The Journey to Freedom:
A Guide to Life
In an unusual Internet circulation that was attributed to the Dalai Lama, James J. Lachard wrote in an unpublished essay the following: “Man, sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.” 54
The Dalai Lama points out that one’s life is too frequently unlived. We can assume that there must be another way to live. To some degree, we have all been caught up in our own version of an unlived life. This next section of the book begins by exploring how your body, mind, and emotions make up this constricted self we’ve talked about. This is the self that sacrifices itself for money, security, pleasure, being important, and trying to survive. The core question that we will be examining is “What is the prime motivation in the structure of the constricted self that snatches us away from living a fulfilling and meaningful life?”
In this part of the book, we will start taking a journey of eight steps that will continue on in Part III. These journeys will take you step by step through the birthing process of your constricted self and the process to awaken to your expanded true self. It is key for you to know how you are structured and developed so that you can become conscious and make changes in your life that give you more inner freedom. The changes you make will build a new foundation to live your life more in the present and not die having never lived. To build a new foundation, I utilize an energy structure called the chakra energy system. This system explores how your energy is developed and how it builds and decreases in strength. The constricted self blocks this energy system and restricts its natural flow. I also use the Enneagram structure to deepen your journey by identifying your personality type. You will take assessments and do exercises to find your personality type and begin to understand how you have constructed the patterning of your life. After going through how you’ve created “what you are not,” that is, the compensation pattern of the constricted self that comes from the emotional and physical wounding we all have experienced in one form or another, we will begin the journey back to our essential nature that I’ve called our expanded self.
Let me review the eight steps before we begin. The Journey to Freedom: A Guide to Life has eight steps to discover how you created your ego personality, or constricted self and how you can awaken to your expanded true self. In the first four steps in part 2, I explore how your fear of death was created. Knowing that the ego is filled with fear, the first four steps describe how your ego was born and created this death phobia. There are a variety of exercises, practices, and meditations to provide you tools for this journey.
Here are the first four steps:
1. The Journey of Separation describes how fear begins to be a central part of your life. It explores the effect on your body and how it separates you from others.
2. The Journey of Emotions describes how you use your emotions to hold on to and to resist people and situations in your life. The ego uses your emotions to generate pain and suffering in your life.
3. The Journey of the Mind investigates your personal thinking process and how it can become a very powerful force dividing you from your physical body.
4. The Journey of Self-Identity delves into the process of how you identify yourself as a separate person from the world around you. This step explores at how you define yourself as a person and are caught in the subject/object dilemma of perception.
Steps five through eight in part 3 are the steps to help you unwind your ego-created journey. Each step includes exercises and meditations to help you explore your own personal journey.
5. Freedom from Personal Identity is the beginning place to detach from your constricted ego and identify.
6. Freedom from the Mental Self is releasing the mental patterns that have bound you to your inner pain and suffering.
7. Freedom from the Emotional Self is when unwinding your emotional impulses helps you gain the possibility of inner expansion and release from fear.
8. Freedom from Separation is the final step and recognizes the illusion of your false inner home and the awareness of the truth of the separation you lived with all your life. The last part of this eighth step is the Process of Integration. Of all the eight steps the process of integration opens the possibility for your awakening to your true self.
Each of these eight steps will take you into and then out of your contracted awareness into the freedom of expansion to experience a vital and full life as you complete this journey of your existence.
54. James L. Lachard, An Interview with God, unpublished work.