By Ma Ananda Sanghavasini, Meditation Facilitator & Intuitive Life Coach at The Divine Mine.

December 5^th 2013 is a memorable day in history as it is the day of the passing of a great world leader: Mr. Nelson Mandela. It was very synchronistic that right on that day I happened to watch the movie “Long Walk to Freedom” – a biography of Nelson Mandela’s life. It was such a touching experience that it is hard to describe in words, yet I will make an attempt as I wish to share this profound experience.

Throughout the movie, as I was watching, I was hit with so many insights and touched deeply in many ways. One idea that came to me was how the story of Nelson Mandela’s life very much resembles an inner story many of us carry inside; how each character in the story could represent an aspect of ourselves in our inner world. For example, one of Nelson Mandela’s dreams was the right to freedom and equality for all of human kind. Freedom is our bright right; it is who we are deeply inside. After Mr. Mandela was imprisoned, the prison guards would continuously talk down to him and his fellow freedom fighters who got arrested. The prison guards would poke at him and try to make him react so that they could punish him. To me what this resembled is that our inner being is like Nelson Mandela. Our being is already free, it knows its right to be free, to freely express itself as it desires. The prison guards resemble our inner judges and inner bullies who will come along and try to create havoc. The inner prison guards however, are nothing but voices from the past, words which someone once uttered to us. The voices were recorded in our sub-consciousness and now we keep repeating these voices, beating ourselves up day in day out, even though these voices are long gone in the outer world. Our being longs to experience its freedom, yet our limiting believes are like the prison bars that prevent us from venturing out and live the life we dream about. The prison bars made up of our limited believes, and the inner prison guards that are the recorded voices from the past keep preventing us to experience the freedom we are longing to consciously experience. Ironically quite often we don’t even know that this is happening.

How can we free ourselves from these inner prison bars and inner prison guards? Meditation and mindfulness practice are a few ways of freeing ourselves in inner and outer world. Even though physically we might not be in a prison cell, as long as we believe in the voices from the past and our unexamined limited believes, we are imprisoning ourselves through the bars of the mind. When we are free in the inner world, only then can we be really free in the outer world.

May our ongoing practice of mindfulness be a continuation of the Long Walk to Freedom that Mr Nelson Mandela started many years ago. Even though Mr Nelson Mandela was imprisoned in the outer world, he was not in the inner world. He kept going on, believing in a better future for himself and for humanity. May his courage and vigilance be an inspiration for all of us, may his spirit live forth in each of us inspiring us to continue on, come whatever may. And….may Mr. Nelson Mandela experience the ultimate freedom at last, may peace and justice prevail on Earth…