Oct 26, 2022

The Setup

There’s been a theme through my life, and that is ’empowerment.’ Everything I do for myself and for others is aiming at the goal of genuine empowerment. Indeed, I have come to see that the epitome of spiritual practice is fostering empowerment – in yourself and in others. Why? Because when we sit within our true power, only then are we free to actually pursue our purpose (or purposes, because yes, there can be more than one!). Let me restate this – when our ego (which is the part of us that navigates through the 3D world) and our soul (or higher self) are in alignment, then the full power of that soul can come through into this world, in your life, in your actions, in your mindset. This is how I see Empowerment.

What’s fascinating in a purely intellectual way is seeing how hard it is for most people to genuinely support the empowerment of others. I believe this mainly happens when we ourselves haven’t yet reached our own true power, or our ego is not in alignment with our soul self. In this case, the idea that someone else could be powerful is therefore threatening. Again to restate this, the truly empowered person does not make decisions based on fear in any form. The soul self does not feel fear.

Too often I see people who =think= they are empowered making decisions which are rooted in fears – fear of not being enough and of not having enough. It it my hope that by the end of this episode you’ll begin to see when this dynamic is in action – and recognize when you are both the victim of disempowerment and when you are the perpetrator. Until we can recognize what empowerment looks and feels like in ourselves and others, I’ve noticed most people are in what they believe to be a power tug of war. In blunt truth, when any one element of the equation is disempowered … all elements are disempowered. Imagine your old-style Christmas lights – when just one bulb goes out, the entire string is dead. That is humanity. When one person, one gender, one race, one culture, is made to feel/act/believe they are lesser than they are capable of, the entire collective of humanity is dimmer and loses our collective potential. Don’t think for a hot minute that because someone can step on another person that this makes them powerful. It does NOT. Not in truth, and most certainly not in any sort of spiritual way — regardless of whatever justification is used.

The Story

While this dual empowerment and disempowerment dynamic is something that I’ve known, I’ve also too often fallen prey to others in that I’ll give my power away. What exactly does this mean? First off, let’s define power.

What IS power? Think about it for a moment. What is power? In general. There are lots of spheres where power is wielded – financial power, political power, social power, family power, religious power, etc. But what is power itself?

The definition that I finally landed on and the one that I work with is that power is our ability to effect change. That’s it. Our ability to effect change, and with any luck that change will be in accordance with our will and intention. Here’s an example: I have the ultimate power in my room. I can move things from here to there, and no one will undo my work. I recognize I do not have the power to do this sort of thing in my friend’s home. I can try and impose my will on their space, and if they undo it, then I can proceed to use emotional abuse, financial bribery, social pressure, or whatever trick I can think up in an effort to get them to capitulate and accept that now I have power over their living space. In essence, I would be using these tricks to steal their power for myself — at least, I might believe that is what I was doing. Now let’s switch around this scenario: what if my friend walked into my house and started to rearrange everything to suit their needs, and if I attempted to reassert my own preferences then I would be subject to whatever tactics they chose to employ until I gave up and let them do as they wished. So in the first instance, I’m the one disempowering my friend while in the second my friend is disempowering me. Do you see? While this scenario would, of course, be an utterly ridiculous situation, I think it’s simplistic enough to serve as an example and it’s also one in which you can easily rearrange the elements to suit your particular examples when you want to examine them to see what might be going on. Maybe it’s not a room which is being squabbled over, maybe it’s something else.

Other ways that our power can manifest usually relates with self-ownership and self-responsibility. When I take power for my life, I’m signaling that I’m accepting responsibility for the decisions I make and actions I take. It’s born of self-confidence, self-assurance, and self-knowledge – to name a few.

In my youth, I often fell victim to giving away my power. Why would I give away ownership of my life, my space, my choices?

There are 2 HUGE reasons that I usually encounter, though I’m sure there’s probably more. The biggest one is: if I give away the power of choice, I’m not responsible for what happens. In this case, I get to play the victim and blame someone else. “It’s not my fault” and “someone else made me do it” are the most common statements of the victim. The second reason is: it’s just easier to give in than it is to stand my ground. The reasons why it’s easier can be anything from avoiding confrontation; the desire to be seen as “the good guy”; I don’t believe I can win anyway; and because the situation isn’t important enough to bother with. These two reasons – the ability to blame someone else and it’s easier – cover pretty much every instance that comes to mind. Perhaps you can think of some others?

In the early days of this journey for what I called emotional intelligence and now like to consider as a form of spiritual intelligence, I would use writing to explore a theme. I’d populate my story with characters and explore the ideas. It was using tool that I explored why I didn’t seem to be making traction on the things I wanted to do in my life. Why was I stagnating? I was using Caroline Myss’ 4 Survival Archetypes – the Child, the Prostitute, the Saboteur, and the Victim. In my story, the one who came forward first was the Saboteur, which is not what I was expecting. She told me “I am the guardian of your personal power. If you don’t have the strength to stand up to me, then I can’t give you the challenges which would require you to stand up against others.”

Ouch! The Saboteur is the guardian of personal power. Cool! I continued with the story, and eventually the Victim came forward and told me “I am the guardian of personal boundaries. Without personal power, I cannot hold my boundary.”

So the Saboteur and the Victim in this story both required my ability to hold my power! Without it, I would remain subject to the will of others, unable to believe that I was capable of accomplishing things. This realization led me on a journey into power. As a woman, this led me on a gnarly journey into some heavily inherited karmic crap! I’ll talk more in another episode on about recognizing when something we are dealing with belongs to you individually or to some aspect of the identity that is being aligned with. For the purposes of this post, by the time I emerged from that journey and recognized what was going on, I came to recognize that my Empowerment consisted of Power and Responsibility being tightly allied.

To stand in my power, I first had to take responsibility for myself. I had to own the idea that everything in my life is because of choices I had made. The buck stopped here, with me. Blaming others was a trap! The moment I’d start to think “it’s not my fault”, that’s the moment my power slips away like water. Why? Because I just gave away all responsibility for my situation, and with it all power to honestly change that situation going forward. I had realize that life didn’t happen TO me; it happened FOR me. Right now worldwide, we have a huge victim mindset culture, and it is so prevalent it is just sad. It is so sad.

In spiritual circles, I hear the term “standing in my sovereignty.” What exactly does that mean? Sovereignty is “complete independence and self-government.” Hrm. You know what that sounds like? Power and responsibility. So if I stand in my sovereignty, I’m standing in my power center and owning the fact that my life is mine to make of it what I will.

When this is a mature understanding, it also means that stepping on the sovereignty of others would be unthinkable. Alas, that is the not the case in many places right now. I’ve seen a huge rise in the ideals of socialism and communism, which are entirely a “disempower the masses so that the few can rule over them” approach. As an exercise which is not personal to you, so you can start getting a feel for things, take a look at the news and see where you can spot attempts or demands that select people or groups be disempowered for whatever reason. Listen to the language that’s used. Feel how your emotional centers respond, how the energy in your body responds to disempowering language versus empowering language. You can feel it, your entire body responds. So feel that. Doing this will hone your ability to see those same scenarios in action in your own individual life – especially when they are words coming out of our own mouths!

This sort of demand tactic is 100% the Bully, which is another name for a deeply disempowered Victim who imagines that it’s empowered, but it is most definitely not. Why? It has the power to effect change. Doesn’t that mean the person who can force others to accept their demands is therefore in power? Perhaps they hold a fragile kind of power, but they are not EMpowered. Why? Well, one, they are making decisions in fear, and two because they have given away their responsibility in this situation. Someone else is responsible for their live and the condition of it, and while that might be true about the past, Empowerment doesn’t look backwards and it does not make decisions based on fear. Anger is a mask worn by fear! I don’t know about you, but I can’t undo the mistakes of the past. Sure I can spend my time saying “this situation isn’t my fault, it’s not fair that I have to endure this, and the ones who put me in this situation need to do something to change it….” AHA! There. Someone else needs to be responsible for changing my life … because I do not have the power to do it myself. That’s the second half of that statement. And anyone who tries to convince you that taking responsibility for their situation is somehow morally wrong or bad, holy moly. Run. That person is trying to disempower you in a false attempt to build themselves up. In other words, that person is a bully and you’d be wise not to give them your lunch money.

Also learn to recognize when you are in the bully role, and when you are trying to take someone else’s power to bolster your ideals/agenda/vision/identity/etc. This is definitely where I’ve found that my Observer Self can help. I also had to learn to recognize when I was in the bully role, or when I was trying to take someone else’s power to bolster whatever my ideal, agenda, vision, identity, whatever. This is definitely where the Observer Self came in super handy. So if that’s not something you’ve mastered yet, you can revisit that topic, which is linked in my blog post.

Do be aware that bullies do not always take the obvious route. I’ve gotten to the point where I can feel when I’m starting to negatively impact somebody else’s power or my own. I’ve worked with these concepts enough to become very sensitive to power losses and gains in those around me and within myself. And so the losing of power and the harming of others in that way definitely does not feel good to me though when I can feel someone else starting to plug into their power … Man! I love that feeling! It’s like watching someone plug into their soul. Quite literally, if you have felt that moment when you find the bad bulb in the string of Christmas lights and then the whole string just lights up. Yeah. It’s like that.

The Point

So Empowerment is about taking personal responsibility for ourselves and standing in our own power enough to know that we can indeed make changes in our lives; that we have the choice of what to do next. Remember in the last episode where I shared a profound mystical experience in which I learned that all the power we’d ever need is already inside of us? That is exactly the feeling I’m talking about here. The Victim looks backward and makes excuses for their continued inability to make changes. A Bully is a victim who does the same, but demands that someone else take responsibility for making changes so they don’t have to. A Survivor recognizes ‘that was a shit situation’, learns the lessons available, and looks forward. However shitty things were, the Survivor is focused on the next step that they need to take, and they take back both their power and their responsibility for their own life – their personal sovereignty – and then they take those steps.

An Empowered person knows that life events happen FOR us, not to us – that it’s about what you CAN do, rather than what you can’t change. With an empowered approach, the base mindset begins looking for ways to grow and expand as a person because we’re inspired to see where we can go.

If you are working toward stepping up to your potential, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of working to fully empower yourself. Align the soul and the ego, and bring your True Self online. When you are indeed truly and honestly empowered, then I believe that you will seek to empower everyone around you. Why? Perhaps I’m naive, but I like to think that empowered people are the ones who model humanity’s true and greatest potential. If I give those around me a hand up, enabling them to stand on their own two feet with dignity and pride so they can start living their purpose, well, really, isn’t that what stepping up to our potential is all about?

TL:DR

Genuine empowerment is synonymous with personal sovereignty, in which we recognize we are responsible for all aspects of our lives and we own our power to make the changes we want. True Empowerment means we encourage and support empowering those around us.

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About the Featured Image

This was taken in near Cusco, Peru at an ancient site called Sacsayhuamán. The foundation line of stones for this site are truly impressive! These are form fitted stones that are literally weigh tons yet are carefully and precisely sculpted to fit together so closely that even after literally thousands of year – not to mention how seismically active this area is! – they are still so close together that even weeds can’t grow between them. Can you imagine the power and skill it took to sculpt a group of 40+ ton boulders to fit into a jigsaw puzzle? I thought it was a fitting symbol for the potential of Empowerment.