Inner Freedom

Real freedom = inner freedom.

How many have a great life, friends, family, and everything that comes with external freedom, and yet still suffer because they imprison themselves within?

It is a choice to live free.  The greatness that Nelson Mandela exemplifies is available to us all, moment-to-moment-to-moment.  Greatness is our birthright.


Forgiveness as a winning strategy 
By Bill Clinton, former U.S. president 
"Mandela made a grand, elegant, dignified exit from prison and it was very, very powerful for the world to see. But as I watched him walking down that dusty road, I wondered whether he was thinking about the last 27 years, whether he was angry all over again. Later, many years later, I had a chance to ask him. I said, ‘Come on, you were a great man, you invited your jailers to your inauguration, you put your pressures on the government. But tell me the truth. Weren't you really angry all over again?' And he said, ‘Yes, I was angry. And I was a little afraid. After all I've not been free in so long. But,' he said, ‘when I felt that anger well up inside of me I realized that if I hated them after I got outside that gate then they would still have me.' And he smiled and said, ‘I wanted to be free so I let it go.' It was an astonishing moment in my life. It changed me.
"He's got so much to teach us about forgiveness. It isn't about being soft-headed and kind-hearted and essentially weak or forgetful although the Bible says God both forgives and forgets. Mandela found that forgiveness was a strategy for survival. Because he found a forgiving heart under the most adverse circumstances, because he learned to hate the apartheid cause without hating the white South Africans, he had space left inside to learn and grow and become great.
"To me he represents a great political leader. He had the discipline to stay the course for almost three decades, through enormous punishment, to achieve the political objective he sought. And he did it in a way that, in the end, had the support of people across the racial divide. In the process he freed not only black South Africa but, as Martin Luther King said about America, he freed white South Africans, too. It's a terrible burden oppressing someone else; it's like being in chains yourself.
"What makes Mandela so special is that he's a real human being. He laughs, he cries, he gets mad, he fell in love with Graça Machel. He's got a real life. And the fact that he is so flesh-and-blood real makes his greatness and his sacrifice and his wisdom and his courage in the face of all that has happened to him even more remarkable. He never pretended to be somebody who didn't like soccer or wouldn't like to be able to go to a boxing match again. He's not just great: He is a good man. Not because he is perfect-he still has his flashes of anger and regret-but in the big moment, in the big ways, there is nobody like him."

http://www.odemagazine.com/article.php?aID=4368