‘Coming home in your free will’. It is the subtitle of the Liber method. During an end-of-year archive clearance, I come across an interview with psychotherapist Edith Eger that sheds special light on what that actually is, free will. Freely translated, according to her, it is about the ability to ‘want’ to interpret the right word at the right time. Whereby ‘correct’ is meant: the life-giving, creative word. And not the trapped, wounded or traumatized word.
Referring to Liber, you can understand Eger’s words as follows: every moment of the day a gigantic cloud of words fills our minds. Then we are at home in our free will, if we are able to choose from it the word that bears the most fruit at that moment. That, paraphrasing Eger, chooses ‘not to avenge the past, but to enrich the present’.
A creative life therefore requires the right words. To be able to distinguish one word from another. That is why Liber does not teach you to become still ‘just plain’, but to express the many things in our head that are not still, explicitly and maximally. Consciously, it is therefore an approach that is at odds with meditative techniques that teach you to ‘let go’ of words and thoughts; ‘to let it drift’.
What Eger makes so clear once again: whoever cannot distinguish between a creative and a destructive word remains trapped in the past. Where the spiritual sense of words does not extend beyond that they may be ‘released’, primordial soup remains, primordial soup; No penicillin is discovered, no legal system is developed, education remains a privilege for the rich. The word of the strongest rules there naturally and everything remains the same.
“Every moment is a choice.” Eger cites with approval Viktor Frankl, founder of logotherapy. What the Liber methodology can bring within your reach: in the first instance the awareness that we do not use that freedom of choice; usually let our lives be steered by an automatic (word) pilot. That is confrontational. Because every now and then the word ‘sucker’ stares at you again. However, by not letting that ‘overdo it’, but by learning to fully feel its impact, a small miracle can then happen to you. He who gives home to the word that hurts, turns out to be like a home to the word that liberates from pain.
