What My Yoga Practice Has Taught Me About Freedom

When I was a child, July 4th meant dressing in red, white and blue, family cookouts and fireworks. As I got older, I stopped feeling like celebrating. It seems wrong to celebrate when not everyone in this country gets to enjoy the same freedoms — whether that's the freedom to feel safe, access to healthcare, or being treated equally under the law. So instead, I want to talk about the kind of freedom that our yoga practice teaches us — one that has little to do with borders or governments, and everything to do with the mind.

Two Kinds of Freedom

There's the freedom we talk about every July — freedom to. Freedom to vote, to speak, to move, to worship, to simply exist without fear. It's the freedom etched into our country’s founding documents and chanted at protests, and it matters greatly. It's also, clearly, still unevenly distributed.

Yoga teaches a different kind of freedom — freedom from. Not from laws or borders, but from the noise inside us. The ancient yogis called this citta vritti nirodha — stilling the fluctuations of the mind. Freedom, in this tradition, isn't about what's granted to you by a government. It's about what no longer has a grip on you: a reactive thought, a craving, a fear, an old story you keep telling about yourself.

There's also vairagya — non-attachment to the mind's desires. Not indifference, not detachment from caring, but the practice of holding things loosely enough that you're not controlled by them. Not allowing your thoughts to rule your actions. And there's a companion practice, aparigraha — non-attachment to outcomes and things, non-greed. Together, they mean you can want something, work for something, even grieve something — without being enslaved to the wanting or the outcome.

These two freedoms aren't in competition. But they're not the same thing either, and I think it's worth being honest about that difference — especially on a day that treats freedom as if it only means one thing.

What This Looks Like on the Mat

I notice it most in poses that bring about discomfort. Yin poses especially, like Half Pigeon, that ask me to stay with the discomfort. Camel, which asks me to open somewhere I'd rather keep guarded. My legs may shake, my mind starts negotiating — how much longer, why does this matter, can I just move on — and somewhere in that noise is a choice. Not to force stillness, and not to bail either. Just to stay, breathe, and notice the wanting-it-to-be-over without succumbing to it.

That's the whole practice, really. Not transcendence. Simply: discomfort arises, the old pattern is to react — tense, resist, escape — and freedom is the half-second gap where you don't have to. You feel the pull and you don't get dragged. Off the mat, that gap is everything. It's the difference between a reactive fear and a chosen response. Between being ruled by a a thought or feeling and simply having one.

Is This Just Spiritual Bypassing?

I want to be careful here, however, not to suggest yoga as a kind of escape hatch — don't worry about what's broken out there, just find peace in here. Inner freedom that lets you stop caring about outer freedom isn't real freedom. It's avoidance.

So I don't think of this as a replacement for the harder, slower work of social justice. I think of it as what makes that work sustainable. You can't stay engaged with something painful for the long haul — a broken system, an unequal country — if you're constantly reactive, burnt out, or collapsing into despair every time it disappoints you. The non-attachment yoga teaches isn't not caring. It's caring without being consumed. Aparigraha, in particular, is what lets you work toward a better outcome without needing to possess or control the timeline of when it arrives. It's what lets you show up again tomorrow.

Holding Both

I don't think I'll ever feel fully at ease on July 4th, and I've made peace with that. I can hold "this country still has real work to do" and "there is something in me that no law, no border, no circumstance can fully take away" at the same time. It's not a contradiction. It's what it looks like to be honest about the world and still tend to your own freedom while you work toward equality for all.

So this 4th of July, I'll sit in stillness for a few minutes and ask myself two questions. Where do I still feel bound — by fear, by attachment, by an old story I keep repeating? And, just as importantly: where have I already found freedom, regardless of what's happening around me?

If you want to try it, grab a journal and find a few honest minutes with your own mind — which, it turns out, might be the freest place there is.