What problems are you currently grappling with in your life?
Have things become too chaotic?
Not enough productive output?
Too much frustration and stagnation?
In any of these cases, what’s missing is power.
Power.
Power has a bit of a negative association in our culture. Suppose someone said to you “I want to become more powerful” – what would you think of them? You’d probably either judge them or attempt to talk them out of it. After all, a lot of stories that we were told as children involved someone seeking to become powerful and ultimately failing terribly in the end.
Men, in particular, have been scorned against grasping power. The implication being that men can’t be trusted with it because (they’d say) masculinity is a destructive, chaotic force in the world.
It’s here that I invite you to reconsider what power actually is. Because once we can get a clear idea of what it is, it’ll become apparent how important it is. How necessary it is! And what an incredible creative force it can be. We’ll also see how real power has built-in safety mechanisms that naturally prevent its misuse.
Only through understanding and stepping directly into power can we really tap into the resources that will allow us to intelligently solve our long-standing issues and move forward.
Power, as opposed to Force
Force and power are two distinctly different things.
Frustration is Force's signature emotion.
Force is when a person is expending energy to either make something happen or prevent something else from happening. Force involves effort. It’s when we’re making something happen. You’ll recognize when you’ve been applying force by noticing how tired you are afterward. Oftentimes the results are less than satisfactory. There’s a sense of not getting out of it what you’ve put in.
Power, by contrast, happens through yielding, allowing, accepting and flowing. Instead of making something happen, it takes action on the opportunity that’s present right now. It is riding the wave of inspiration. It’s not attempting to control too much, it’s just moving in the way that is intuitively correct for it in this moment.
In combat, power would be to conserve your energy while dodging someone’s wild swings, and then striking decisively once they’ve tired.
As mid-tier manager in a business setting, force would be trying to get everyone to listen and cooperate. Power would be communicating more deeply with their team members in order to tap into what actually motivates them.
Culturally, what we think of as power is actually force. Force is what a dictator wields. Force is what you see in old, mythological warrior gods. Force is us pushing ourselves to burnout. Force always creates karma – in that whatever we do from a position of force, creates some sort of echo of suffering that comes back to us.
Power, by contrast, isn’t against anything. It doesn’t move against anything. Power doesn’t judge anything as wrong, or even as evil. Power’s desire is simply to see clearly, speak truthfully, heal, and unify.
You’ll know that you’ve been touched by power if you’ve been uplifted – if your experience has improved in some way. Power taps into such creativity that it always manages to find a solution that honours the needs of everyone involved.
Power comes from Neutrality
Force isn’t neutral, it needs something.
Take a moment to consider this idea of need. Notice what a heavy concept it is! Reflecting on this – what in your life do you feel that you need? Notice the subtle ache about it. Notice the subtle drama that’s created around this thing. It feels distinctly unsafe, like we can never feel totally at rest in our hearts because we don’t know when it’s going to come or go.
Force stems from need. It acts from panic, from anxiety, from adrenaline. It says “I have to make this thing happen!” But along the way it creates chaos and damage. Just think about the amount of destruction in a James Bond or Mission Impossible chase scene and you’ll see what I mean.
Power stems from neutrality. It has no bias, and therefore it’s in a place to discover and facilitate an outcome that serves everyone involved. A healing, in other words. Power knows that there’s nothing to be afraid of, therefore it doesn’t have to act from fear. As such, power doesn’t need anything.
Power is here to play! It’s not trying to get anywhere, but just to enjoy the process of greater growth and awakening. Power recognizes itself IN everything and AS everything.
Stepping into Power
Now let’s talk about how to cultivate more power in your life.
Seat yourself at the very center of your experience. Ground in.
Here’s the formula:
1) Identify the problem, the need, and the threat.
2) Discover the lie.
3) Ask yourself what there is to be done, if anything.
4) Give yourself over to the task at hand.
I’ll take you through each of these four steps so that you can see exactly how this works.
1) Identify The Problem, The Need, and The Threat
What’s the problem? State it simply – extra points if you write it down.
An example problem might be: “I have too much work, I’m totally behind, I’m stressed, I can’t seem to get on top of it.”
What’s the need? What do you need? You might say “I need to work more, I need to get more done, I need to get on top of my work. I need to get organized.”
And finally, what’s the threat? The trick with finding the threat is to find yourself all the way at the bottom of the chain of threats. So usually it’s not being behind on our work that’s so bad as it runs the risk of us looking bad in front of our clients or employer.
What’s threatening about that? “I might lose my job.”
What’s threatening about that? “I’ll be out of a job, won’t have an income, won’t know what to do.”
What’s threatening about that? “I’ll lose everything. I could end up homeless or worse.”
What’s threatening about that? “I may become a total failure!”
What’s threatening about that? “...?”
Eventually we enter a territory that just feels like fear. To the ego this feels like death. Becoming a total failure is like dying, from the ego’s perspective.
2) Discover the Lie
The lie is always the same: “I am truly threatened.”
Despite how it seems though, the threat is not real. This is what we need to see in order to step out of force and into power.
The discernment that we make here is to agree that these things can happen (i.e. there is a small probability of losing your job, losing your money, and so on) but even if they did happen, there’s nothing truly threatening about it.
They’re just neutral events. They don’t mean anything. This is the essential thing to see!
No matter what happens, no matter where you end up, you will always be you in the here and now. And as long as this is always true, you will always have the next thing to do from here. You will always have this question to return to: “What shall I do now?”
Unless you are actually dying in this moment, there’s no cul-de-sac. There’s no Game Over, no dead end.
The situation is real, but the interpretation is false. And everything that’s threatening about this situation is all up in your interpretation of this otherwise neutral event!
So as you consider your problem, say these lines aloud:
None of this means anything.
Nothing means anything!
This doesn’t signify anything.
There’s nothing to fight or run from.
There’s nothing missing.
There’s nothing wrong.
I allow reality to be as it is.
Repeat these a few times over and pay attention to the effect it has on your body. If it creates relief, then that’s how you know you’re releasing the lie out of your psychology.
3) Ask yourself what there is to be done, if anything.
What is there to be done?
Only now are we asking this from a place of neutrality. We’re not in a fearful, reactive mode. We’re not trying to get away from anything. We’re not fighting anything. We’re not forcing anything.
Again: What is there to be done, if anything?
We ask now from a much more centered place. There’s this humble recognition that we can only do one thing at a time. That we don’t have all the answers. That we understand very little about what’s actually going on.
But fortunately, we have the most important thing, which is to ask about what can be done now, if anything. If nothing can be done, then we let it go entirely.
Returning to our example of being overwhelmed with work we can ask: Do I have time to do some of this work now? If so, which is the most important task? What goal can I set for myself to do over the next hour? Can I allow this to be enough for now?
4) Give yourself over to the task at hand.
Once these questions are answered, we can give ourselves over to the task at hand. We simply do the thing that there is to do. We stop questioning if this is the right thing to do, if we should be doing something else, and instead trust in the wisdom that originally decided on this particular task.
Let it be enough. Let it be worth your time. Let it be worthwhile.
Give yourself over to the task and allow yourself to get lost in it.
This is how we reclaim the flow state, a beautiful, generative state that’s absolutely brimming with creative power.
Through Becoming Neutral we Claim our Power
When we’re neutral, we’re centered, clear, and unafraid. We’ve discovered safety and security in our own experience and thus we can no longer be intimidated.
We’re not trying to make anything happen, and as a result greater insight becomes available to us, as well as holistic creative solutions. Power comes to us in the form of simplicity, clarity, and one-pointedness.
Give it a shot and leave a comment telling us how it went!
Brent