Calling back power

One of my favourite authors, Caroline Myss, has done a lot of work about calling back power. Basically, we can choose whether to allow ourselves to be dominated and abused, or we can give ourselves permission not to be. Nobody else can give us this permission - it has to be a personal choice.

I see the act of reclaiming our personal power as being the actual act of growing up. Some people never do it; some come late to it, and still others never have a problem with claiming and owning their personal power.

What exactly is personal power? It's nothing more or less than our control over ourselves - our decisions, plans and movements. We have no right to try to exert control anyone else, for any reason at all and nobody else has a right to try to exert control over us. This includes parents and children, husbands and wives, teachers and students, politicians and citizens, doctors and patients, priests and parishioners, salesmen and shoppers. Nobody has a right to try to control or influence another person, only themselves.

However much we disbelieve it and carry on as if the above isn't true (me included!) - it is, so we're always wasting our energy when we do so. Also whenever we're trying to control each other, we're losing our own power and we're trying to steal theirs. And unless the other person consciously calls their power back, they're letting us. So we're all the weaker for it.

I'm not saying we must never consciously allow ourselves to be influenced by people. When I read Ms Myss's work, for example, she is influencing my thinking, BUT I've still got my critical faculties intact. If you can hear or read another person's ideas whilst remaining fully in control of your own logical processes then there's no loss of power either way, just a healthy exchange.

This is why I like the concept of teaching, learning and schools being optional. The ideal situation would be for people to have access to experts (teachers) on their own terms, by mutual arrangement between the two. The teacher then consolidates his or her own thinking by being questioned and having to explain, and the student remains in control of the learning process, so learns properly in conjunction with his/her own logical process and current level of understanding.

In my Taoist training I learned that a healthy person is basically a self-contained battery of bio-electrical energy, who recharges from the earth (women) or the sky (men). If you've given some of your power to someone else and not called it back, you are basically a leaky battery who can never properly recharge. And if you have no faith in the earth or sky to recharge you, so you constantly try to leech power from other people instead, you're not only a very poorly battery indeed but you're also having a corrosive effect on your environment.

How do you know if you're leaking power or not recharging properly? Here are some clues of that condition:

• You're not happy. You feel angry/ frustrated/ bored/ irritated/ discontent.
  


• You're not healthy. You're not sleeping well, you feel tired all the time. Everything is too much effort.


• You find yourself focusing on particular issues or specific people with resentment, blame or fear.


• You wish your life could be different but you don't know how to make it so and you consider it to be beyond your power to improve.

I think everyone experiences some of the above at various points in their lives. Even the most enlightened sages struggle to keep it that way all the time, but it does get easier. Calling back your power is the first step.

So how do you do that?

First you have to believe that the universe will recharge you. You don't need another person to do it. Next you have to accept the principle that another person can only control you if you let them. Decide not to let them, and they can't. As soon as you realise this is your choice, you have called back your power.

It helps to look back over your life at times when you've given your power away (A strict parent? A bossy teacher? A manipulative friend, lover or spouse?) and to consider how you could have opted to keep control over your own actions instead. Sometimes it's easier to submit to the rule of a person in a more powerful position, but if you do so consciously and logically, after considering the options, you still keep your power. Just working out the options in retrospect like this is often enough to sort out the past, no matter how abusive some situations might have been for you.

It's recommended that you consciously call back your power and recharge your battery every day, but with practice it becomes an automatic, ongoing procedure. Life always produces hurdles and difficult people, otherwise we'd never learn or progress, but of course we get more adept at managing them.