Free Yourself from Your Mental Bondage

Have you ever started singing a song in your mind and throughout the day were unable to drop it from your thoughts? At first it seemed fun. You sang it silently, happily, several times. Maybe even a few renditions occurred aloud when no one was around. Soon, though, it became annoying. Oh sure, you tried not to remember it and told yourself to stop it, but then you changed tasks and there it was again.

Bondage can surface in our lives in different ways. There is physical bondage, but some people say emotional and intellectual bondage can be just as damaging. Mental bondage strikes in all forms. It is like living in a small box. Our thoughts bounce from one wall to another but can never escape because the window is closed. How can we free ourselves from our bondages?

A seeker asks Sadhguru how a person can become free of their bondages when they are in a family where so many people are dependent upon them, when they feel that there are certain chains around them.

Sadhguru: Maybe you cannot release your body from the chains but you can definitely release your mind from the chains. That is in your hands, isn’t it? Right now, maybe you cannot take Sanyas and live in an ashram – your husband, wife or your children will not allow you, but you becoming mentally free, can anybody stop you? No. The bondages have come only because of yourself and nobody else. Freedom does not mean we have to change all our situations. We do not have to turn our life or situations upside down to become free because one situation is not better than some other situation; don’t ever believe that. It is just a choice. Somebody chooses to live in this situation and somebody else chooses to live in another situation; everything has its pluses and minuses. The important thing is how you are within yourself, isn’t it? So, you may not be able to change your external situation immediately, maybe there is nothing wrong with it and there is no need to change it. But you should change your inner situation because it is bothering you.

This mind can become a ladder to divinity, it can make you ecstatic. Many times this mind made you happy, isn’t it? And many times it made you very unhappy, fearful, tense and frustrated. So the same mind is doing both. It is doing whatever it wants because this little instrument of a mind is not in your hands, it has gone out of control. You can take your car and reach the next city or you can ram it straight into a tree. It is left to you. So, it is just about what you do with it. You can reach very far if you keep the controls in your hands.