It was a sleepy afternoon as she told me her story again. It’s the kind of story that still echoes, even decades later. Almost twenty-five years ago, her husband had an affair with a family friend. He left her, married the woman, and never looked back. “I will never trust a man with my heart again,” she said flatly. Not with anger, but with the hollow certainty of someone who’s rehearsed the same vow for years. She’s never dated since.
Her story of betrayal, abandonment, and the ache of watching someone you love become a stranger is familiar to me. I understood her. I even felt a flicker of envy at her resolve. There’s something seductive about the idea of never risking it again. No more disillusionment. No more hope unraveling. But I also saw the cost. The way her heart had built walls so thick that even the kind of love that heals, liberates, and surprises us, had no space to slip through.
Our stories are similar, and yet we’ve come to opposite conclusions about what to do with our hearts. Her heartbreak built a fortress. Mine opened a window. That window became my entry point to emotional freedom. To a kind of healing so exquisite it ushered me into a life of profound depth, joy, and strength. One that now feels unshakable. In the wreckage of my own story, I uncovered a rooted resilience, a deep capacity for love and compassion, and a new relationship with my body… not as a vessel for pain, but as a tool for release, pleasure, and spiritual liberation. I came to understand that my heart is unbreakable. My spirit is unshatterable. And every time I’ve stepped back into the arena I’ve only grown stronger.
The details of my “failed” marriage read like a soap opera, and the grief was real. And yet, surrendering my pain was the key that opened the door to my emotional freedom. It was the only way to be free of bitterness, shame, and the invisible heaviness that can drag joy down by the ankles. Through surrender, I reclaimed my peace. My softness. My wild capacity to love. And my unwavering belief in the beauty of connection.
I don’t fear love and connection. I trust life and others, even when there’s little reason to. I’ve been disappointed. I’ve been betrayed. But I refuse to make cynicism my home. I refuse to be in bondage to pain. And that doesn’t make me stronger or wiser than anyone else. Only willing. Willing to risk the fall for the sake of the flight. Willing to walk through life heart wide open, to protect one of the most sacred things I’ve found… my emotional freedom.
What is Emotional Freedom?
If you ask me, emotional freedom is a kind of fearlessness, a quiet confidence and a spaciousness in the heart and mind that rises when you recognize that you’re indestructible. Not in the sense that pain won’t touch you, but in the deep knowing that your heart can hold it all. The ache, the rejection, the beauty, the loss. Emotional freedom is born when you no longer fear your own tenderness. When you trust that your heart is strong enough to be cracked open and still remain whole.
It’s liberation from the compulsive grasping we often confuse for love. The reaching for others to ground us, to steady our sense of self, whether it’s a partner, a friend, our work, or our stuff. Emotional freedom is the moment you realize you don’t need to be chosen to know your worth. It’s the steady inner truth that I am okay, even if you don’t call. I am whole, even if you walk away. I am worthy, even if you don’t pick me.
For so long, I lived on an emotional rollercoaster, my inner world tossed around by the actions and affections of others. If they pulled away, I collapsed. If they returned, I bloomed. But that wasn’t love. It was bondage. And it wasn’t until I began turning inward that I found something deeper. A spiritual center. A place within me that didn’t sway with every gust of disappointment or surge of attention. A stillness that held me like the earth holds roots.
That’s what emotional freedom has come to mean for me—the ability to stand on my own two feet, anchored not in ego or independence, but in trust. Trust in life. Trust in God. Trust in the unfolding, even when I don’t understand it.
And strangely, as I became more emotionally independent, I also became more open. More connected. What used to feel like desperate clinging now feels like sacred relating. Engaging with friends, lovers, and my work from a place of fullness, not hunger. I’m no longer trying to fill a void. I’m just sharing what’s already overflowing. Every day, I walk with a little more lightness. A little more breath. A little more freedom. Because I keep surrendering my wants, my timelines, and my heart to a power greater than me. And in that surrender, I find peace.
What Stops Us From Being Emotionally Free?
Years before I finally spoke the words that would put an end to my 11-year marriage, I knew in my bones that the season was coming to a close. The signs were there. But I stayed because I was terrified of what the grief would do to me. Terrified of hurting someone I once promised forever to. Terrified that the weight of my own sadness would crush me. I didn’t yet believe I was strong enough to survive the pain that would follow my truth. So I avoided it altogether.
Emotional bondage looked like avoidance, for me. Avoiding grief. Avoiding endings. Avoiding the discomfort of disappointing others. I tried to keep things intact on the outside to avoid the earthquake that was already rumbling within. Then I think of my friend. The one who, decades after betrayal, still wears emotional armor so heavy it keeps love out entirely. Her bondage looks different from mine, but it’s rooted in the same fear: the fear of being undone by pain.
When we don’t believe in our own capacity to survive heartbreak, we remain in bondage. When we see ourselves as fragile and easily broken, we remain in bondage. When we tie our sense of self to people, outcomes, circumstances, or expectations, we remain in bondage. When our emotional safety is outsourced, we remain in bondage. And so many of us are conditioned to do just that. We’re taught to defer to others, to society, to family, to tradition, as if they know better than we do what’s best for our lives. We’re handed scripts about marriage, success, womanhood, belonging. And if we never pause to examine them, we remain trapped in stories that were never ours to begin with.
Bondage can look like staying. It can look like silence. It can look like control, people-pleasing, perfectionism. It can wear the mask of strength, when really, it’s just fear wearing heels. But bondage always begins in the mind. In the beliefs we carry about what we can and cannot handle. In the voices we internalized that said don’t make waves, don’t disappoint anyone, don’t trust yourself. And yet, the moment we stop outsourcing our truth and find the courage to face the fallout of freedom, we begin to get free.
My Journey To Emotional Freedom
By the end of what I had come to call my “slow year,” so much of my life had changed. I had begun reconnecting to myself in magical ways. I was still married then, still trying to find footing in a life I knew deep down was ending. And yet, I found myself reaching for things that anchored me, like my health, my female friendships, long walks alone, and a daily ritual I called “devotion” which is sitting in meditation, journaling, and sometimes reading a short passage. These practices gave me a flicker of stillness in the midst of emotional chaos.
But there was one part of myself I hadn’t yet dared to face… my sensuality. I felt cut off from my own body. That became painfully clear during a sacred sweat lodge ceremony, aka Temezcal, in Tulum, where I found myself pressed into darkness, heat, and breathless intensity. I remember panic overtaking me. The sensation of suffocation. My mind spiraling. Thoughts and overwhelm drowning me. I was shaken to the core, not just because of the fear I felt in the moment, but because I saw just how much fear I had buried in my body. Fear that I felt at a cellular level. Fear I hadn’t even known was there.
But something else happened in that same ceremony. A crack opened. A fleeting moment where my mind released its grip, and my body took over. I glimpsed a different way of being. Not controlled by thoughts, but free in sensation. It was brief, but powerful. Not bracing against life, but surrendering to it. A glimpse of liberation.
I hadn’t known how to access my body or trust its wisdom. I was living from the neck up, detached from the very place that held so much of my power. I couldn’t feel myself. I couldn’t hear the language of my body. I didn’t yet have the tools, the safety, or the courage to go deeper. But after Tulum, I knew I couldn’t keep living that way. I was determined to return to my body, no matter how uncomfortable or unfamiliar it felt.
Not really knowing where to go or what to do, I decided to start with sex as an intro to my body. I hired a tantra coach. At first, I thought it was about unlocking pleasure and redefining intimacy. But it quickly became about so much more. I was learning the sacred language of my body, reclaiming my womanhood, and releasing emotions I hadn’t realized I’d been gripping for years.
Through that sacred work, I began learning how to live in my body again. Not just inhabit it, but trust it. I discovered that emotional pain didn’t need to be solved or silenced. Iit needed to be moved. Danced. Breathed. Felt. That grief could be released through a good twerk, a deep breath, a guttural yell. That stillness was not just something I found in meditation, but in the spaciousness that comes after fully surrendering to what my body is holding. I began to understand that my body was not something to overcome or ignore. It was my ally.
And here’s the part I didn’t expect… that doing this deep, feminine, embodied work would be the thing that gave me the courage to leave my marriage. The strength I unearthed through sensual, intuitive movement, the sovereignty I cultivated through reconnecting to my body and my breath, and the emotional release I began to experience, all led to the deeper truth that I couldn’t stay where I was and become who I was meant to be.
After the year that followed the end of my marriage, I woke up to my own rhythm and began to truly understand what emotional freedom felt like. Not just the absence of chaos, but the presence of lightness. A soft power in my chest. A new way of being in a space where I could dance, cry, laugh, and rage without fear of being too much. A new trust in my body to carry me through it all. This was the real beginning of emotional freedom and of coming home to myself, not just in spirit, but in body.
How I Claimed My Emotional Freedom
Ask anyone if they want freedom, and their answer is almost always yes. For a long time, I thought I wanted it too. The freedom to work from anywhere, freedom in my schedule, financial freedom, the kind of life that looked expansive on the outside. And while these are beautiful desires, I’ve come to understand that the kind of freedom that truly sets us soaring is not about location, money, or time. It’s about something much deeper. It’s an internal liberation.
I was longing for the type of emotional freedom that comes from within. Claiming that kind of freedom didn’t happen overnight. It took courage, intention and a willingness to stop chasing approval and start listening to myself. I had to dissolve old, inherited beliefs, soften my grip on control, and feel things I had spent years trying not to feel.
True freedom came when I gave myself permission to be fully me. Messy, unpolished, emotional, strong. I stopped performing for others and started honoring myself. I stopped trying to earn love and prove myself. I decided to let go of the roles I’d been playing to keep others comfortable and finally choose to belong to myself.
This freedom didn’t happen by accident. It was about turning inward, listening deeply, and feeling what I’d avoided, in order to soften the grip of fear. It showed up in honest and brave conversations, in boundaries that protected my peace, in dancing barefoot in my living room, in choosing rest over proving. It showed up when I let my heart stay open, even after it had been broken. I didn’t just stumble into this kind of freedom. I claimed it, moment by moment and choice by choice, with tenderness, grit, and a lot of grace.
3 Pillars I Return to Again and Again to Claim (and Reclaim) My Emotional Freedom
Emotional freedom isn’t something you win once and keep forever. It’s a practice. A daily, moment-by-moment choosing of love over fear, presence over performance, and surrender over control. These are the three pillars I know to return to whenever I drift away.
1. Liberate the Mind
Every one of us is born into a web of conditioning. Our thoughts, beliefs, and expectations are shaped by our upbringing, society, religion, tradition, culture. We are taught how life “should” look, how love “should” feel, how women “should” behave. We’re given scripts about marriage, ambition, sexuality, spirituality and many of us spend years trying to contort ourselves to fit roles we never consciously agreed to. I sure did.
For a long time, I didn’t realize I was living out someone else’s story. Following traditions I never questioned. Staying small because it felt safer. Dressing “appropriately,” repressing desire, playing a role in a script I didn’t write all because that’s what “good” girls, “good” Christians, “good” women do. But something in me began to question it. I started watching my thoughts, noticing how they weren’t always mine. I began journaling. Having wild, open, transformatie conversations with people who challenged the status quo. And slowly, my mind began to loosen its grip. I started to believe there were other ways to live. Other truths.
The more I challenged my mental patterns, the more possibility I began to see. And with each possibility came a tiny crack of freedom. A breath of fresh air. A taste of something sweeter, softer, truer. I didn’t have to live by default. I could live by my own design.
Escaping the cage of conformity gave me something I can only describe as spiritual liberation. A lightness in my chest. A huge exhale. A knowing that I was finally free to be me.
2. Feel the Body
While liberating the mind cracked the door open, it was feeling my body that blew it wide open. For most of my life, I lived from the neck up. A high-achiever and thinker, I graduated university at 20 years old with a deans commendation for high achievement across several subjects. I was a woman always in control. But when I started working with my tantra coach, everything shifted. She didn’t ask me to think my way to clarity, she asked me to feel. To drop into the wisdom of my body. To stop explaining and start experiencing.
I eagerly read Pussy: A Reclamation by Mama Gena. I practiced swamping—a method of emotional alchemy where I gave myself full permission to move through my emotions viscerally and unapologetically. I’d rage to a heavy soundtrack, smashing pillows against the side of the bed. I’d cry and roll around the floor. I’d dance barefoot in the living room, hips moving in ways I’d long forgotten. Sometimes I laughed. Sometimes I screamed. But I always felt.
I let my emotions rise and crash like waves and discovered that they wouldn’t drown me. The grief, the anger, the joy, the longing… all of it I learned to simply feel and observe as sensation. Nothing to fix. Nothing to fear. Just energy moving through me. And as I let my body lead, I remembered that I’m safe to feel. Safe to express. Safe to inhabit the full spectrum of my humanity. That, too, is freedom.
3. Surrender to the Unknown
The truth is, we never really know what’s coming. Not tomorrow. Not even the next hour. And for a long time, that terrified me. I clung to plans, people, identities. Anything that gave me a false sense of control. But in doing so, I realized I was protecting myself out of the possibility of experienceing true love, joy, spontaneity, and magic. And there is no freedom in that.
Eventually, I came to understand that trust isn’t about other people. It’s about my relationship with Life. With the divine. With the deepest part of myself. Trust is a decision I make daily to believe in beauty, even after disappointment. To open my heart again, even when it’s been bruised. To let go of needing certainty in order to feel safe.
I started choosing surrender. Choosing presence. Choosing to live in the now, instead of forecasting the future or rehashing the past. I began trusting that life has a rhythm and intelligence I don’t need to control. My only job is to show up for it fully, honestly, wholeheartedly. And when I do, I feel free. Because true freedom isn’t about safety. It’s about aliveness. It’s about saying yes to the mystery, and letting it shape me.
Emotional Freedom Means Living With An Open Heart
For 25 years, she has guarded her heart. And who could blame her? Pain carves deep, and we learn quickly that walls seem safer than wounds. But over time, protection can become its own kind of prison. We shield ourselves from pain, but in doing so, we also block the joy, the magic, the spontaneous beauty that life has to offer. There’s a silent suffering in staying closed, an ache that comes not from what was lost, but from what was never fully lived.
What I’ve come to learn is that emotional freedom doesn’t mean avoiding heartbreak. It means letting life move through you. It’s choosing to keep your heart open, even when shutting down feels easier. It’s trusting in your own resilience, knowing you can bend without breaking, that your softness is not your weakness, but your strength. To love again after loss, to hope again after heartbreak isn’t naiveté, it’s bravery. The open heart is not fragile, it’s fierce. And only the open heart can carry the beauty, the pain, and the ecstasy of a life lived wild and free.
Are you willing to risk the fall for the sake of the flight? To find the courage to face the fallout of claiming your emotional freedom?
Ps. Want to kickstart your journey to a slower, more joyful way of living? Sign up for the free 5 Days of Slow audio course here.
