A dream that everyone has the ability to experience freedom. Right now, whatever your circumstances. It’s your birthright.

We think certain conditions have to be present to experience freedom. We have to be healthy, we have to have a good job, be free of debt. We certainly aren’t free if we’re in the grip of illness and pain, if we have a serious diagnosis. We aren’t free if we have to change our lifestyle or else stay sick. We aren’t free if someone we love is ill. We can’t be free if we grew up in difficulty, if our family of origin life was less than ideal, or outright abusive in some way.

How can we be free and happy even in the midst of physical and/or emotional pain?

These are dark times. Anyone reading the news can see it in the world at large. As I’ve written about before, it’s also a dark time of year, these weeks leading up to Winter Solstice. We’re waiting for the light to return. It can feel like a loooong wait.

Happiness is a practice. It takes intention. You need a true and deep desire to be free and whole. It takes a commitment to showing up for your life, and a willingness to take a radical stand for YOURSELF and your happiness.

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Your Wasteland took me by surprise last winter. I had thought the dim memory of where you lived so much of the time was worked out, worked through.

I remember months of Late Night with David and pints of Ben and Jerry’s, when all I could really feel was a distant gratitude for the ants that cleaned my kitchen. The therapist’s room where I identified the Wasteland, and that it was yours, a lineage memory of pain so deep it annihilated all emotion, and left a cold, dry, lifeless terrain where nothing grew. No possibility of life, of green, of juice. I had tripped into the Bel-Boyd legacy, and it took years to find my way out of that vast, stark land.

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