Being Free: How to Re-Invent Your Life

What makes a person free? What say do you get in your life? What would make peace of mind and freedom to be yourself available? We all have opinions about these things but we don’t all agree and we may not have thought our opinions through. The Victoria writer and therapist, Paul Peele has been fascinated by these questions for a lifetime. In his book “Being Free” he suggests that a simple but almost universal misunderstanding prevents our seeing the answers. He also says that changing your life is possible but that you don’t have to change yourself to be free, to accept yourself or to enjoy life. Paul claims that what keeps us from seeing how free we are is that we believe our thoughts and we believe our thoughts are significant. He suggests that the mind is always trying to map out the world around us so that we can deal with our concerns. That’s what thoughts are for. But rather than understanding that our thoughts are always imperfect guesses which are attempts to make sense of the world we take them to be real and true. We are never as creative at finding a more useful new viewpoint when we already hold an opinion. We assume that if we believe something this must be significant. Our minds constantly create thoughts just as our hands might fidget with a pencil. We don’t consider fidgeting significant but we often take our thoughts to be true or significant just because they popped into our heads. Because we think our thoughts are “true” we feel stuck with them no matter what the consequences. For instance if you think badly of yourself you might fail to notice that the only thing which makes this significant is that you believe it. In this book he invites you to question what you think and believe. “Freedom exists when you don’t believe your own opinions or believe a thought is significant just because it has occurred to you.” He doesn’t suggest you stop or control your thinking. “You just need to know how to question your thoughts. You don’t have to believe everything you think.” He illustrates how all this plays out in your daily life by talking about everything from sex to conflict to relationships to negative thoughts and self image. The ideas in this book are not at all complicated but come from such an unfamiliar way of looking at life that it requires quite a leap of imagination and an open mind to get the point. The book’s invitation is not to learn something new but just to consider a radically different context for all that you already know. The author doesn’t want you to believe anything he has to say. He’s only inviting you to question your own reality. He says “You don’t have to believe your own opinions much less mine. You’re free to question anything in your mind and this is where your freedom starts.” This book is written in a personal and familiar conversational style which I found engaging. In the seeming flood of self help books this one is significant because it deals with the most basic and useful idea possible. How do you know what you think you know? This book is useful because it asks and helps to answer the question, “What makes a person free?” Above all it is a practical book about how to live free in the world and be at home in your own skin.