The Freedom of Prison

Welcome back to Daily Alchemy. And this one's going to be about prison versus freedom. I don't know if you guys know my story, but I was formerly incarcerated, spent three years in federal prison. Wasn't like the hard knock life really, but it wasn't easy either. And a lot of people ask me about the experience and feel really sorry for you, or some people judge you immediately and put you in a bit of a box. And what I found was that one prison was my creation. And of course people are like, yeah, it was. You messed up, you did this or that. Nobody really knows my full story about it. But, you know, some of it I would say was my fault. Some of it I could say was not my fault. But the reality of it was it was all my creation. So given the fact that it was all my creation and I came into this life to love myself in the most amazing way, then did I create anything to punish myself? No, I created everything to love myself. So when I go through the thought about the prison experience and relate that back to the correspondence of trauma, there's so many individuals that I'll meet. And I was at this interesting dinner tonight around justice reform. Everybody's in there talking about how they want to course correct the criminal justice system, which in America, when you look at the external view of it, it's pretty jacked up. And even when you're in it, it's pretty jacked up. The food you eat, the things that you experience, the way that you live, you're like a caged animal. And it's really interesting, the reflection of individuals that end up being incarcerated, how that's also a reflection of some traumatic aspect of what they've gone through historically, right? So for me, if you go back and say, well, why did I create prison for myself to love myself more? And I go backward and I look at all of the traumatic things that happened in my life. Whether it was the sexual abuse of my teenage years, whether it was the suicide attempts, whether it was my mommy and daddy issues that I have, whether it is the, you know, former marriages that I got into out of fear because I didn't love myself enough. So I ended up creating all of these different relationships in order to validate me. All of those things that I ended up going through, I did them out of fear, out of external validation. Even the sexual abuse aspect of things wasn't out of fear, but it's not on a linear timeline. It was like there's a really divine version of myself that created that from the divine state so that I could find the divinity in myself here on earth. Just to repeat it again, There was this divine version of me that was walking in human form that set that rhythm in motion so that I could go through it to love myself now. And even though it sucked then where I am now, absolutely had to create that for me to be here now. So when I think about the prison experience, the same thing happened there. It was like this was the greatest gift that I could give myself from the present moment I'm in now. And that gives me freedom in all of those situations. Now, when I was in it, certain things came about that allowed me to then start to step into the human that I am today. For instance, in my first year, I was miserable when I was incarcerated, and I was very much so in a victim state. I was sad all the time, depressed, crying. I was vulnerable. I was letting things out, didn't have any friends, was very judgmental about my situation. That was the longest year of my life, and I could have stayed a victim to that for that entire sentence for the next two years. What I ended up doing, though, is I started to change the narrative when I was in there. I started to recognize that I'm not going to live like this anymore. I'm going to actually find friends. I'm going to work out, I'm going to learn to draw, I'm going to read books, I'm going to learn about new industries, I learned about digital marketing. I figured all this different stuff out when I was in there, and I used my time so wisely that it became a really beautiful experience for me. And so by the time I got out, I had all these amazing plans. Some of those plans didn't. Didn't come true, but I still had amazing plans. And I walked out and I had a completely different influence over my life than when I went in. I was able to then know that no matter how bad things got, they were never going to be as bad as where they were. But that allowed me to understand was that a couple of things. One, as we start to grow and mature, when we do look at life on the linear timeline, we can start to make adjustments from the perspective of the past in order to actually understand why the now can be free. What it also allowed me to do is basically say, okay, now that I can sit in a divine version of myself, or as close to it as I possibly can. I'm always getting closer, but I'm as close now as I ever will be. And we're always as close as we ever will be. That puts me in the lens of being able to say, okay, this is all holy and all divine, and I am always whole. I've always been whole. I've just limited myself based on the external constructs of what people have told me. Being sexually abused back in the day, I put definition on that based on what people would have thought of it. Me being depressed, I put a definition on that based on what people thought of me. Me being incarcerated, the same thing. Me having failed marriages, the same thing. Me having thyroid condition, the same thing. Me in my last couple of years going through what I would consider me being like a spiritual vampire. Okay? Lying about all kind of nonsensical things in order to gain approval from the world outside of me was the same thing. And so all of these were prisons that I created for myself to free myself. And when I created these prisons for myself to free myself in order to step into the divinity of myself so that I can actually pull my authentic version into this human body. That's where the healing started to happen. Oftentimes we try to solve the baby problems when the whole body is here screaming for us to heal it, when we can start to actually recognize the. The wholeness of the human spirit and healing. The wholeness of that and healing from the inside out. And then recognizing that we have constantly been on the path of freeing ourselves from the prison, the prison of the matrix, the prison of our mind, the prison of limiting beliefs, the prison of all of the stories and the BS that the world has told us. We will start to step into our divine power, and that divine power will create an influence that changes the energy of the world around us. So takeaway on this one is that we all have prisons around us. We have to recognize that there's no unseen hand doing anything to us. Some of us will be in jobs right now that we hate. There's not somebody over there lording you over your keyboard and saying, hey, you have to go do this thing, or dragging you into work every single day. You're going, you don't have to go to that job. You don't have to work in that industry. You don't have to do what you've been doing. But it also doesn't mean that you have to be irresponsible and just quit and disappear either. A lot of people do that. They're like, if this is not a hell yes, then it's a hell no. People say, if this isn't a hell yes, then it's a hell no. That's not accurate either, because there is balance and things that have to happen in between. There's responsibilities that you set for yourself. And it was almost the same thing as when I went to prison. I was at a camp. There was no fence. I could have walked away at any time, but I would have walked away. It would have made prison a lot harder for me. I could take my sentence in the time that I had, and I could make it as beautiful as I could possibly make it. And when I did that, the time sped up, my experience sped up, and it got better, and I was actually able to work and alchemize a different world within. That's alchemy is when you take the gifts that you've been given, trauma or fun, and you turn it into the best possible thing that you can. So remember, no matter where you are and what you have and what you're doing, everything is a blessing. You have to find your purpose. You have to step into your abundance of. You have to remember. And this is the process of the chanting. The coding is to find the balance in your purpose, find the truth in your talents, merge those things together. And if you are in a place that was built off of fear, which most of us are, I mean, we grow up in it. We go to college because of it. Not to say college isn't good, right. But we go. We do a lot of things because we fear that we won't have. You have to find the truth within you so you can let go of that fear and step into the abundance of what you're creating. And when you do that, life will shift and become significantly more beautiful. I know that the. Know that the road isn't easy, but it isn't easy on purpose because we've built a whole lot of generational trauma. We have a lot of epigenetic programming. We've, on top of that, got societal constructs that has told us all this crazy stuff that we believe in. And now it's time for us to rectify that and step into our wholeness. Thank you for listening, and I love you.