From the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to global warming, from the fires of war to the daily grind of work that withers your heart, our world is erupting with crises right now. And crises, times of great upheavals, offer opportunities for growth and transformation.
This is a time when we are being called upon to become more fully our selves, to bring our genius and power to the task of creating a world that works for all of us.
So where does sovereignty fit into this task of self-making and world-making?
Spiritually, sovereignty is one of the capacities and qualities of your soul. So it is inherent within you-it’s an aspect of your being.
Each of us is a spiritual being. We exist not as a point in space and time, but along a continuum that includes space and time at one end, and the subtle realms of formlessness-no-space, no-time-at the other. At one end of this continuum is your incarnation-your particular, unique self-that which makes you who you are, as unique as your own fingerprint.
At the other end of the continuum of your being, you are a fractal of all that is-you live within the whole, you are not separate from anything that exists, either in form or in formlessness. This is the realm of oneness and unity.
The quality of Sovereignty is yours along the whole of the continuum of your being, but it looks different depending on where you’re standing in that continuum.
In terms of your incarnation, your own unique and particular selfhood, you have sovereignty over your own life. This means that everything within your own energy field is your kingdom, and you are the queen or the king of it. You have responsibility for your own life, and you have the freedom to choose how you will live.
This doesn’t mean that you can have anything you want. We live in the world of form, and form necessarily implies limits. We also live in nested ecologies. There’s the ecology of your personal life, which includes your relationships, your work, your health, your environment, your neighborhood, your country.
There’s the ecology of the world, which affects every being that lives on this earth. There are subtle ecologies in which our extended soul is embedded.
Each of these affects you in different ways, just as you affect all of these ecologies as well.
So sovereignty is not an Alice In Wonderland world in which you can say “Off with their heads!” anytime something doesn’t go your way. It’s a quality of being, it emerges from your relationship to wholeness, and it carries with it both the responsibility to govern your inner kingdom wisely, and to contribute your gifts and talents to the creation of the world in which you want to live.
So if you want to live in a world filled with kindness, love, safety, respect, creativity and compassion, then cultivate those qualities in your inner kingdom first. As you embody them in your own life, you change your personal ecology, which then changes the world around you.
Sovereignty isn’t some magical kingdom in which we are enthroned forever. Cultivating this quality requires a continual engagement with the day-to-day stuff that shows up in our lives. Sovereignty brings a stronger, clearer vibration into that stuff, so that when you’re sitting in the middle of your own particular crises, small or large, you can still be sovereign.
You can have a day when everything goes wrong, and still be sovereign. You can create the kind of energy and experience you want to have-not by changing what’s happening out there, because you have no control over external events-but by resting in the qualities you want inside yourself. You can meet outer circumstances with equanimity, humor, peacefulness, delight.