I worked with a client who had a recurring dream she was in a prison with barely any light and all she could see were bars or alternately that she was in a forest where all she could see was trees and the light was so dim because the canopy was thick. I went to the Akashics to see if I could find any source for the dream in her soul book or any other rooms or source material she might be working with. What I found was an image of her in her room, which, when you entered it, acted like a holodeck projecting a huge field of summer grass and wheat and wildflowers. In this field which was all sunlight and insects buzzing lazily and birds flying was a circular grove of trees. They were tall and thick and hardly any light got into them. However, it was just a ring of trees, not a forest. You could see right through them to the other side and the space in the middle was just about 3 paces wide. Enough for someone to stand and sit, but not lay down. And you could walk between the trunks with ease. Inside this ring was my client staring up at the canopy, wandering around inside the circle, touching the trunks and wondering how to get out. I offered her my hand, but she didn’t take it and decided to stay inside.
So many people in life make their own prisons. It’s not because something bad happened to them in this life or a previous life, not because the universe handed them a turd sandwich or their parents decided to be terrible, terrible people between the time everyone agreed to do this and when the soul embodied, and not because their body is faulty and out of warranty. All of these things happen and rather more often than not. But once they do happen, people have choices. Not just one, not just one kind, but choices in every minute of every day. We are Free Will machines, making choices in each and every moment. Our choices may be limited depending on the situation and the day, but in the end we have them. A man condemned to death can still die free, a rapist may take the body, an order might be given, but each of us has a choice in how that affects us and what we do from there. If you don’t believe me, just talk with Auschwitz survivors or listen to some of their interviews. Or, to quote Maid Marion “You may take this body, but it will not be me!”
Lots of people talk about circumstances keeping them from being able to do this or that. Circumstances can limit our options, but they can’t really make us do anything. Hence all these dramatic movies we love where there are only two choices and the hero makes the hardest one we probably wouldn’t because we’re not heroes and situations like that are fictional. In most cases we use circumstances to get us off the hook, to take the blame or the responsibility or both for our choices. We use them to confirm our worldview, turning it from a weaving of choices, actions and consequences into gravity. But it’s not gravity. We choose. It’s the single most terrifying, mystical and joyful thing about living. The thing is, most people are still waiting for a jailer to come and set them free. You know all that guff about us having the key, we don’t even have to have a key because we’re not in a prison at all. We just need to stop all the talk that is convincing us that holding onto these bars is necessary. When we let them go, we’re free to fly.