Awakenings with David Cunningham
Awakenings is a podcast with David Cunningham exploring consciousness, awareness, love, and the deeper questions that shape how we experience life. Through thoughtful conversations and reflections, the show invites listeners to see themselves, their relationships, and the world with greater clarity and presence.
Awakenings with David Cunningham
The 3 Freedoms You Need to Love Fully
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Most people think the goal is to become more loving. I don't.
I think love is already natural.
The real challenge is keeping ourselves free enough for love to show up.
In this video, I explore what I believe are the three most important freedoms we can cultivate as human beings. These freedoms don't just improve our relationships. They restore our peace, our power, and our ability to love fully.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:
💭 Why being "right" is often the source of separation and conflict
💭 How curiosity creates connection where righteousness creates distance
💭 Why your experience of life comes from who you're being, not what others are doing
💭 The hidden belief that fuels resentment
💭 How stories about the past quietly limit your future
💭 Why freedom, not effort, is the foundation of love
Love is not something you have to manufacture.
Keep yourself free.
And love will take care of itself.
👉 Join the Awakening Weekends:
https://theawakeningweekend.com
If you’re ready to move beyond understanding this intellectually and actually live it, the Awakening Weekends are where that happens. It’s a space to experience what it means to show up differently and leave a completely different impact on the people around you.
👉 Watch David’s free video on ending self-criticism:
https://endingselfcriticism.com
If this message resonates, this is the best place to go deeper. It will shift how you relate to yourself and everything else builds from there.
It's David Cunningham here at my home in Pennsylvania. I want to talk about our three most important freedoms. The freedoms that we must have to love fully. Remember, when we're free, we love. But it's never about being more loving. It's keeping ourselves free. It's natural when we're free, we love. So what are the three most important freedoms? Number one, free from righteousness. See, for us to be righteous, we have to believe we're right. And for us to believe that we're right, we have to believe that the other is wrong. It's the source of every argument, it's the source of every bit of distance between us and other human beings. So how do we keep ourselves free from righteousness is simple. To get that we're never right. We've never been right, we never will be right now, we've never been wrong either. Because there's no such thing. All of us as human beings have our views of life. It's not that any view is the right view and another view is the wrong view. If I'm in front of my house and you're in the back of my house, we have different views. To argue which is the right one and which is the wrong one doesn't make sense. Keep ourselves free from righteousness outside of any belief that we're ever right and anybody else is ever right or we're ever wrong or anybody else is ever wrong. We and everybody else have their views of life. We can be curious about each other's views, wonder about each other's views, learn from each other's views versus argue about which one is right and which one is wrong. So keep ourselves free from righteousness. Keep ourselves free from resentment. Resentment comes with the belief that somehow my experience of life comes from the other person, which is just not accurate. It's never accurate that my experience comes from you. My experience always comes and is related to, correlated to, the way I'm being as a human being. If I love the way I'm being, I love my life in that moment. If I don't love the way I'm being, I don't love my life in that moment. It has nothing to do with the way the other person is being. Suppose someone's loving me and I'm cranky. I don't experience love, I experience crankiness. Suppose someone's hating me and I'm compassionate. I don't experience hate, I experience compassion. So our experience life always is correlated to the way we're being, which is the one thing we have a total say about who we be as human beings. We may not have a total say about what we have in life. We may not have a total say about what we do in life, but we definitely have a total say about who we be at all times, under all circumstances. So to keep myself free from resentment is to always have the understanding that my experience of life is in my hands. It comes from who I'm being, and that's the one thing I have a total say about in life. Third essential freedom is a freedom from resignation, a freedom from thinking that something's not possible. The only time we think that something isn't possible is when we make a decision about the past. The past determines the future. Oh, I can't have this because of the way it was in the past, or I'll never be able to accomplish that because of the way it was in the past, or I can't be related to that person because of the way we were related in the past. All right. Can we please observe carefully and discover that the future is not determined by the past ever? I don't care if I've argued with my dad for 10 years in a row. That doesn't mean I'll argue with him tomorrow. I don't care if I've not gotten along with my boss for five years in a row, that doesn't mean I won't get along with my boss tomorrow. The only thing that predicts the future is our stories about the past, what we've decided about the past. If I argue with my dad and I decide he's closed-minded, oh, what predicts my future is the decision that he's closed-minded. Because as far as I'm concerned, when I see him tomorrow, I'm going to see a closed-minded person. But in the absence of that story, we argued yesterday, that's over. It's complete, it's done. It predicts nothing. So in the absence of our stories about the past, our future's free. Anything and everything's possible. There's no resignation when anything and everything is possible. So to keep ourselves free from resignation, to have the profound understanding that our past does not predict our future. So keeping ourselves free from righteousness, free from resentment, and free from resignation. And then we love. We just love naturally. We love wholly. We love completely. So the job, again, is never to try to have yourself be more loving. The job is to keep yourself free. And those are the three most important freedoms. Thanks for watching the video, everybody. I hope you're enjoying it and I hope it's useful for you. And I'd like to take a minute to tell you if you'd like to do more work with me, you can participate in my flagship program called The Awakening. The Awakening is a three-day program that's the most fulfilling work I've ever done. I created this program at the crossroads of transformation and spiritual enlightenment. I'd worked in both fields for many years. Many people have been on those paths. And what is new is to see where those two paths cross. Where does transformation cross paths with spiritual enlightenment? And there's a gold mine there for us to tap into. So the awakening works right there. We go there and discover everything that's possible when you cross the path of transformation and spiritual enlightenment. It's really an amazing program that gives you such access to freedom in your life, peace in your life, actually a state of grace, and then the power that comes from living in a state of grace. Just imagine how effective we can be when we live in a state of grace. Alright, click the link below for more information on the awakening. I hope you can join me. Thank you.