What Does It Actually Mean to Be Free?

Every year, on August 15th as India celebrates its day of independence I find myself caught in a familiar emotional dissonance.

Watching the ceremonial flag hoists, feeling the high-energy spectacle of national pride, patriotic songs blaring through loud speakers, speeches echoing through the walls of institutions, organisations, residential complexes. And yet, beneath the orchestrated patriotism and all the noise, the same existential questions surface: 

“What does it actually mean to be free? Are any of us genuinely free? What is the price we pay for freedom?” 

As a yoga practitioner, I naturally turn inwards, to the practice and the philosophy to make sense of this friction. It strikes me that modern culture has flattened two sacred concepts. Patriotism has been reduced to defending borders, singing songs and waving flags. Yoga has been oversimplified to physical postures and flexibility.

Yet, at their deepest roots, both address the same human yearning - the right to self-sovereignty. 

The truth is that true freedom cannot exist without total inclusivity.

The Land is a Free Shared Refuge

Consider the nature of the land we celebrate. There are patriotic songs that honour the land. When we sing these lines, we are not singing to a political party, a specific religion or a boundary line drawn on a map. While physical borders are necessary administrative lines that protect a nation's people, true patriotism does not stop at a fence. 

We are bowing to the earth itself—the soil, the waters, the winds, and the flora that sustain every single life living upon it without bias or distinction. The land does not ask for your creed, caste, gender, or background before it yields its grain or flows its rivers. Its generosity is inherently inclusive.

Physical borders protect us, but mental borders enslave us.

When ‘patriotism’ loses this inclusive heart—and when our systems deny people equal access to that very land, its resources, and basic dignity based on caste, class, or identity—it stops being about freedom and instead degenerates into exclusion and fear.

The Illusion of Separation

In yogic philosophy, exclusion is a symptom of spiritual ignorance / Avidya. In Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, the root of all human suffering and bondage is identified as the ego’s rigid misidentification with the small, isolated self (Asmita). 

It is mistaking the impermanence (Anitya) for the eternal (Nitya), the Impure (Ashuchi) for the pure, Suffering (Dukkha) for Joy (Sukha), and the non-self for the self (Atma). 

“Anitya-ashuchi-dukkha-anatmasu nitya-shuchi-sukha-atmakhyatir-avidya.”

— Yoga Sutras (2.5)

When we live in Avidya, we view the world through a narrow lens of “Us vs. Them” , “Me vs. You”. We claim to be citizens of a free nation and yet we live internally colonised - enslaved by prejudice, conditioning, volatile emotional impulses, and fear of the ‘other’. We spend much of our lives bound by karmic loops, social conditioning, external compulsions, and more. 

“Yogas chitta vritti nirodha.” (Yoga is the quietening of the fluctuations of the mind.)

— Yoga Sutras (1.2)

True liberation—Moksha or Kaivalya—is not an escape from the world. It is the absolute sovereignty over one's own internal landscape.

Bridging the Spirit and the State

During India’s Independence movement, the word Swaraj became a rally cry. But it was never meant to be just a political term. It is actually a profound concept. 

Swa = Self and Raj = Rule.

It bridges the self-rule of the spirit with the self-rule of the nation. It clearly asserts that the external political freedom is hollow without internal spiritual autonomy.

This is where the solitary practice of yoga intersects with the true spirit of patriotism.

Yoga originates from the word Yuj (Union). If the underlying reality of existence is one unified consciousness, then to marginalize, exclude, or divide is to inflict harm on our own collective body.

A nation is not just a piece of land marked by fences and borders ; it is a collective consciousness. 

Just like how one cannot attain nirvana / experience samadhi while the body is in its own internal conflict , a society cannot experience true freedom when its people are bound by fractured systems, injustice, division, or inner stagnation. 

Action over Bypassing: A Collective Upliftment

Freedom that belongs only to the privileged is not freedom; it is merely permission granted to a few. 

Spiritual realization is not a retreat into an ivory tower. It is NOT a substitute for real world justice. Inner peace that ignores material oppression is nothing but spiritual bypassing. It demands Sarvodaya (Sarva = All + Udaya = Upliftment). It requires us to constantly ask: “How does my presence serve the world I live in? How do I use my privilege to dismantle real-world inequality?”

To be truly free is to realize that you are neither trapped within the narrow boundary of your own ego, nor disconnected from the land and the diverse people who sustain it. It is to stand rooted in your own being—unshakable , clear-eyed and equanimous—while actively offering your life to break the chains of division so that everyone can rise together.

When this internal awakening finally meets our definition of patriotism, a nation ceases to be just a defensive territory. It becomes what it was always meant to be: a shared, living awakening.

Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu. Jai Hind. Jai Bharat.