Slavery or Freedom, Which Do You Choose?

The Jewish people are about to begin celebrating Passover, their Exodus story of 210 years of slavery in Egypt.*

Jews are commanded to constantly remember their slavery, to remember it as though they were there.  One of the very powerful messages of this remembering, and one that applies to all people who are blessed to live in freedom today, is the lesson that while we are no longer physical slaves, we are still slaves.  This time we are our own Pharaoh and the slavery is of the self-imposed spiritual and emotional variety. That means the only one who can free you is you.

We hold ourselves back from climbing our mountain  The journey that will lead us to being the person we were destined and created to become. We hold ourselves back with the “I can’ts” (see the inner-speak series). How we speak to our self and about our self, translates into who we are.  We each have a Pharaoh inside us that enslaves us with the “I can’ts”.  We also have a Moses inside of us that can lead us to freedom.  A freedom that we can use to continually grow, improve, and find joy.  Who would you rather listen to?

“We suffer under the constraints of our habits simply because we had them yesterday.  We are slaves to ingrained pathways of our lives and our world; because we are too busy dusting the covers of our Book of Life to read its pages.” – The Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson

Happy Passover

*this post, while somewhat edited, has been posted here before, and in the theme of the remembering, it’s posted here again.  In case you don’t remember!