Personal Power

The theme of empowerment returns for me very frequently, free-floating like a mass of ice in the sea, requiring more warming attention, more sunlight before it can fully disassemble, integrate and merge into larger bodies of me.

When this happens, that a nugget of soul work remains hard and intact, needing more time and process to release its separateness from the rest of me, the best cure, the most powerful assist I know, is to work it through the arts.

The arts make meaning of our struggles, lend dignity to every far flung, lonely and forgotten-feeling piece of this planet’s body.

The theme of empowerment sits atop a node in the organic matrix where time and timelessness meet. Wherein to retrieve my own personal enormity and capacity, I have to both acknowledge the restrictions that took place within time, but in that same moment, allow the dissolution of all that happened.

I can’t seem to free myself specifically of any binding, without first feeling the full bind.

But then in the instant of feeling it, so so fully, then it can be released. As if it must be completely allowed, totally birthed into form, before it can live out its earthly life in body and finally pass away.

This is, I realize, transit work. I have to access the parts who have been walled off through the psychological mechanisms of traumatization, and allow them an exit out of their frozen space, out of imprisonment, back into the arms of life.

Trauma work is how we reclaim personal power.

The following piece is about re-empowerment, about the curious duality of recognition of what happened, while releasing all that happened from having to still exist, in the way just described.

As for the feel … While I was trying to get ahold of how to use recording software I made a series of (in my mind, Euro-trashy) pop songs mainly to help me learn the tools. These songs also reflect some of the influences of living in Berlin, in which nary an acoustic note was to be heard. Artificiality, such as it is, in music, is one of the themes that I play with here and there. But more on that another time.

May it give you something that you can take away for yourself.

You really did go through all that, I’m not saying you didn’t. You really did go through all that, I’m not telling you different.

But you’ve got to realize the power you have. The power you have is tremendous. You don’t have to go through the same thing again, unless you want to.

You don’t have to go through the same thing unless you want to.

You really did live through all that. There’s no sense in denying. We really did get laid to waste, there’s no point in us lying. But we’ve got to realize the power we have. The power we have is tremendous.

Now that we remembered we are magnificent, we don’t have to give our consent. We can think of good reasons we did it before, like a science experiment.

But now I see the seed of two was in my own mind, and I don’t even have to mind it.

My invitation to You:

When and where do you give your power away? Why do you do so? What are the pathways, channels, and mechanisms of this loss of power, how do the energies exit your sphere and end up somewhere outside of you? Energy is power. Loss of energy is loss of power.

What power do you own? What power do you disown? Do you feel ashamed of the power you have? Or do you hunger to remember and reembrace your own nature? Can you see that your power is either in your own possession, or else possessed? The word possess is connected to the word power by way of proto-Indo-European language ancestry, sharing the root poti.

Imagining your power personified, as a being in her/his own right, how do you relate to your Power? Is there love, fear, alienation between you?

Using whatever art materials you have on hand, free draw on this topic. See if you can draw a portrait, sketch of your power. With the qualities of your lines, show how you sense and feel power. Indicate your relationship to it. Is your power like ice in the sea, still separated out from you in some way, as I relate to mine? Or how to experience the relationship (spatial, feeling qualities, size, energetic) between you?

See if you can make a kind of Motto Song, Poem, or piece of writing, in which you declare your stance on the topic, as I did in the above example.

Thank you for reading, beloved.

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this photo from my room features artwork on display by the amazing Rayne Cottrell. Thank you sister. https://isurvivedearth.com

as well as the poster made for Team Bright by Madeleine Ignon https://www.madeleineignon.com/