The Five Strategies to Breaking Free

They say, ‘as within, so without’, that is the understanding that life just mirrors our own soul journey for us. While God permeates this world, She can in the end only be found within. The Bible famously states, ‘Be still and know that I Am God’. How now can we travel within, and how can we find God in the real world, our self-imposed interferences notwithstanding? The problem is we can’t meditate ourselves into Heaven. We feel restless, we have karma to burn, and a mission to complete, while at the same time we shouldn’t be taken in by our desires and our demons. Ideally, we just follow the Signs of our spiritual path and let God flow through us. In reality though, we have to do a little bit of everything.

The Five Strategies of Breaking Free


                                                Soul
                                               Mission



Awaken to                      Be Still and Know          Just Be
Desires and Drives           That I Am God



                                                  Shadow
                                                   Work


A soul mission is something we have to take for granted. All of us came here with a little homework to do. Some projects we have to see through. We have a profession to decide on and to pursue and become an expert in. We have some love relationships, a family to raise, and so forth. Without this soul mission we would feel empty inside, restless and unfulfilled. Yet, what exactly that mission is about is something we have to Awaken to.

Our desires are linked to our soul mission. Maybe it is our passion in romance, maybe it is the desire to become a parent. Maybe we need to prove ourselves professionally, or just maybe we want to be enlightened. Our desires are the search for external approval and thus will never fully satisfy us. Yet, as we highlighted in the soul mission section, some desires set us free, while some bind us. We have to figure out which is which.

Shadow work is necessary when we have traumas of the past to digest, yet we may still add problems with our unresolved inner conflicts. Maybe we suppress something that is meaningful to us in the name of spirituality. Maybe we run after something that we think is our soul mission when in fact we just desire to be special without recognizing it. The inner demons remind us that something is off.

‘Just be’ is truly spiritual living. Still with a mission to complete, we show up in places that we know are meaningful for us and interact with folks we need to. Yet, we no longer have an agenda. Conflict free we let a higher Force flow though us and we just observe in astonishment how all the pieces fit together. With nothing to prove and nothing to wish for, the inner demons have nothing to attack and slowly disintegrate into nothingness.

God is at the center of the circle and we have glimpses of Her in real life. However, it is only in the exceptional satori moments, or that special moment that takes our breath away when time stands still when we are truly united with God. In the ‘just be’ state we are like lucid dreamers. Still asleep, but Awake within the dream so that we can enjoy the magic of the Way without getting our self involved.

I thought I could give a little personal example to illustrate ‘the five strategies of breaking free’. Take the book ‘On Breaking Free’ that I am currently working on. I am an author so you might call a note like this my soul mission. On the other hand, my demons have been communicating for a while to me that I enjoy recognition and enjoy being looked up to, so you might call a note like this nothing but an attempt of my intellect to stay strong and relevant. There is probably truth to both statements, so the elegant solution is to let the book write itself—just be! I interview my spiritual friends and share their stories. I start with the problem statements several of my clients have, and there is very little for me to do but to connect the dots.

We can Awaken to our soul mission. We can Awaken to the inner contradiction of our desires. We can learn to listen to the message of our demons and we can make friends with them. Like a surfer riding life’s ups and downs, we can live the ‘just be’ paradigm. Most importantly, we can learn that life is meditation, even amid the busyness of life, and can become still. As we do, we see Her embedded in everything and everyone.

The five strategies of breaking free are all connected and can be summarized by these 5 rules: ‘See your soul mission through’, ‘Know yourself’, ‘Find gems in the dark corners of your soul’, ‘Just be’, and ‘Be still and know that I Am God’.