What Three Very Different Thinkers Taught Me About Inner Freedom
When I moved back to France, I thought I was moving towards freedom. Out of the structure I had lived inside for eighteen years. Out of the rain. Out of the career that had run its course.
What I discovered quite quickly was that external freedom – the removal of constraints – does not automatically produce inner freedom. You can change everything on the outside and bring yourself entirely with you.
À nous la liberté – a philosophical dialogue between three very different thinkers – is the most honest book I have read about what inner freedom actually is. And what it is not.
- Who Are the Three Authors?
- Inner Freedom Is Not the Same as External Freedom
- The Tyranny of What Others Think
- Free “For” Something, Not Just “From” Something
- Alexandre Jollien — Inner Freedom in Practice
- Practical Takeaways
- Why This Belongs in Soul
Who Are the Three Authors?
Christophe André is a French psychiatrist and one of the most well-known voices in French-speaking psychology – a pioneer of mindfulness-based therapy, a prolific writer, and someone who has spent his career at the intersection of mental health and inner life.
Matthieu Ricard is a French Buddhist monk, molecular biologist, and longtime translator to the Dalai Lama. He was famously tested by neuroscientists and found to have among the highest levels of compassion-related brain activity ever recorded. He is also an extraordinarily warm writer.
Alexandre Jollien is a Swiss philosopher who spent seventeen years in a residential institution after being born with cerebral palsy. His books are about how to live joyfully and freely within profound constraint. If anyone has earned the right to write about inner freedom, it is him.
The three of them met at the Monastery of Tibhirine to talk. This book is that conversation.
Inner Freedom Is Not the Same as External Freedom
This is the book’s central argument.
External freedom – the ability to move, choose, leave, begin again – matters. None of the three authors dismiss it. But it is not the thing that produces the life you actually want. You can be externally free and internally imprisoned. Imprisoned by approval-seeking. By rumination. By the story you tell about who you are and what you deserve.
Inner freedom is something else. It is the capacity to not be controlled by your own reactions. To observe what is happening inside you without being taken over by it. To choose how you respond rather than simply being the response.
The Untethered Soul gets at this from a different angle – the question of who is the witness behind the thoughts. Petit traité de la vie intérieure by Frédéric Lenoir covers similar ground in the French philosophical tradition. À nous la liberté is more dialogic, more human, more at ease with disagreement. Three very different paths to the same territory.
The Tyranny of What Others Think
The three authors return to this again and again. The degree to which we organise our lives around managing others’ perceptions. The energy that goes into maintaining an image. The paralysis that comes from needing approval before acting.
Christophe André brings the psychiatric perspective – approval-seeking as a pattern laid down early and reinforced constantly. Matthieu Ricard offers the Buddhist view – attachment to the self-image as a primary source of suffering. Alexandre Jollien speaks from experience – a man who has spent his life visibly different from the norm has had to develop, out of necessity, a relationship to others’ opinions that most of us never have to.
The question they collectively ask is: how much of your energy is going towards looking free rather than actually being free?
I recognised myself in this. The decisions I had made not from genuine desire but from a need to appear capable, considered, unconcerned. The blog I hesitated to start not because I was unsure about it, but because I was unsure what people would think.
Free “For” Something, Not Just “From” Something
This distinction is the most practically useful thing in the book.
Most conversations about freedom focus on freedom from something – from a job, a situation, a relationship, a habit. Freedom from is real and sometimes necessary. But it is incomplete. A life organised only around what you are escaping is not yet a designed life.
What the three authors explore – particularly Matthieu Ricard from the Buddhist tradition – is freedom for something. Freedom for love, for presence, for contribution, for the things that actually matter to you. Inner freedom is not the absence of constraint. It is the presence of direction.
This connects directly to How to Design Your Life – which argues that without a designed direction, you have not freedom but a default. And to 3 Kifs par Jour by Florence Servan-Schreiber, which is about training attention towards what matters – which is itself an act of inner freedom.
Alexandre Jollien — Inner Freedom in Practice
The most moving parts of this book are Alexandre Jollien’s contributions.
He describes growing up in an institution, surrounded by others who struggled with profound physical and cognitive limitations, learning that joy does not depend on circumstances. That freedom is not a condition granted by the outside world. That a person can be deeply, genuinely, visibly free inside a body and a life that most people would find unbearable.
His writing is not sentimental about this. He does not claim it is easy. He says it is a daily practice – choosing, each day, not to be colonised by resentment, comparison, or self-pity. Not because those things are wrong to feel, but because they are not where he wants to live.
That, for me, is the most useful definition of inner freedom in the book. Not the absence of difficult feelings. The refusal to take up permanent residence in them.
Practical Takeaways
- Ask how much energy goes towards looking free rather than being free. The gap between performing freedom and experiencing it is worth examining honestly.
- Distinguish between freedom from and freedom for. What are you moving towards, not just away from? The answer changes the quality of the movement.
- Examine your relationship to approval. Not to eliminate the need for connection — that need is real. But to notice when you are organising your choices around managing other people’s perceptions.
- Practise observing your reactions without being your reactions. This is what all three authors mean by inner freedom in practice. The capacity to notice “this is what I am feeling” without the feeling becoming the whole of you.
- Take Jollien seriously. A man who built inner freedom under conditions most of us will never face is not speaking in abstractions. If he can find it there, the conditions you are working with are manageable.
Why This Belongs in Soul
Soul on this blog is about spirit, self-discovery, and the inner life that underlies everything else.
À nous la liberté belongs here because inner freedom is the condition for everything else. You cannot build a life you actually want while imprisoned by approval. You cannot be present in your relationships while colonised by self-image. You cannot grow while organised around how growth looks rather than how it feels.
It belongs alongside The Untethered Soul (what it means to stop identifying with the voice in your head), Change ma vie (the practice of inner work, one episode at a time), and The Power of Intention (Wayne Dyer’s version of the same territory from a different tradition). All three are circling the same question: what does it take to actually live from the inside out?
I moved to France for external freedom. I am still learning what inner freedom means. À nous la liberté is not a book that gives you a method. It is a book that gives you three extraordinary examples of people working on the same question – from very different starting points, with very different tools.
That, it turns out, is more useful than a method. It shows you the territory without pretending there is only one path through it.
Et toi? Is there a place in your life where you are pursuing freedom from – and might need to also ask what you are moving towards? Leave a comment below or come and find me in the Notes from Soph community on Skool.
Notes from Soph | Learning, not perfection.
Book Details:
À nous la liberté – Christophe André, Matthieu Ricard & Alexandre Jollien
Published 2012 | L’Iconoclaste
📚 https://amzn.to/49p6h1C
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