A Brief Guide to Stepping Into Your Power
“If you are doing something for someone else’s approval, you may as well not do it” – Neale Donald Walsch
Stepping into your power is all about serving yourself. This may sound overly self-indulgent at first, but when you go deeply into it you realize that this is the ultimate expression of your soul.
Do you live your life based on what someone else thinks you should do? This happens all too often in our culture. What we end up doing is that we give up our autonomy and our power. We end up living the life that another envisions for us, thus dismantling our ability to follow our own intuition. We may not realize it, but at the unconscious level we build all sorts of emotions that perpetuate this submission of personal power.
Who do we often live our lives for? We submit our power when we attempt to live based on how our social circle thinks we should live and or when we adhere to the norms of society without questioning them. If those important figures in your life taught you how to listen to yourself so that you can guide yourself through life you were blessed. If the influences around you told you what to do and never supported your ability to choose and decide for yourself you may have created a way of relating to the world that is submissive in nature. Furthermore it could be emotionally painful to go against “their wishes” as you are met with scrutiny, criticism, and shame by the important people in your life.
Stepping out the of grip of another’s expectation is essential for self-evolution. This process requires great courage and strength. When you step into your own power you may be met with opposition. Those who once had control of you will feel like they are losing you. Their control of you is what they need to feel secure. This is the illusion that helps them feel as if they doing the “right” thing by you. But when you step into your own sense of self two things happen:
1) You start to enhance your intuition. You enhance your ability to listen to your higher self. This will inevitably bring you a sense of joy because you live in close alignment with your life’s purpose.
2) You start to teach others [if they are open to it]. By breaking the cycle of emotional submission you show others that they to can live for themselves and not for what others told them “they had to do.” This is how we help society evolve by lifting the weight of past karma that has had families, communities, and societies, living out the prescribed desires of generations past [which typically is always fear based – for in these cases we live life by “doing what we have to do” even if that means submitting and suppressing our ability to feel the consequences of our way of life {as opposed to not being afraid to see things as they are and build our lives and society accordingly on what the compassion in our hearts tells us we must do for all of life}].
So how do I do this?
1) Draw conscious awareness into all of your actions. This is not easy. It requires a lot of focused attention into the now. You need to assess whether the things you do in your life are about fulfilling your destiny or someone else’s. Did you take that job because it would make your parents happy? Did you move to that place because another told you to? Did you marry that person over another person because that person was more acceptable in the eyes of your social circle? Again, it takes great courage to ask these questions. But this process is essential to step into your power. Yet, realize there were no mistakes. Every “missed step” is a learning experience. So question and assess your life. Is this what you want?
2) Let go of any resentment and move forward. Anger will only anchor you to the past. See that those whom tried to control you only did so because this is what they thought was the best thing for you. In a way this is how they showed love and care for you. This was what was done onto them so they repeated only what they knew.
3) Meditate. Enhance the ways in which you communicate with yourself. The language of your soul is subtle and can only be heard when the clutter of the mind does not get in the way. The mind when used without being anchored to the past can be a great transmitter of the soul, but what we often do is identify ourselves with our thoughts and we end up living a life through these identifications. These identifications anchor us to the past…and living through the past, based on yours and another’s idea as to who you should be, diminishes your ability to step into your power. Your power resides in the now. Essentially, you are not who you were yesterday. You are who you are now.
4) Realize that life is ever-evolving. There is no end point. Realize that part of the vision we have for our lives is about controlling how it will turn out. This control, based in fear, diminishes our ability to live consciously in the now.
5) Surrender your personal will to divine will. At the core of your being you are divine and you allude any definition. You are not the thought about who you think you should be or become. Identification, a process passed down by how others think you should be, divides yourself from the state of grace that is inherently who you are. You are not the illusion of your ego and the false ideas that you think you should uphold. This only creates a sense of expectation that has you chasing something that may never be. When you live a life without expectation, without an idea as to who you should be, you will become aware of a voice within you that has you knowing what to do at all moments. This is how the divine communicates with you. This is what developing your intuition is all about.
When we become aware of how we typically live our life based on external factors we are given the power to step into our true nature. This is what I mean by serving yourself. You learn that serving the non-self is what brings you harmony and peace. The ego-self derives its sense of self from living out external expectations as to what we or others think is best for us. The latter process leads you into the land of illusions and conditions that weaken our ability to go within and develop our intuition. The former process, living from the non-self, has us living without expectation and has us clearly rooted into the present moment.
Very few people, if any, have mastered it. But, this is the life that will essentially bring deep peace to ourselves and to our planet. It is a process that we step into over time. Shedding the layers of the fear driven life we live may take lifetimes to accomplish, but without a conscious effort to live a life for our non-selves, not for our circles, and not for the society as it is now, we start to push forward this process and evolve at both the personal level and the social level. For when we live a life from within we will always choose and make decisions that have a sense of deep compassion for ourselves and for the world around us. Because at this point we will feel on the inside that all is one.
About the Author
Christopher Renzo is a life coach and writer who specializes in helping others get in touch with their source of inner power and confidence to create a more harmonious life. He has been working with clients in a professional manner since 2009 and has been helping people with his intuitive gifts ever since he was a teenager. He holds the notion that once people understand the root of their troubles from a psychological and spiritual perspective, they can break free from the conditions that bound them to a life of discontent. Born and raised in the New York Metropolitan area, Christopher now resides in Berkeley, California. Please visit his excellent blog, Keen Awareness.
This article is offered under Creative Commons license. It’s okay to republish it anywhere as long as attribution bio is included and all links remain intact.