needs to become like me. That’s not the work.

The work is becoming increasingly capable of seeing what is actually running you. Your adaptations. Your stories. Your nervous system. Your shadows. Your desires. Your wounds. Your gifts. Your unconscious agreements with the world.

Know thyself. There is freedom in that.

Not freedom from every constraint of being human, but freedom from being unconsciously governed by what you cannot yet see.

That’s what The Dirt Codes are becoming for me. A way of mapping the terrain. A way of turning toward the places we haven’t explored. A way of gathering data points from our own human experience until the territory that once frightened or controlled us becomes navigable.

I don’t want people to look at my life and think, I want her freedom. I want them to look at it and realize, I can find mine.

That is a very different thing.

And maybe that’s what these last few days have been trying to show me. One woman saw freedom in me. Two women reflected it back. And this morning, I danced to it.

Maybe I’m finally beginning to see it too.

Maybe freedom isn’t the absence of chains. Maybe freedom is finally knowing which ones are yours, which ones were handed to you, and which ones you are ready to take off.

(Thank you ladies.)

And speaking of The Bridge… shameless plug.

Listen to “Nous The Bridge” by The Dirt Codes on SoundCloud.