What is To Be Empowered?

In its simplest, most direct manifestation, to be empowered is already happening if you’re consciously involved in working on yourself. If this work is psychological, spiritual or better a combination, and it’s consistent and sincere, then empowerment is taking place.

This truth is often missed. Perhaps your inner work’s momentum hasn’t quite gathered yet. Perhaps your struggles are still in your face. Delight in the fact that still elusive outward changes are a reflection of how you’re changing inside; they just haven’t quite taken form yet. Things may not be all that pretty inside. Instead of being neurotic that change hasn’t manifested, realize it’s in process; you’re working it.

The truth of the matter is that empowerment is ongoing. You have to climb a while before reaching a plateau. Then the path still continues.

Empowerment is personal power. It’s used for routine tasks such as getting up, making breakfast and going to work. It’s also used as self-determination and integrity. Personal power properly claimed and wielded, can bring you emotional freedom and peace of mind.

There has to be a modicum of personal power to just survive, let alone thrive. Depending on your ‘story,’ your bio, you may have been raised in an environment that provided this. Then it can be built on. If not, and even if so, most of us still need to work on it. Personal power is personal. You must dust it off and let it shine. No one else can really do it for you.

Everything that we’ve shoved away, we shoved away with a curse; most of it came from the outside. With a curse comes a hiding, comes a shame. To dare to be seen and to speak from what’s authentic undoes a curse. It’s time to stop hiding behind some fiction of “bad me” and burn through to shining.

— Jeannie Zandi

With personal power comes tremendous trust and energy. You’re able to trust yourself, and life. It energizes your psyche which fuels your imagination, purpose and passions. It lifts you. Personal power can be a diamond in the rough, however. Its best use isn’t for you to impose your will over your circumstances. This can be destructive, short-lived, and in service of the ego.

Humility does not mean you think less of yourself. It means you think of yourself less.

— Ken Blanchard

Once personal power is actuated and exercised regularly in a balanced way, it begins to become empowerment. Empowerment is a settled resource, while personal power can fluctuate. Empowerment is lifelong and more of the spirit.

Personal power giving way to empowerment is the transition from ego to soul. The soul is truth. When you know your spiritual truth, all other lies fall off. It’s a knowing that can’t become unknown.

This is the pinnacle of empowerment, but it doesn’t have to be fully reached before being radically effective in your life. You need empowerment in your career, for personal growth, to heal, for spiritual development. If you’ve put in the work to find some psychological wholeness, and also reached into your soul and are on a spiritual path, the practices you’re engaged in, the realizations that come, and the way of being that establishes itself in you are all naturally empowering.

Over time it becomes firmer and firmer, more and more knowable and reliable. There’s a gentleness to empowerment, a detachment. Even with annoyances or more substantial issues that may still come up, empowerment once accessed filters into your life, and eases your way.

Truth is empowering. Every time you turn to truth, it empowers you more. Knowing your true nature, and before that growing in understanding it, being it, experiencing life from its perspective is empowering with each encounter. Each moment of spiritual practice polishes your diamond.

Fear does arise on the way to empowerment. Fear is a many-headed beast. Therefore courage is a must. Ironically, you need courage to be empowered, and empowered to show courage. They are inextricably linked. One feeds the other. Courage is a fire that burns away fear. Empowerment keeps the fire going.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.

— Ambrose Redmoon

Power is essential to life. Every living thing needs to be powered somehow. Humans are powered by soul consciousness, light, breath, life force, and food and water. Of these, consciousness is the overseer and director, and life force is the ‘electricity’ and subtle hub making each item work with all the parts of a human.

If consciousness and life force are trapped in past hurts, or projected into future worries they aren’t available now where you need them. Their power is diminished greatly, and you’re left powerless in the present. Loss of power is much more than lack of energy. It can lead to depression, confusion, and low vibration choices which exacerbate your situation.

To reclaim and cycle your power in through your present moments is an act of empowerment. Feeding old ghosts or giving juice to future fear dragons is disempowering. Your power is needed now, here with you.

But the greatest power is always love. Power can be used in the service of love, but not vice versa.

— Ram Dass

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