You can never do it enough. It will often bring surprises. Most times we hate to do it. We’d rather create our own fantasies. We’d rather swim in the pool of our own beliefs, and wrap ourselves up in the cozy blanket of our own opinions. We’d rather be in denial. We’d rather medicate. We’d rather run, or we’d rather stay and project.
Observing your thoughts, the way you act, and the choices that you make, is a skill, even an art, and it yields a very strange journey. Be prepared for the unexpected. In a nutshell, my own personal experience and understanding of self-observation looks something like this:
- First, we begin to glean that there is actually something to observe. This takes about 20 years.
- We become curious and observe for one second. We are so freaked by what we observe that we retreat and medicate for at least 10 years.
- We still desire to evolve. After decades of attending self-help workshops, we realize that our spiritual development requires that we observe.
- We resolve to observe, and begin the process anew.
- Through observation, we discover we must un-do everything we learned in our New Age self-help workshops.
- Through observation, we discover we must give up our fantasies, our beliefs, our opinions, even our affirmations.
- We enter a state of confusion and total disorientation.
- We fall into despair, stay there for a while, and wallow.
- We blame and curse the people, the earth plane, the game, the whole enchilada.
- We realize we’ve stopped observing.
- We resolve to observe again. It’s not so bad this time.
- We observe our thought patterns when we want to repeat steps 8 and 9.
- We observe that by observation we can zap those thought patterns that have held us by the throat for the over 50 years we’ve been alive on this planet. THAT feels good. It feels like power. We like it.
- We begin to look forward to those old thought patterns returning so we can fine-tune our powers and see what else we will discover. We happily accept that we are very powerful.
- Whatever is in the moment, we observe it’s our choice how we play. As long as we are observing, we will always have a choice.
- We observe that every next moment is punctuated with uncertainty. Sometimes this observation is pleasant, and sometimes it is unpleasant. We’re OK with both, because we can see that whatever the present situation, there is always potential and possibility.
- We discover uncertainty is a very interesting dance partner. It gives us the opportunity to be quite powerful and quite creative.
- The more we observe, the more we are able to observe, and the more there is to observe.
- The whole enchilada starts to look a whole lot different.
- ?
What will you discover when you journey into the realm of observation? I haven’t a clue. I just know this has been my experience. But I can promise you that for anyone who does it, observing will open a very interesting door. It is perhaps the key to those famous words inscribed above the Temple of Apollo at Delphi over 3,000 years ago: Know Thyself. Who are you? You’ll find out by observing.
How To Keep Your Power
Power is attractive and enticing. We all want to feel powerful, and we want others to see us as powerful. This is as it should be. Yet, we have an uncanny ability–habit?–to continually give our power away. Humans have been handing over their power on a silver platter for thousands of years.
Who do we give it to? From political leaders and religious icons to the person walking down the street, generally speaking we give our power away to anyone we think can make our journey on earth easier, safer, and pain-free; anyone who convinces us they have a quick fix, or will do the work for us, or take our problems away; anyone who will protect us from the consequences of traveling on this earth plane. Besides people, we give our power to an assortment of belief systems, thoughts and ideologies that promise the above.
It is ironic. Even though we each chose to experience this journey in the earth dimension, the first thing we will trade in is that very experience. When we encounter the difficult bumps in the road, we want to give up, get out, medicate, or turn the whole thing over to someone else to do for us.
Does it work? Never. Giving our power away leads us into bigger problems, bigger bumps, more complicated consequences, and general unhappiness. Giving our power away ultimately leads to disappointments, feelings of betrayal, and massive participation in the blame game. It is a waste of our energy, for giving power to others can never produce any worthwhile or long-lasting results. How ironic, again, that when the person or belief system we’ve given our power to doesn’t give us the promised goods, we turn on it or them. It does not occur to us to question whether giving our power to anyone or anything in the first place was a good idea. It does not occur to us to ask if we ourselves are responsible. Instead, we kill the king, martyr the savior, divorce the partner …and promptly look for another. Out comes our silver platter with our power placed on it, asking for takers, asking for someone or something else to be responsible for our journey. Around and around we go through the centuries, missing the opportunity each time to realize the problem isn’t with them, it is with us and our endless willingness to give our power away.
The fact is, no one can do the journey for you. Further, you don’t really need anyone or anything to do it for you because you carry within yourself all the tools that you need. One secret ingredient that will help you walk your path powerfully is something no one likes to talk about: pain. You must be willing to feel your pain. Pain is common to the human journey, and everyone’s path is painful. Pain is not as bad as you may think. It is much better than the suffering that entails when you give your power to others or to a belief system in the false hope of getting rid of the pain you must encounter on your journey. When we are willing to be OK with the pain, we are much less likely to give our power away because we’ll have removed one of the main reasons why we give power to others. We will also be less likely to medicate for the same reason. We’ll know that medicating is just an avoidance of those difficult and painful bumps which we all must eventually face.
The word power has a very solid and grounded feel to it, and you feel it the more you claim your journey. When you take your power back and keep your energy within your own path, it is available for you to use in facing those obstacles and bumps on your road. You can have friends, guides, teachers, supporters, leaders by your side, but the obstacles in your path are yours alone to face. No one can ever stand in that spot on your path but you. Everyone else is on the sidelines of your journey. It is unfair to others to try to place your obstacles in their lap, even if they ask for them. You must walk your walk yourself, every single inch of it. That is power. You can’t help but feel powerful when you really get that you are absolutely and completely responsible for your responses and how you use your energy on a path that is uniquely all yours.
How do you keep your power, then? You need to be willing to keep your power. You need to be aware of the age-old human tendency to place power on a platter and hand it over to others and others’ belief systems in an attempt to avoid pain, and resist that tendency. It is very subtle, so be aware that we do it often, in all sorts of small and large ways. You need to be aware that while others may give you pieces of the puzzle, you’ll have to put them together yourself. The path you journey on is yours alone to figure out, and by doing so, you and your path become authentic and powerful testimonials to your spiritual energy.
The final irony in the human weakness to relinquish our power and our path is that we are each extremely powerful and sophisticated spiritual energies, or we would not have contemplated journeying to this very difficult human dimension. More than contemplating, we have all decided to actually experience it! Power is your middle name. So the next time you are tempted to place your power outside yourself and look for a new leader, a new ideology, a new savior to bring you happiness and smooth out the painful obstacles on your road, know that a portion of your spiritual energy is having a huge ‘belly-laugh’ over the absurdness of such a situation!