What is Self-Liberation?
There are many forms of self-help that are not liberatory—their goal is to make you “normal” or “more productive” (i.e. more useful to capitalism), rather than happy & free on your own terms.
These are so ubiquitous that people sometimes mistake my interest in personal growth as self-improvement, or hear healing as fixing.
I am not trying to become a better cog in the machine, or to adopt the belief that I’m broken and need to be fixed.
Healing to me means defragmentation. It means undoing the damage of various forms of trauma and wounding. It involves turning toward the pain and developing a relationship with the part of myself that is in pain. It is through that relationship that the pain is relieved as I reintegrate that part and become more whole.
Personal growth to me means the pursuit of my own joy, and the transmuting of any obstacle to that joy. At this point, I have a lot of faith I can get through obstacles—and actually that obstacles are opportunities for growth—because I’ve experienced it over and over again.
To avoid confusion, I started using the term self-liberation.
Liberation has two connotations or flavors.
- The spiritual version is moksha — liberation from the cycle of karma and rebirth.
- The political version is liberation from oppression, i.e. the modern Western materialist capitalist colonialist project and all the violence inherent in it.
On this site, I think of it in both senses.
First, all healing is karmic healing. Clearing or creating karma is largely what we are doing here. Karma just means cause and effect, carried over lifetimes. Even if you can point to your childhood as the cause of your issues, the reason your childhood played out the way it did is due to karma.
If you want to learn more about karma, I have a whole site about how to read the karma in your birth chart and work with it: AstroLiberation.
Second, personal growth is incomplete without a political lens. To truly experience inner freedom and joy, we must grapple not just with our individual childhood and life and how it wounded us, but also with the violence of our society and how we have internalized it.
This is especially true if you are neurodivergent, queer, trans, non-white, or any other form of marginalized—but I believe it’s true for everyone, because the modern Western materialist capitalist colonialist patriarchal white-supremacist framework is something we are all steeped in, and it alienates us from our natural desires, connectedness, and joy.
For more, read my Self-Liberation Principles.
Self-love is a set of skills you can learn
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About me: I'm autistic/ADHD and I write about how to be free and happy from the inside out.
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