What is Personal Power?

Our personal power is key to our inner self. The energy of our power resides physically in the solar plexus Chakra, which sits just below the belly button in your body. Personal power is our freedom over thoughts, feelings, emotions, and responses to the experiences we have in life. Throughout the course of our life, we are taught who we are through contrast and comparison. We begin as an infant exploring our lives, taking in the sites, sounds, smells and textures. We learn about the physical world. We also learn about the energetic world as we interact with people and objects around us. Finally, we learn about the emotional world. We begin to express ourselves through sounds, our cries as pre-language, that help us let others know what we need.

We watch intently. We observe other people and that helps us to begin learning more about our world. We learn language, we learn behaviour, we learn beliefs,and we begin to receive impressions from other people about who we are. Our parents tell us we are cute. They smile and interact with us. Sometimes we can experience the opposite interaction of abandonment, a lack of love or interaction, raised voices - all experiences that create fear from a lack of safety. Whatever it is that we experience in those moments begins to tell us about who we are. 

We are souls having a human experience. This human experience is based on duality. Right and wrong, black and white, light and dark. This earthly experience becomes about comparisons and judgement. We observe, we compare, and we make a judgement about ourselves. We may even be aware of how we feel about that experience. This contrast creates suffering because we are trying to resolve the difference between who we feel we are and who others say we are. The world is simply a reflection, a mirror of our subconscious. So what we experience outside ourselves in the world is a reflection of our thoughts, our feelings, and the belief that we hold either consciously or subconsciously. As we grow, be begin associating our experiences with those thoughts, feelings and beliefs as proof of our identity.

“If life truly is a reflection of my inner world, then what is it showing me right now?”

Our stability comes from our point of view. If we are grounded, we feel comfortable in this existence. We feel comfortable in our own skin because we understand this physical experience. We can get lost through the contrast when we begin asking questions about our reality and our experience. If we are balanced, we feel stable. If we are not balanced, we feel unstable and we will suffer even more. As we experience the world, we are told what to think, what to believe, and how to behave. We are taught very early on that in order to be successful, or to be accepted, or feel worthy, we must follow the rules set out by society. We are searching for who we are by comparing ourselves to others. and it feels safer to follow those rules and do what others ask, so that we can have acceptance and feel worthy. The problem with this is that we are actually giving our power away to someone else. The power to choose our own thoughts and our own beliefs. To behave in ways that align with who we truly are. 

When we give away our power and become unstable, that is when we suffer. We give our power away when we are very young. When our parents tell us what to do. When we wait for them to give us direction and when we choose to follow the rules to gain their love and acceptance. As we grow older and we enter school, our teachers tell us what we should think and how we should behave, and again we give our power away to them to get good grades, to pass, to feel like we belong, to feel like we are intelligent, that we can contribute and have value. Then after we graduate, we go into the world where we are told where to be, how long to work, what to do and how to behave in order to get that promotion and the cycle continues. We give our power away to those who lead us, and as we go through life, society tells us through our laws how we should behave, where we should live, what we must do. Corporations tell us what we should buy, what we should desire, and we will continue to compare ourselves to other people to the point that we even lose our ability to recognize what we truly desire. We get so used to someone else telling us how to think and feel that we become paralyzed by decisions and we no longer can function, and we continue to suffer.

There is hope! 

We can learn how to take back our power even in the systems that seem to have so much control over our lives. We can take back our power by becoming aware of our thoughts, feelings and beliefs. We can take back our power by understanding that we are the ones that choose. Even when it feels like we have no options. We still can understand that we have power over our thoughts, over our beliefs and over our choices. This allows us to stand up, even if it is only in small ways. We take charge of our life, our happiness and we find our joy. We discover our true desires. We start noticing. Noticing what is happening around us and asking “how is this aligned with my inner thoughts, feelings and beliefs?” If life truly is a reflection of my inner world, then what is it showing me right now? Once we begin to get a better sense of what is going on in the shadow world within our subconscious, we can begin to understand better what we are experiencing in our lives and choose to change what isn't working.