Breaking Free

Emotional liberation from our inner bondage

When we think of bondage, we most often think of someone being restrained. We have the imagery of leather straps or chains, someone of authority holding power over us, our inability to move or be free, instead completely constricted. 

Bondage is something most of us are not comfortable with  (unless you’re into that sort of thing) as it takes away control of our autonomy to act in the world. Control, or our internal locus of control, is critical to our individual notions of freedom. Without a feeling of control, we lack the feeling of freedom and without that, we feel oppressed. When we are bound, when our freedom is taken from us and we are in some way unable to move, we lose control and have given that control to the individual who has bound us. 

In some sense, our fate is no longer within our control. We are literally at the mercy of our situation.  

But while most of us do not see the chains or straps that bind us, we do in fact live with them every day. 

Baruch Spinoza, the 17th century philosopher, argued that it was in fact ourselves who performed our own bounding. And what’s more, the straps keeping us chained are our emotions. 

“The impotence of man to govern or restrain the emotions I call bondage.”

Emotions are critical to our every day existence. And while many misinterpret Stoicism as representing the suppression of the emotions, it was in fact the proper processing and understanding of the emotions, the ability to detach reason from emotion, that inspired Spinoza. 

“…for a man who is under their [emotions] control is not his own master, but is mastered by fortune, in whose power he is, so that he is often forced to follow the worse, although he sees the better before him.”

We often believe that the strongest individual, the one with the most power, is the one who is the loudest, most vocal, most, to some degree, obnoxious. I would argue, however, that it is in fact the individual who holds a steady hand in times of emotional distress, the individual who does not yell, who holds full control over their emotional state who is the most powerful. It is through clarity that proper judgment and reason is applied and the individual who can stand above the clouds of emotional judgment will more times than not win out. 

In Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle is the Way, he recounts the training of the Apollo mission astronauts and how John Glenn was able to keep his heart rate under one hundred beats per minute. The need to break free of the shackles of emotions could not be more important than when you are hovering hundreds of feet above the earth. 

In order to control the uncontrollable, in order to bring structure to our fate, we need to be able to break free of our emotional bondage. We need to understand we are in control of our emotions and can master them rather than allow them to suppress us. 

We do this by first taking note of the emotions arising within us. We do not want to suppress emotions but need to properly manage them. If suppressed, they may not appear for a while, but eventually they will explode out the way a shaken can of soda explodes once opened.  

Next, we need to investigate what is surfacing the emotion. Once this is determined, we are better aligned to properly process the feeling and begin practice on immersing ourselves into emotion rich environments that could trigger that in order to learn to master it. 

When Glenn and the other astronauts were sent to space, their hearts remained under one hundred beats per minute because they had practiced for thousands of hours that scenario. They went through simulations and worst case scenarios. They trained every conceivable scenario so that they were in control of their emotions and thus, releasing themselves of the shackles of their emotions and finding ways to control the uncontrollables. 

“We are tossed about by external causes in many ways,” wrote Spinoza, “and like waves driven by contrary winds, we waver and are unconscious of the issue and our fate.”

If we cannot free ourselves from the bonds he’s of emotion, then we cannot hope to keep a steady hand in trying times. We will not have had enough practice and our emotional self will take over. It is only through this process, noticing the arrival, investigating the cause, processing the emotion, and practicing to keep that emotion at bay that we can take back control and release ourselves from the bondage of emotions. 

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Until next week,

D.A. DiGerolamo