When I was young, I used to fantasize about a magic trunk. A heavy, weathered crate covered in runes or hieroglyphs or… something mysterious. I imagined crawling inside, closing the lid, and making the world stop. Time would pause. Grown-ups would freeze mid-sentence. Even my thoughts would shut up. I could stay for eons if I wanted. And when I was ready, I’d lift the lid, refreshed and ready to do all the peopling again.
That was my idea of freedom: an indefinite break from the world. From others. From my own noisy mind.
I didn’t yet have language for overstimulation or neurodivergence. I just knew the world was full of moods and demands I couldn’t control, and being a person in the mess of it all felt sticky and tangled. So I went looking for a real-world equivalent of what that magic trunk promised: freedom from it all.
I got very jazzed when I found meditation. It seemed, on the outset, to promise exactly that: sanctioned stillness and cosmic invisibility. Sit, go inward, flick the thinking switch, and disappear it all into “emptiness.” Yes please!
I came in, convinced as Sartre, that hell was other people. But slowly, a suspicion muscled its way in as I kept practicing: what if hell wasn’t other people, but all my damn ideas about them? My projections. My stories. My labels and concepts and mental gymnastics. My habitual recoiling from the raw, relational weirdness of the world.
And when I pulled that thread, something started to open. I caught a whiff of a braver, deeper freedom than I’d imagined: the blooming capacity to be with whatever’s actually here without needing it (or me) to shape-shift into perfection first.
Freedom, as they say, is an inside job. Turns out, we don’t need to free ourselves from everything if we can expand the field so wide that nothing’s left out. The inside job is less spa day, more hanging out with the full cast of your inner sitcom without needing anyone to shut up.
And yet, it’s not only an inside job. My ability to even consider “inner freedom” has always been propped up by outer freedoms that rely on—surprise!—other people. A room of my own. Patient, brilliant teachers. Cats that sit in my lap when I meditate so I don’t dare get up.
If you’ve ever called yourself a Consciousness Explorer, practiced in community (like this one!), or adventured through your mind-bod via a podcast or app, your burgeoning inner freedom rests in a beautifully wide web of entanglements: A bit of extra time in the day to practice, an internet’s worth of guidance on the other side of your cracked phone screen, the emotional and financial bandwidth for retreat or reflection. Maybe even a family that values the inner life (or at least thinks your “woo woo” stuff is kinda cute). And let’s not forget a sociopolitical regime that hasn’t outlawed the contemplative path—yet.
None of us gets free alone. Contemplative life isn’t a path leading up and out of the world, it leads us further into it. And without collective freedoms (economic, social, political) inner freedom doesn’t get very far.
Still, old fantasies die hard.
I catch myself reaching for that magic trunk all the time. I sneak off to quiet corners to be alone. Lock myself in bathroom stalls at dive bars for a break from the noise. Screen calls. Forget texts. Disappear into the night. I still love to close a door and block out everything but my breath. (What can I say? Once an introvert, always an introvert.)
But wherever I go, the world always follows me in. It’s part of the landscape of my own being. The pounding bass, the news cycle, the broken systems, the big moods. The silence I steal in those moments is heavenly, but I don’t mistake it for liberation anymore.
Like the Tao, the peace that can be disturbed is not the real peace. And liberation that depends on conditions is not lasting. We won’t find what we’re looking for by escaping each other. We are made of each other. Even when it’s hard. Even when it smells like beer and bad decisions in a dive bar bathroom.
These days, freedom feels less like a locked trunk and more like a window flung open. I catch glimpses of it in the dissolving of lines between quiet and loud, self and other, inner and outer. I practice finding it in the silence that sings inside the noise, in the stillness that dances in the movement.
And whenever I taste it – briefly, wildly – it’s so delicious that I can’t help but want to share it all around. Because real freedom isn’t from each other. It’s with each other. With others on your path. With difficult people. With total strangers. With you!
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