Open Heart with Lu Leslan

Break Free

• Lu Leslan

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0:00 | 9:11

What truth remains when you dare to let go of everything that was never truly yours? In this Season 2 finale, Lu explores what it means to break free—not from life or people, but from the accumulated weight of traditions, rules, conventions, and noise inherited through the generations. She shares a deeply personal story about choosing solitude over convention, the Stoic wisdom of releasing what we cannot control, and a meditation on being the wave rather than riding it. This is Open Heart at its most honest—an invitation to ask what is truly yours and have the courage to live by that answer.

SHOW NOTES:

IN THIS EPISODE:

  • Breaking free from traditions, rules, conventions and noise inherited through generations
  • The burden of belonging and the echo chambers that define us
  • Personal story: choosing solitude as salvation
  • The Stoics on suffering and releasing what was never ours to hold
  • Navigating life's conditions by seeing the big picture
  • We are simply passengers sharing the same journey, sky, stars and breath
  • The wave passage: a meditation on peaceful surrender to life's natural cycle

QUOTE: "Peace doesn't lie. And solitude—real, chosen solitude—is my salvation."

SEASON 3 ANNOUNCEMENT: Open Heart Season 3 begins June 11, 2026. A brand new season exploring our world from a different perspective. Stay tuned.

SHARE YOUR STORY: lu@leslancreativestudio.com

Connect with Open Heart Podcast:

Open Heart with Lu Leslan is for anyone who aspires to understand themselves and the world more deeply. Through honest personal stories, philosophical insights, and practical wisdom, each episode invites you to live with more clarity, courage, and compassion. Subscribe and share with someone ready to open their heart. 

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

Lu's first documentary: Take a Bow: The Ingrid Clarfield Story (2011)

SPEAKER_00

Every human arrives alone and leaves alone. But what happens in between? The traditions, the rules, the noise? Are they truly yours? And if you were dear to let them go, what truth would remain? Welcome to Open Heart Podcast. I am Lou Leslan, your host. This is a podcast where we share ideas, stories, and questions with an open heart so we can be kinder and wiser to ourselves and each other. Every week we'll discuss a topic where I share my observation, ideas, and questions with you, and I would love to hear your thoughts, comments and reflections. Please send them to Lou at Lesland Creative Studio dot com. Today's topic is break free. Break free not from life, not from people, not from responsibility. From the weight we've been carrying without ever asking whether it was ours to carry. From the first breath we are learning. We learn by watching others and by watching ourselves. We live with others before we understand what it means to live alone. We learn to appreciate beauty, to turn away from danger, to recognize love and understand hate. We discover our potential, vast, unlimited, surprising, and our vulnerabilities equally vast, equally real. We want to be known. We want to be appreciated. We know the source of our suffering and we know what brings us joy. We seek adventure, we find our distractions. We are sensible and we are wild. We want our children to have good lives knowing they must find their own path. We have the potential to become anything we can dream of and we know our limits. This is not contradiction, this is being alive. But here's what accumulates along the way. Living with others brings weight, not just love and connection, but the burden that comes with belonging. Traditions inherited through the generations, rules follow without questioning, conventions that outlived their purpose, norms that define us before we know who we are, and the noise, the noise of echo chambers that amplify one voice while silencing all others, the noise of the powerful who writes rules for everyone else, the noise of expectations dressed as love, the noise of belonging that cost you yourself. Breaking free isn't abandoning others. It's releasing that weight and beginning, perhaps for the first time, to ask what is truly yours. Deep personal relationships have their rewards, but they may not be for everyone. I could not stay in my marriage, the deep connection was absent. Surviving alone never frightened me. Finding my own path after motherhood never deterred me. The unknown future did not stop me. What I knew clearly and could not ignore was this. I wanted to be free. The peace, the solitude, the quiet that belongs entirely to me. Peace doesn't lie, and solitude, real, chosen solitude is my salvation. This is what breaking free looks like. Not dramatic, not rebellious, just honest. This much is certain. We have no control over external events. The past is memory. The future is unknown. No power over what others choose, think or become. No one can decide what we do, how we think, who we want to be, who we choose to be with. The Stoics understood this centuries ago. Suffering comes from grasping at what was never ours to hold. Releasing that, not with resonation, but with relief is where breaking free begins. We navigate our lives through all different conditions, knowing only what we know at that moment. Taking a step back, seeing the big picture, that openness, that willingness to see beyond our immediate condition is what allows us to break free. We are simply passengers, sharing the same journey, the same sky, the same stars, the same breath. Every living thing rised this tie, climb and fall, triumph and ruin, ecstasy and despair, and still unlimited possibility. I float in the sea. I am not riding the wave. I am the wave rising and falling, moving with the water. It is peaceful. It is serene. One red light bleeds through my eyelids. I want to stay forever in this beautiful blue world. This is the last episode of season two of Open Heart. I hope you get to listen to all the episodes from thought capturing to break free. Season three starts on june eleventh. I look forward to a brand new season where we explore our world from a different perspective. Until then, thank you for joining me. I love to hear from you. Please share your comments, stories, and questions. Send them to Lou at Lesling Creative Studio.com. This is a podcast where we share ideas, stories, and questions with an open heart so we can be kinder and wiser to ourselves and each other. Take care of our own.