Freedom and Disobedience

This morning, glancing through "The Betrayal of the Self" by Arno Gruen, I read,

"We learn in earliest childhood to yield to the demands of those whose 'love' we are dependent on.  Without reflection, we learn to equate freedom with disobedience.  Therefore, we respond to freedom...with anxiety and fear...

"The lesson of our childhood is that power, initially experienced at the hands of our parents, promises an escape from the helplessness we despise...Freedom then takes on an entirely different, unexpressed significance: it means deliverance from, not harmony with, our own needs."

Life is about living in harmony with our needs.  I heard "needs" defined by an NVC teacher recently as the basic life force that causes everything to live and move, from the first single-celled life form to the complex creatures we are today.  Needs are what get us up out of our chair and cause us to desire to live, breathe, love.

To live in harmony with our needs would mean, first, that we know what our true needs are, and second, that we accept our needs as legitimate, and do not apologize for them.  How easily said, yet hard to do.  But I am learning - by being still, by reading, by reflecting, step by step, mistake by mistake.

Oh, to live straight from source, to feel the wordless part of my being speak to me from its own deep intelligence about my needs, and to see myself respond without question - that seems like a state of being worth living for.