What does liberation mean to you?
For many, the word “liberation” conjures images of oppressed people overcoming unjust dictators and achieving national sovereignty. And indeed, being free from political oppression is certainly one form of liberation that’s important to all people around the world.
However, there’s another form of liberation that is less obvious but still essential for your well-being: Mental and emotional liberation.
Unlike political liberation, mental and emotional liberation happen internally. This means that you don’t need to overcome some external force to achieve mental and emotional liberation. Instead, you must focus on shifting your internal energy state to experience this powerful form of freedom.
In this blog, you’ll learn five practical tips that can help you experience mental and emotional liberation. But first, let’s dive a bit deeper into what these qualities mean from a Chinese Medicine and Qi Gong perspective.
What Does Mental and Emotional Liberation Really Mean?
Being mentally and emotionally liberated means that you are free to truly think for yourself, and fully experience the emotions that flow through you. This empowers you to speak your mind without fear of judgment, even if your views conflict with others’. It also allows you to trust your own inner compass in guiding decisions and realizing your desires, rather than following what other people or the media tell you how things are.
When you experience this form of liberation, your thoughts aren’t constrained by others’ expectations. Instead, you’re able to really ask yourself important questions, such as: What do you want for yourself? How do you want to show up in the world? And what values do you want to stand up for?
Similarly, emotional liberation gives you the courage to face your feelings on a deep, energetic level. Rather than hiding from your emotions, you’re able to acknowledge how you feel. This empowers you to transform challenging energy states in order to regain harmony and balance.
How to Cultivate Internal Liberation
Although these principles of mental and emotional liberation are easy to conceptualize, sometimes it’s a bit more difficult to embody these qualities in practice…
In modern life, there are a myriad of external forces that can pull you away from your center and make it difficult to stay truly free. Various societal attitudes tend to reinforce certain ways of thinking and feeling while discouraging others. Following preset paths is often the “easy” choice, while pursuing your creative outlets or dreams can require being in tune with your own authentic thoughts and feelings, which is the true source of internal liberation.
In many cases, mental and emotional liberation isn’t simply a one-time choice. Rather, it’s a practice that requires daily reinforcement. Below, you’ll discover five practical tips to experience internal liberation so you can feel more free to truly be yourself.
1. Start Your Day with a Spiritual Practice
When you start your day with a consistent spiritual practice, it grounds your energy and helps you orient to your own authentic thoughts and feelings. This helps you establish greater resiliency so you’re not as susceptible to taking on others’ energies.
After you wake up, try to dedicate some time to a spiritual practice that helps you become centered and grounded. Yoga, meditation, or Qi Gong are a few common practices that can give you direction in the morning. Whatever you choose, just try to be consistent so it becomes a cornerstone of your day.
In general, it’s best to practice before you start looking at screens or consuming media. This helps ensure that when you do start engaging with others or taking in external experiences, you’re able to be responsive to your environment rather than reactive.
2. Stay Rooted Within Yourself When Engaging with Others
When you’re surrounded by others, it can be easy to start taking on their views and beliefs. These can include moral values, beliefs about what’s possible, and even views about your own personal identity. For example, if your family members or work colleagues see you as occupying a specific role, that view can have an influence on how you see yourself. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s important to maintain perspective on how you view yourself and the world around you.
When you engage with others, try to remember that others’ perspectives are exactly that: Their perspectives. No person’s or group’s perspective defines reality. When you’re engaged in social interaction, always check in with yourself frequently to ensure you’re not following along with someone else’s narrative of reality and becoming disconnected from your own truth.
Staying connected to yourself in social situations is an important step to staying mentally and emotionally liberated.
3. Honor Your Thoughts and Feelings
Sometimes, thoughts and feelings aren’t always pleasant, but it’s important not to bury them.
If you ignore difficult thoughts or feelings, they don’t just disappear. Instead, they usually come back in more harmful ways. When your feelings are big enough, they can sometimes overwhelm your conscious mind and reduce your sense of mental and emotional empowerment.
According to Chinese Medicine and Qi Gong, it’s important to acknowledge your thoughts and feelings and work with them in a skillful way. Sometimes, this means taking a few minutes to reflect on your internal experiences in order to process and let go. At other times, it might mean dedicating Qi Gong or other spiritual practices to transform challenging feelings and release old energy.
It’s not always easy at the moment, but honoring your thoughts and feelings is a powerful step in liberating yourself from unhealthy thought and emotional patterns.
4. Spend Time Alone
Spending time alone is a wonderful way to reconnect to your own authentic truth. In the absence of external stimulus, you’re able to listen to yourself and strengthen your relationship with yourself.
Spending time alone can be as simple as taking a daily walk in your neighborhood. Additionally, scheduling time to have more prolonged, immersive experiences with yourself can be a great way to do a periodic ‘reset.’ Doing a solo trip or camping weekend can profoundly shift your energy and give you a renewed sense of inner strength. In turn, you’ll experience a heightened feeling of mental and emotional liberation following these solo journeys.
5. Practice Qi Gong
There are many benefits of practicing Qi Gong, and one of these is mental and emotional liberation.
Qi Gong helps you let go of all of the external noise that most of us experience on a day to day basis. This helps you establish a greater sense of personal empowerment and freedom within your mind and emotions. Instead of constantly reacting to the world around you, you’re able to skillfully sift through external stimuli and make intentional choices about what you want to take in, and what you want to leave behind.
If you’re interested in trying Qi Gong, be sure to check out our Thirty-Day Qi Gong Challenge. When you sign up, you’ll get access to thirty unique Qi Gong routines that are each just seven minutes long. This makes it easy to find time to start your day by getting centered and grounded before you go forward into the external world.
Click on the banner below to learn more about how Qi Gong can help you experience mental and emotional liberation in everyday life.