Our Greatest Human Freedom

“Our greatest human freedom is that, despite whatever our physical situation is in life, we are always free to choose our thoughts.” Viktor E Frankl

In case you have no idea who Viktor Frankl was, I have taken this excerpt from viktorfranklamerica.com : “With a lifetime that spanned most of the 20th Century, Viktor Emil Frankl (March 26, 1905 –September 2, 1997) was witness to a transformative period in world history. He is most known for being a Holocaust survivor, but in reality, this represented a short period in his long life. By the time he entered the concentration camps at 37 years old, he had already spent much of his adult life as a psychiatrist and neurologist, specializing in the treatment of suicidal patients. He had also developed his own psychology theory called Logotherapy (Greek for “healing through meaning”). His lasting contribution has been to the field of psychology, with his recognition of meaning as a factor in mental health and his advocacy that the psychologist’s role was to help their patients find meaning.”

I love this quote by him, because he is absolutely correct in saying that no matter what our situation, we are always free to choose our thoughts. There is absolutely no-one capable of controlling your thoughts. There may be seeds planted which may lead towards leaning more towards one thought than another. However, you are still the one in control.

With any control, comes huge responsibility. So it is with your own thoughts. You are one hundred percent responsible for your thoughts and therefore for the affect that they have on you. My guide always cautions us to be aware of our thoughts, for they are truly powerful. Our thoughts are experienced through conversations that we have with ourselves. And it’s those conversations that we need to control in conjunction with our thoughts. They can have a profoundly positive impact on the way we view ourselves and others, but conversely, they too can have a profoundly negative impact.

The dictionary describes thoughts as “an idea or opinion produced by thinking, or occurring suddenly in the mind.” Perhaps it’s time to read that through a few times and let that description sit with you for a while. Our ideas and our opinions are produced by thought. And man, so often our thoughts can be so misleading! Those misleading thoughts can form misinformed and skewed opinions and ideas which ultimately results in miscommunication and misunderstanding.

I have spoken very often about “practising the pause”. By practicing the pause, we are encouraging ourselves to stop in the moment between a feeling and a reaction to think about what we’re feeling and why. This pause allows us to understand what may be causing our reaction and choose how we want to respond. When we practise the pause, the first step is to slow down our minds and bodies. The next step is to centre ourselves through taking a deep breath, or a drink of water. Moving our bodies for a moment helps too as well as taking a moment to relax and tense the muscles. Essentially, it’s about taking physical action to interrupt the flow of thought.

We spend most of our day on auto-pilot. We move through the day doing the same things that we always do without paying too much attention to what we’re doing. This goes for our thoughts too and whilst checking emails, scrolling through facebook, eating breakfast, going for a walk or going to the gym, are easily done on auto-pilot and don’t have too much of a negative effect on us; letting our thoughts run rampant without supervision, can lead to all sorts of problems in our life.

Viktor Frankl in this particular quote, was referring very much to his experience in a Nazi concentration camp. But… I want you to really stop and take time to think about what he meant. If you know anything about his life during the time that he was in the concentration camp and once he was liberated, you’ll see that at no point in time, did he allow any of the repulsive acts of the Nazi’s experienced by him, to cloud his thoughts and lead him down a path of hate and resentment. Rather, he chose to write a book entitled “Man’s Search for Meaning,” which I highly recommend you get your hands on a copy and read. At his very lowest point, totally malnourished and degraded as a human being, Viktor Frankl still chose to not allow his thoughts to become negative in any way. What a challenge that must have been for him.

It’s so easy for us to see ourselves as victims. It’s so very easy to believe that someone has done something to us which has caused us to behave badly. How easily do we abdicate blame for anything going wrong in our lives? How easily we allow ourselves to hate and act out against others because of opinions developed in our minds through our own destructive thoughts!

Allow yourself to buy into the concept that your greatest freedom lies in the fact that you are free to choose your thoughts. Take responsibility for those thoughts and through conscious awareness, create that amazing life that you so desire.