Inner freedom is the permanent and irreversible end to separation.

It is achieved through the gradual lessening of the “I” thought.

The “I” thought is what keeps us separate, afraid, and in competition to survive.

When I believe in “I,” there is a me and there is everything else. I am bound to my experience.

Life revolves around my happiness, my problems, my future, my past, my wishes, and my wants. Effort and willpower gets involved to manage these things and those like them. Effort to cultivate happiness, solve problems, create the future, fix the past, realize dreams, and so on.

It is the effort, we think, required to feel free. Unfortunately, further separation is the result.

We tend to think that “something else” is required. Something needs to be added. Something needs to be subtracted. We tend to think that we know what is best for us.

The reality is: what is best for us, is happening right now because nothing else can be happening.

Can you find the gift in your present situation? What are you learning? Can you see what invitations are being handed to you to open doors that were previously shut?

Sometimes the present moment tastes bitter. It is not to our liking. We feel it needs to change (and it very well might need to).

Can we remember to relax? To stop kicking and screaming? Can we drop our shoulders and merge with the moment?

To merge with the moment means to let go of the “I” thought, which really means to stop thinking about it. Quit — literally — analyzing, making plans, and trying to figure things out. Things are already figured out.

Your job is to live the moment. Embrace it. Learn from it. Let it move through you.

That is how you merge, and that is how you get free.