Power: Love in Action

Power is one of the qualities of your soul. You were born with the quality of power pulsing through every cell of your body. It is what enabled you to make the journey from formlessness into form, from essence into incarnation. Without power, you would not exist.

So power is within you, always, just as it is within all forms of creation. Open your eyes and look out your window. That tree, with its tender new leaves, the squirrel scurrying through the grass, that wide blue sky, those scudding clouds — they all exude power, because each is an expression of spirit in the material world. And spirit can only become matter through the activity of power.

Power remains vibrantly alive in the natural world, where it is renewed through organic cycles and seasonal processes. It’s the reason why walking in the woods, climbing a mountain, swimming in the ocean, working in your garden, lying on a beach and looking up at the stars in the night sky can leave you feeling replenished, deeply rested, as powerful as a planet.
When you consciously connect with it, the natural world lends you its power, and helps you restore your own.

And yet, in the daily noise of life and work, of growing and caring for your business, your family, your body, your home, it’s easy to become disconnected from your soul, and with it, from the source of your power. When your website is hacked, or your child is ill, or that project you’ve poured your heart into doesn’t pan out, you can feel defeated, powerless, at the mercy of forces beyond your control.

There’s the rub. We mistake control for power, and become discouraged when we encounter what we cannot control. The truth is, life has its own rhythm and timing, its own inner logic and flow. We have very little control over what happens around us. But, we do have power.

Your personal power is composed of a number of qualities, including sovereignty, self-esteem, self-knowledge, self-appreciation, grounding, and the ability to be centered, present and focused. It includes strong, flexible, permeable boundaries, understanding, and insight.

There are many different aspects to personal power. All of them hinge on your power to choose.

You choose the lens through which you focus. You can choose to see the circumstances of your life as opportunities for growth and creation or you can choose to see them as wounds and disabilities.

Or you can simply choose to see them as they are. You can choose to see the continuum through which your soul carries you through experiences of wounding and disability into growth and creation.

How you see yourself and the world around you will determine what your experiences of that world will be.

Seeing, in other words, is in some way about belief.

If you believe that your relationship to the world is an antagonistic one, that the world is a scary place and you have to protect yourself from it, then you will diminish and deplete your power. Your power will move out to the boundary of your space to try and defend it, leaving the interior of your space — your inner self — vacant rather than filled with your presence.

When you are absent rather than present, you are vulnerable to energies entering your space that don’t honor or respect your sovereignty.

The energy alchemy work we do in Become Your Own Business Adviser is powerful because it brings you back into right relationship with every aspect of your own ecology, and that of your business. Power flows from the integrity and harmony of your being, and the coherency and integrity of the world of your business.

When you transform the beliefs and patterns that keep you from seeing things as they are, you clear the distorting lenses that shape your experience of reality. You see people and situations in their wholeness — their contradictions, vulnerability and fragmentation, as well as their beauty, strength, and delight — rather than through the scrim of your fears, beliefs, programming and stories.

Once you see things as they are, you can choose to create more of the same, or you can choose to create something entirely different. Or you might choose to create something that builds on the past to shape a more vibrant future.

You have the power to choose what you’re going to create, purposefully, intentionally.

You can choose your values. You can choose how you think, how you act, what you put your energy into, who you hang out with. Choose what you say Yes to, and what you say No to.

When your choices are in alignment with your vision, your values, and your soul’s purpose, they have the power of an arrow flying directly at its mark. The more you bring your choices into alignment with your values and your soul, the more power you will have.

You can choose to act in ways that support your values or that diminish them. You can act to enhance and contribute to the whole, or you can act in ways that benefit yourself at the expense of the whole — in which case, you will diminish yourself because whatever happens to the whole happens to you too.

You can act in alignment with Source or you can act against it.

When you own your power to see, to choose, and to act, you stand in your power, you stand in your sovereignty. Then, things start to manifest very quickly. The gap between your intention, action and result becomes almost invisible.

When you don’t own your power, when you are stuck in narratives about victimization or obsess over your wounds or don’t follow through on your values and your commitments, you become much less effective.

Right relationship with power is essential for successfully creating anything — in your business and in your life.

We are powerful, when we choose to be.

Nelson Mandela used the long years of his imprisonment to develop inner power and freedom. So did Viktor Frankl, in Nazi death camps. They did this by choosing their state of consciousness — they chose clarity, peace, truth, freedom. They chose to meet the fist of brutality with the immense power of the human spirit.

Power is the active form of Love. Control is powerlessness masquerading as power.

If we are so powerful, why do we forget that we are incarnate souls? Why do we forget that we have the power of the stars and galaxies, of the Earth itself, in our bellies and lungs, in our bones and hearts?

We live in a culture that surrounds us with reminders of our powerlessness. It bombards us with messages about what we don’t have, what we must have in order to be happy, successful, fulfilled. We live in an environment teeming with not-enoughness. It pulls us out of our bodies, out of ourselves, and leaves us stranded on the far shore of striving to be smarter, richer, thinner, cleaner, more evolved, more innovative, more something.

When we believe we are not enough, we separate from ourselves. We disconnect from our bodies, our feelings, our sacredness, our souls — from the very sources of our power and nourishment. And, because our relationship with ourselves is the foundation for all of our relationships, we disconnect from the earth, the natural world, and the sacred life all around us.

It’s no wonder, then, that we lose touch with the power we embodied so naturally and effortlessly when we were first born, when we were very young children.

I don’t want to sentimentalize childhood. The limitless qualities of our souls — love, freedom, abundance, power — are vibrantly present in us when we are very young, but we have yet to develop the capacity to use these qualities effectively and skillfully. We have yet to learn how these infinite forces function, in a world that is defined by boundaries and limits. It’s what childhood is for — to learn, to grow, to experiment in the playground of incarnation.

My granddaughter, who turned three last summer, has been playing with power and the limits of power more consciously, in the past few months. She’s figuring out how power works. Her mum asks her if she wants a snack, and she roars NO! at the top of her lungs — just because she can. Then she laughs uproariously, filled with gleeful delight at her own capacity to choose, and climbs up onto the kitchen chair to devour her milk and carrot sticks.

Her relationship with power remains an exploratory one — free of guilt, shame, blame, and the rest of the gremlins that beset us as we grow up and take on the shapes imposed upon us by our world.

Our families, schools and other social and educational institutions make sure we understand and obey the agreed-upon norms of our society. It’s an uneasy — and I hope, temporary — but necessary accommodation. We can’t go around yelling NO! to things we actually want, because if we do, they will no longer be available to us.

We can’t even yell NO! to things we don’t want, because we live in a world of relationships, and relationships require empathy, kindness, courtesy, and yes, tact, give-and-take, the willingness to be flexible and open to other points of view.

So, in training to be social beings, we learn both the helpful and the not-so-helpful accommodations of civil society. We learn to listen and be receptive to others, but we also learn to dissemble, to tell polite white lies, to hide our true feelings and pretend to like things we don’t. We hold ourselves back from voicing our true desires. We turn away from that which we truly long for.

Eventually, when we’ve done this for long enough, we grow distant from our desires until we no longer know what we feel, what we want, or how to find our way back home to who we really are. We numb out. We fill the void left by our unfulfilled desires with things, people, and experiences that are poor substitutes for our own soul’s essence. We give over, give away or throw away our power until we no longer have access to it.

The resulting feelings of powerlessness take us even further away from our wholeness, from the essential wholeness and power of the world.

And so the cycle is perpetuated. It’s that disconnection from power that gives rise to mechanisms of control, abuse of authority, and social, economic, and religious structures that serve a small minority at the expense of everyone else.

We experience abuses of power — in our homes and families, classrooms, financial institutions, social and economic systems. We experience the ways in which power is unequally distributed and misused in our workplaces, in our systems of governance and justice.

We react to this growing body of experience and understanding in a variety of ways. Some of us shrink away from the responsibility of owning and wielding power because we are afraid of the corrupting influence of power. Or we become mired in anger, blame, impotence or beliefs about power and powerlessness that keep us from accessing the depths of our own personal power, and using it in service to wholeness through focused, inspired, collaborative action.

Eventually, we forget that power is a quality of soul, that it is within us and cannot be taken away from us, no matter what. We identify ourselves and others as victims, we carve up our world into ideological categories: oppressors, victims, oppressed. And we contribute to the distortions that come from conflating the uses and abuses of power with its essence, which is the activity of love.

Power is Love in action. On a soul level, you have access to all the powers of wholeness — in this world and in the subtle energy worlds. When I say that the powers of the stars and galaxies, of the Earth and sun, are in you, I mean this quite literally. You can access these powers in your own energy body, once you develop the consciousness, skill and capacity to do so.

Power wielded in service to love, in harmony with wholeness, is among the most creative forces in the universe.

Power is the first quality to emerge from formlessness into form. It is the quality that gives shape and form to all of life.

But power is also a function of your incarnation, your personhood. Your personal power derives from everything you are and do. It grows or diminishes, depending on the choices you make, the actions you take, and the rhythms and patterns by which you live your life.

Your genetic makeup, your physical health and well-being, your emotional resiliency, your mental acuity and your energetic strength and flexibility all contribute to your personal power. So do the health of your relationships with others, with the natural world, with your home, your work, your creativity, your culture and your community.

You grow your personal power by being true to yourself, by giving yourself what you need, when you need it, by honoring your desires, by nourishing your heart and the heart of the world, by living your deepest values.

When you do what you say you’re going to do, you enhance your personal power. When you keep your promises to yourself, you gain power. When you align your choices and actions with your soul’s purposes, your true desires and intentions, you develop your personal power.

You may have lost touch with your personal power. You may have contracted away from it, or ignored it, or bought into a story that you don’t have it. Your capacity to hold and express your power may wax and wane, depending on what’s going on in your life, who you’re with, and what your circumstances are. But power is in you, as a seed or potential, waiting for you to claim it, develop your capacity to express it and use it skillfully to create your heart’s truest desires.

And, because it is a soul quality, it brings you into harmony and resonance with all beings, both in the incarnate world and in the subtle energy realms. It unites you with the soul of the earth, the Deva of the Cosmos, and the entire, sacred web of creation.

When you truly understand this, in a practical way, you’ll know that everything you choose to create is really a co-creation. And when you partner with the powers of wholeness — from those closest to you, like the soul or Deva of your business, your family, your home, to those that may seem impossibly far away, like the Devas of galaxies and multidimensional realms far removed from our own – your life and your business unfold in miraculous ways. You and your business become part of the activity of Power, part of the activity of Divine Order. You contribute to the evolution of a world that nourishes all of life.