[Credit: Jesse Kruger]

This is a guest post by Mike Siete Cinco. Mike is a big goal hunter, a lifehacker and his own lab rat. He keeps a record of his experiments at www.mikesietecinco.com.

You can find him on Twitter @mikesietecinco.
There are many ways you can rebel against they tyranny of modern day slavery, as defined on this site.  I won’t be discussing any of them. The slavery I am going to explore, is the same demon that has consumed me since childhood— slavery of the mind.

A short parable:

Sara was a slave. She had never been one to go slow, with anything. “If freedom is what I want, why should I wait?”

“I am a slave, the master is brutal, but he is also lazy and constantly away. Opportunity to escape is everywhere, but I am crippled with fear. I can see freedom—I am afraid of it—but I cannot deny that it is there.” She looks at her hands, they are raw and blistered, she looks deeper into her soul, it is dying a little more with each passing breath.

“I am comfortable in my shackles, it is safe here. Out there is the abyss. Here, even though my body is broken and my mind is shattered, it is familiar— the master gives me just enough. I am ok. Do not worry for me.”  She who is so rebellious does not leave, she will stay, surrender … and fight.

“I have decided that I will stay. I will give everything to my enslavement. The master will have the best slave he could ever hope for. In my acceptance, I will break him.”

Sara realizes, that the master and the slave are one in the same.

Unlike Sara, the slavery I endured was not of a physical nature.  I was a slave to my thoughts, my thoughts in turn enslaved my emotions—my emotions crippled me.  I was also the master. This was both a terrifying and liberating revelation.

Most often, we speak about slavery in the physical sense; In my experience of life, slavery is and always will be, a state of mind. Rebel against modern day slavery at all cost, leave your job and design the life you choose or stay and don’t— but please know this: Until you win the war against the master within, you will always be a slave.

So in the context of battling what we refer to as modern day slavery, as well as the slavery of the mind (there is most definitely a connection between the physical and mental), You have 2 choices, 3 actually, but the third nearly broke me and is painful for me to discuss.

You can leave behind whatever it is that you feel enslaves you, and begin a journey to freedom (there is no destination here, the second you give yourself FULLY to this path, you are free), you can stay and fall in love with your shackles (and watch them melt away) or you can choose option 3— you can do nothing. If you do not choose 1 or 2, then by default, you are choosing option 3.  I know this 3rd option all too well, for it was there, in those times that I didn’t choose, that I died every moment.

Live free or fall in love with your shackles, and more and more, each moment will feel like a lifetime of bliss.  Wherever it is that you are going in your life, and you are surely going somewhere, my wish is that you do it with a sense of freedom that is available to even the most brutalized slave—the freedom that only comes from choice.  This is your birthright. Fight to your last breath to take what is yours— or simply surrender…and you will have it.

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