You are already free

What does it mean to be free?

I used to think freedom was something external—something you had to chase, build, buy, or win. The freedom to work remotely, to travel without limits, to start my own business, to live “on my own terms”. 

I lived like a man climbing a ladder, only to realize it was leaning against the wrong wall. The more “freedom” I acquired, the more I noticed something unsettling: I was still shackled. By moods, by frustration, by fear of what other people thought, by the need to control outcomes. By my own thoughts. 

Then I found Stoicism. Or maybe it found me.

Marcus Aurelius cracked it open for me when he wrote: “Nowhere does a man retreat into more quiet or more privacy than into his own mind.” At the time, I was stuck—overworked, overthinking, and spiraling through a dozen competing decisions. But this sentence hit. It was a reminder: the real retreat isn’t a plane ticket or a sabbatical. It’s internal. The only peace worth anything is the kind you carry around with you.

And that’s when I started seeing the real meaning of freedom.

You are free the moment you recognize you don’t have to react the way you always have. You don’t have to be angry when provoked. You don’t have to be offended when someone is rude. You don’t have to chase the next thing just because everyone else is. 

I’ve been in rooms where the tension could cut glass. Meetings where egos clashed, money was on the line, and people were posturing. In the past, I’d mirror the energy—raise my voice, take the bait. But Stoicism taught me a better response: often none at all. 

But here’s the twist: freedom isn’t something you feel all the time. In fact, it often feels like discipline. As Epictetus noted, “No man is free who is not master of himself”.  This might look like pausing when you want to lash out. Like taking a breath when you want to rush in. Like sitting with discomfort instead of numbing it.

And yet that’s the exact place where the magic lives—between the stimulus and your response.

There’s a phrase I go back to often: “The soul is dyed by its imaginations.” Aurelius again. It reminds me that whatever I focus on, I become. If I dwell on resentment, I deepen it. If I rehearse fears, I color the world with them. But if I imagine peace, if I practice stillness, if I tell myself I am already enough… then I start to feel free. Not later. Now.

And it’s available to you. Not after ten years of meditation or a trip to the Himalayas. Now. In this moment. In how you choose to interpret the thing that annoyed you five minutes ago. In whether you soften or harden. In whether you pause or react. Ask yourself: 

• Where am I giving away my freedom—through habits, reactions, or stories I keep repeating?

• What emotion or impulse am I letting steer my actions right now?

• Am I responding, or merely reacting?

• What would it look like to choose peace in this moment, rather than control?

• What belief am I clinging to that no longer serves me?

• Can I allow this moment to be enough, exactly as it is?

• Where in my life am I chasing something, hoping it will make me feel free?

• What would it mean to return to myself—calm, clear, unshaken?

Freedom isn’t flashy. It doesn’t always look like success. Sometimes it looks like silence. Sometimes it looks like letting someone else be “right.” Sometimes it’s simply the ability to return to yourself—again and again—without judgment.

You are already free. The question is, are you using that freedom?