Love and power aren’t commonly combined, or if so, it’s usually in only the most misunderstood and juvenile of ways. Love is power, and power is love the deeper you drop into the truth. But it’s not about giving everyone hugs and kisses. The truth is–and those of you who regularly read this blog already know–that love can hurt. Love can be a tough taskmaster because sometimes we need a heavy hammer to break through our outer ego shells. This isn’t done out of cruelty, however. The pressure and intensity of our own love is simply trying to free us, and if we’ve put tons and tons of energy into creating walls and defenses, then love will come with an equal or greater measure of intensity and energy to break us out. Ultimately, the cruelty is our own. It is in our ignorance, our avoidance, our fears, and our illusions. These are the things that cause us to suffer, and these are the things that have corrupted our ideas of power and what it means to be powerful.
To become a powerful person has nothing to do with bombs, money, or what you can get others to do for you. It has to do with being fully in your own love. In this place, you are an uncontrollable force. You transcend the normal limitations of the human being who is trapped by their own fears, and everything becomes possible for you.
Is This Too Good to Be True?
There’s an old saying (I think it came out of the time of the Nazi’s) that if you tell a big enough lie long enough, everyone (or most people) will believe it. This is why most of you don’t believe that you’re an uncontrollable (but not out of control) force of love. This is why you don’t believe that everything is possible for you. Keep in mind that this isn’t about naive and silly things like being able to fly like Superman. This is where the ego likes to go to disprove such statements like everything is possible. The ego is always looking for an excuse. If you read through this blog, there may at best be 70% of useful insights for you. The ego will look for 30% or more that’s wrong to discount the whole post. That is how much it hates the truth and wants to defend itself. The more identified you are with the ego, the more you hate yourself on some levels and are always looking to avoid the truth unless it feeds your current particular ego story.
That’s a big problem with a lot of people on the spiritual path; they’re still building an ego story and avoiding looking at the core issues. But love is not this way. Love sees all, and that depth of sight is deeply empowering. You cannot trick yourself unless you want to be tricked and you want to see something other than what is in plain sight. That’s the irony of this path; so much of what seemed like was hidden turns out to be right in front of you. You just didn’t want to see it. And yet, many of us still can’t believe in our limitless abilities of love and connection. We can’t imagine how powerful we are, yet we are willing to believe all these other horrible stories that say we should look this way, have this much money, have that kind of house, have that kind of relationship, and have 2.5 kids with a labradoodle dog. It’s insanity.
So no, your loving power is not too good to be true. You’re just used to another story that is too horrible to believe in, but we do anyway.
The Dissolving of Hatred
What a lot of this disempowerment boils down to is self-hatred. We’ve been taught to not like ourselves and to reject ourselves. That rejection is the basis of all hatred. Where acceptance is the basis of love, hatred keeps us unhappy, which is why we keep striving for more things, experiences, and so forth. As a result, we try to avoid all the upset feelings arising from this program which says that we are not okay as we are. As such, all your energy and your power is wrapped up in trying to make yourself feel good. The ship is sinking, but instead of patching the holes, you’re decorating the hull and telling everyone that this ship always takes on a little water. It’s usually only when you’re six feet under water that suddenly you may think there’s a real problem.
That’s how most people–the ones who are truly dedicated–come to the spiritual path. Things got so bad, that they had to start learning to swim. Everything else they had to hold onto got taken from them. This isn’t necessarily the start of the dissolving of hatred either. This is usually just the beginning of noticing that something has gone horribly wrong. If you need examples of this metaphor, it can be a horrible divorce where you lose your children; it can be a near death experience from a car crash and having to learn to walk again; it can be losing a loved one to death; and it can be countless other examples. Love finally got your attention with something that you couldn’t gloss over with words, work, sex, alcohol, or drugs. Hopefully, you’re ready to really start listening.
The Rising of Love
As love first rises, it tends to scare the wits out of people. Love is one of the most difficult aspects that my students deal with in my sessions. For some, they can’t even look me in the eyes. It’s not necessarily because of my own love–at least not usually at first. It’s usually because I’m mirroring the depth of their own love, and they are just starting to feel the profundity of themselves being reflected back. This is a sacred part of the work I do. It’s not just being a safe space. It’s not just the energy of my presence and the divine will. It’s the student coming home to him or herself and finding all that love coming back. The hatred can get reflected back too. Not in my being mean to someone (although that too can be shared from a loving space, but not in the ways most people would understand), but in how the person can see the ways they have been mean or small-minded to themselves and to others. Love is a bright light that illuminates the swamp of self-hatred someone has been living in, and naturally, most people’s impulses are to say, “EWWWWW!”
Unfortunately, the habituated tendency is to deny what they see too or blame the person that is helping to shine the light. But when love is truly on the rise, you can’t keep denying it anymore. You have to start taking power back over your own life.
The Power of Love and Change
With the clarity that love brings, you have the power to make some of the first conscious choices of your life. This is an incredibly powerful place to be and from which to act. You have to understand that most people (most likely you too) have never made a conscious choice in their lives. If you don’t know who you are and why you do what you do, you are usually operating from cultural programs without really understanding them. You don’t know what you are after, why you feel what you feel, why some situations draw you and others repulse you, and so on. That’s why I’m such a firm advocate of the journal and other ways of doing self-introspection. It’s simply to help you to know yourself. Until you know what’s going on inside, you don’t really know what is driving you. And the self-discoveries will go in waves of understanding because it seems that most of us can’t take the whole truth at one shot. So we pass through one set of illusions on our way to deeper self-love, and then we find another set of illusions. This is okay. It gives us time to adjust to the enormity of the power of love.
Because the depth of our ability to change is extraordinary. If we can create rockets and space stations through our combined consciousness, what else can we do? People can read this blog post pretty much anywhere there is an Internet connection all around the world because of what people have created. This is the power of our focused energy and attention. What happens if we are focusing our loving intention towards something? What happens if others join with us? What does that do in re-shaping the world? I want to know. Do you?
One Small, Loving Step at a Time
But lets not get ahead of ourselves. I am not advocating running out to change others or to get lost in ideals here. The power of your love is so amazing that things start to move on their own the more you reside in this space. To the cultural identity within most Westerners, this is impossible because we are taught that we have to do things to change things. But this is not true. Change is already here. It is already arising. It doesn’t need that much energy in it necessarily. At the beginning, taking our energy out of things that do not serve us is more important. So start there to call your energy back to yourself. Here are a couple of ways to call your love back from the things that do not serve you.
- Release worries. Worrying about the future is pointless. It drains your energy, and it gives you nothing back in return. Try to find one worry in particular that you can let go of.
- Stop buying beauty products. The beauty industry is a sham. It’s made up of beauty ideals that keep men and women in self-hatred as they strive to gain others’ and their own approval. Your money is also part of your energy. In no longer buying these things, you can start to see yourself as you are and save (potentially) a lot of money that can be re-dedicated towards healthy expressions of love.
- Stop drinking and doing drugs. Along with the fact that intoxicating substances make it impossible to feel and understand ourselves, they too take a lot of energy to procure via doing things to get them, consume them, and buy them. This is a huge issue for a lot of people, and it’s why most major religions prohibit them.
- Let go of unhealthy relationships. When you put your energy into people who drain you or do not support you, you are perpetuating the falsehood that you are undeserving of love. No matter what you think, if people don’t support you and offer kindness to you, this is not a healthy relationship. It’s best to move on.
- Leave a bad job. A lot of bad jobs have a lot of unhealthy relationships. If you don’t like what you are doing, you are coming from a place of self-hatred by forcing yourself to do that job. Regardless of the reasoning you have in your mind, leaving a bad job may be an important step in figuring out out what you love to do.
Love Will Rock the Boat
One of the things a lot of us feel as we let go of these things that do not serve us is a sense of empowerment and energy. We may also feel more at peace when we are no longer forcing ourselves to live out fantasies and perpetuate lies. Make no mistake about it; it takes an awful lot of energy to act out lies and illusions. We have to believe in them every day. Then we have to go take action to keep them in tact. I’ve always noticed that wherever love and the divine will are that a little action from me goes a long way. If it’s not in the divine plan, it requires tons of work, drains me, and is seemingly impossible. Everything keeps falling apart. Keep this in mind for your paths. While I always want you to be cultivating your inner knowing about what is right for you, you may want to consider if something that you are doing is the right thing if everything you touch keeps falling apart.
But as this subhead says, love will rock the boat. So there are different kinds of falling apart. Gracefully falling apart means letting go of illusions, and unfortunately most of what people look to as signs that things are going well in their lives are also built up off of cultural lies. An old romantic relationship may fall apart and go away, and it may not be replaced. Someone with a juvenile understanding of love will wonder what went wrong. Nothing. It may not be time to have a romantic relationship. You may never have one again. The divine plan is vast, but if you are truly in your own sense of love, this will no longer matter. Your own love is enough, and whatever and whomever does flow into your life will be perfect. You will be able to accept this perfection as it arises and passes, and in staying in this flow, you will also know how to combine your intentions with the divine. That is incredible power. From the depths of integrity, you can actually make immense cultural changes by how you lovingly join with others if this is what you are called to do. Regardless of the outward manifestations of love’s power, you will be content as you are because that is the greatest power of all.
