10. How to feel the power of your Authenticity by transforming your Vulnerability

Hi my sweet and powerful Buddy! How’s your awareness expanding? Have you been getting super curious about yourself and your authenticity so you can know when you’re in it and when some fears have knocked you out of it? I bet you have. If there’s one thing I know about you, it’s your willingness to learn by facing the hard stuff instead of avoiding it. I know, I know, that doesn’t mean you’re able to face it every time. You, like all of us still have some training in our procedural manuals that automatically cause us to avoid the things that facing could help us transform. Let’s continue to explore some of these facets of being authentic together, shall we? Today’s question is a quadoozy in a good way!

Today’s Question:

If Vulnerability feels so intensely awful to feel, how could I empower my own vulnerability?

Oh my goodness, it’s such a juicy juicy question! Let’s start by defining what real power is. 

Real Power is:

• Shareable 

• Flexible and Reflective

• Adaptable

• Validating

• Creative, meaning solutions that see the whole picture without solving one problem while causing others

• Comes from energy flowing feely within from our energy generating Essence qualities

• Comes from within, expressed as an Essence quality to make contact with other’s Essence

• Is expressed from authentic anger instead of fighty who’s right or wrong anger

• gets Essencey results

Psuedo-power is:

• Acting out of unconscious beliefs beliefs and fears 

• Rigid and auto-Reactive

• On a hierarchy of who’s got the external resources?

• Power over-ing like demanding, controlling, and intimidating

• Power under-ing like fawning, placating, or going quiet or invisible

• Defensive and stuck in repeating cycles

• Comes from tightness and constriction of our minds and bodies

• Expressed as tightly-held opinions, superior judgments, and manipulation for resources by taking away from others or over-giving to others depending on your training.

• Gets results that activate resentment from those who’s power was not respected

Real power is the feeling that we can take action that feels good to us and others because it’s benevolent and creative. Other’s experience this power within you and want to move toward you, cheer you on, and champion your causes. Real power comes from feeling all of the Essence quality resources we have within us and how we use them to get our needs met. Super sadly, this is not the power that we were usually taught by our overall cultures of religion, education, justice, and politics.

Psuedo-power, real power’s illegitimate step-cousin, is what most of us marinated in. It is a system of transacting for external resources of power so one can have what other’s can’t. It’s hoarded by the few who obtain it for fear of losing the exclusive status of it. It functions on loopholes of the law and the psyche. It’s very difficult to experience joy when pursuing this form of power because you are required to be on alert and have your defenses ready at all times. In this unfortunate state none of us have access to our Essence qualities so we can’t enjoy our alleged success. Psuedo-powers erupt from either/or thinking instead of both/and thinking so they destroy the love, connection, uplifting spirit, and compassion we all want to feel our actions creating.

In real power you get to feel yourself transform difficult situations with your intuitions, instincts, wisdom, loving-kindness, and empathy. You get to feel yourself generating motivating energy from within yourself instead of trying to find something outside of yourself to motivate you. You get to feel the empowerment, which creates self-confidence, from your discipline, perseverance, purposefulness, and industriousness. You get to explore, discover, invent, and discern what feels like right action by listening to your own insides instead of following someone else’s advice or directive. I know for me personally, my present moment self can get really motivated to do the things I don’t always want to do right now, by remembering I want my future self to be able to trust my present moment self. 

If you want to whittle real power down to it’s basic component, it would be in your power to make choices. Every moment you are making choices, including choosing to not make a choice (which would be a pseudo-power). Reminding yourself over and over that you have the power of choice helps you catch any victim powerlessness thinking that you can fall into. Our trained-in powerlessness was imprinted from watching our caretakers proclaim they had no choice. Take a moment and tell yourself you have to do something today. Notice how your body responds to this “have to.” You will feel everything but ease and flow in your body, like tightness, heaviness, bunching-up and twisting, to collapsing energy. These are not the internal experiences that come from invoking real power. Now, take a moment to think about how you choose to do the things you want to get done today. This “choose to” approach will fill your inner chest with openness and lightness, your inner belly with ease and flow, and your jaw and shoulders with energized readiness. You get to choose which of these experiences you want to have in your body as you’re getting your stuff done! You get to choose your results! I’m just saying.

Just to remind you of some of our previous explorations, remember how we were exploring about the cycle of unmet emotional needs, which cause victim powerlessness beliefs, which deploy defensive strategies instead of Essence qualities to handle our stuff? This is where the psuedo-power cycle comes from. We only use psuedo-powers when we already feel powerless inside. So now that you know this, every time someone tries to over-power you or under-power themselves in your interactions with them, you can see through it, instead of automatically reacting to it. Yes, I can sense you’re getting it, we can interrupt our cycle of powerlessness and psuedo-power by identifying it when it’s being done to us. If you learn to see through this dynamic that we all, unfortunately, are playing out on each other every day, you can no longer be over-powered by someone else’s psuedo-power. How cool is that?!

You see, real power comes from knowing how to access the both/and truth inside of you right when other’s are lost in their either/or power struggles. If you can be aware that their need for power has nothing to do with your worthiness of getting your own needs met, you can be freed up to be the wise one in the room. The one who is self-possessed and self-governed while others are stressed out or acting out their aggressions. If someone can’t take your power away then they are challenged to respect your power instead of bullying it into submission. A Power-taker needs a power-giver-upper in order to function. If they discover that’s not you, then they are required to shift strategies, not you. You get to continue to deploy your Essence qualities and walk away from the interaction knowing you stayed true to your values instead of needing to think about all the things you might have done wrong or all the things you wish you would have said. 

I know Sweet Bud, we are just touching on some deep processes that you are going to need to seek guidance with and practice on a regular basis to interrupt your old patterns. My hope is to activate your curiosity and excitement about learning new ways to be your authentic, powerful self. If you want to learn more check out my book, Transform, that helps you practice these skills to be more deeply you.

I’m realizing we didn’t talk enough about vulnerability in this exchange so I will send you another one soon with more details about how to transform vulnerability into power.