Power Makes a Terrible Gift
What "owning your power" should mean.
Recently I was part of an online chat with other yoga practitioners. The topic of “owning your power” came up. I think there’s a lot of confusion in the world right now about what it means to “own your power”, but the sentiment seems to be something like: “Stand for what you believe in, speak up, choose your direction in life, and don’t let others decide your path for you.”
Pretty much every time this topic comes up, I see a very specific puzzle appear. Here’s a paraphrase of one person’s struggle with it:
I want to own my power. But there’s someone in my life whom I care about and who’s stuck in their ways. I’m scared they’ll get hurt if I stand my ground and speak my truth. What do I do?
Another version I often hear goes something like:
I find myself going along with things my husband insists on, just because it’s easier than arguing with him. I’m scared that we’ll just fight more if I own my power and push back. I love him and I want our relationship to be strong, but I hate myself for crushing my own voice.
Yet another that I’ve heard from more than one teenager:
My mom drives me nuts. I want to move out. But if I do, I think it would really hurt her. I’m worried she’ll get depressed and maybe even do something drastic to herself if I leave. I don’t know what to do.
The struggle is something like, “How can I be empowered when that might hurt people or relationships I care about?”
I think there’s a clear answer now. It just isn’t very widespread yet. That’s in part because there isn’t a lot of clarity about what “owning your power” means. So attempts to share the answer often sound strange or callous or impractical.
But I think the answer is immensely practical, deeply compassionate, and very, very needed today.
I’d like to try my hand at sharing it here.
Giving power away
Let me start by defining a formula for the opposite of owning power:
If Alex believes that Sam needs to be or behave a certain way for Alex to be okay, then Alex has given their power away to Sam.
“Sam” here can be a person, but can also be pretty much anything else. People give their power away to jobs, financial situations, political parties, social groups, physical possessions…. The list is literally endless.
When someone has given their power away to something, they’ll tend to experience that thing as having some control over them. “I have to” and “I can’t” come up a lot. (“I have to clean the kitchen because Sam will get really upset tomorrow if I don’t.”)
This creates room for excuses. After all, if something outside of you has your power, that is responsible for your actions, not you, right? (“I know I said I’d call last night, but my boss made me work late, and then I had to clean the kitchen for Sam….”)
But this means that if you have goals you care about, you have to convince whoever or whatever has your power to let you take actions that move you in that direction. I mean, if they control you, it’s up to them what happens to you, right?
This leaves you with two choices:
Try to manipulate them. (“If you really love me, you won’t go on this trip.”)
Give up and blame them. (“I have no hope for financial security. I have to pay back these student loans, but there’s no way I’ll ever be able to.”)
(There’s also a third choice: reclaim your power. But I want to spell out some of the main consequences of giving power away first. I think it’s a lot easier to understand what standing in our power means when the pattern of not doing that is absolutely crystal clear.)
Trading power
One common manipulation tactic is to offer to trade power. It’s as though Alex says to Sam, “You have my power, so you owe me yours.” If Sam agrees, then Alex gets an illusion of control over Sam — which becomes kind of real as long as Sam goes along with it.
I think this is really clear in some cases that we recognize as abuse. So, trigger warning on the next two paragraphs: clear example of emotional child abuse.
Suppose a mother gets upset at her son, slaps him, and then says “Look at what you made me do!” She’s certainly giving her power away to her child: she’s claiming that somehow his behavior was the cause of hers as though she were powerless not to hit him. But the reason she does this is partly out of hope that he’ll agree with her powerlessness, and therefore believe that he is to blame and needs her forgiveness in order for him to be okay. This gives her a hook on his emotions in a way he then plays along with.
Really young children learn how to stand in their power from the adults around them. So, normally, a child in this situation has no idea how to keep his power when his mother asks for it. But if you imagine the child is grown up and has learned how to own his power, and then play out this scenario… well, the mother’s attempt to manipulate him would just bounce off of him. His internal experience would be something like: “She just chose to slap me. And now she’s choosing to tell herself a story where I somehow made her slap me. That’s on her. I would rather she take responsibility for her choices, but it’s her choice whether she does that. This has nothing to do with me and isn’t my responsibility.”
Most of us grew up in a culture that views power in terms of these power trades. Because of this, when people talk about “empowerment”, they’re sometimes actually talking about pressuring others to give their power away instead. You see this for instance when the “strength” of an “empowered woman” is viewed as coming from her ability to make her husband (say) take his share of household chores. If her ability to “be empowered” requires him to behave in a certain way, then this kind of “power” depends on his choices and isn’t really coming from her. He can take it away from her simply by not doing chores.
(What would a truly empowered woman do? Well, every single soul is different, so there’s no formula. But it might look something like her saying to her husband: “My love, I’m pissed. I want you to help more with chores. I’m sick of doing them all on my own. I respect your freedom to do with my saying this as you wish. If this inspires you to help, I’m happy to point out what you can do. I love you no matter what — and also, I’ll do whatever makes sense to me with how you choose to respond to this.”)
This power-trading is also what most authorities are made of: the authority says “You have to obey me” and we say “I agree.” If everyone ignores the president of a college, that president has no real power over others regardless of title. Same with governments: if no one — including police officers — acknowledges a law, then the law is irrelevant. Every power-over type of authority gets its power solely from individuals giving theirs to it.
Illusions of “real” power
Ah, but surely some power over others is real, yes? After all, even if private citizens of the USA were to all agree that (say) psychedelics are safe, police officers would still arrest anyone caught with them, and the legal system would still fine and maybe jail them. That’s just true, right?
My short answer is “Kind of — but this has nothing to do with owning your power.”
The question is: Are you choosing your actions because of fear of others’ reactions, thus letting their reactivity control you? Or are you choosing what you do based on what makes deep sense for you, whether or not that’s accounting for others’ pressure on you?
The case with law and large institutions is pretty complicated. So I’ll grab a simpler example to spell this out in some more detail.
If Alice thinks she’s responsible for Ben’s well-being, and Ben thinks Alice is responsible for his well-being, and everyone around the pair of them agrees with this… then it sure looks real. This shared story will even control Alice. For instance, if everyone (including Alice and Ben) come to believe that Ben’s happiness depends on Alice staying in a job she hates, then it looks like a fact that she has to keep that job.
But it’s a shared hallucination. Its only substance is that people believe it has substance.
At any time, Alice can call bullshit, at least in her own heart. She can reclaim her power. If she does so, she won’t need Ben or anyone else to agree with her choices for her to be okay. She might listen to others to inform whether she keeps her job — but she might not. It’s her choice. And she’ll know it.
Maybe she quits her job, and everyone is upset with her. They all agree that she’s shirking her responsibility to Ben. They stop inviting her to social events, they gossip about her, Ben shows up at her doorstep and cries. And this probably causes Alice a lot of emotional pain. But in her heart she’ll know that this is their bullshit. She’ll know that they are choosing to give their power to her. That’s on them. And she’s not having any of it.
And maybe Alice anticipates all this and uses that to inform her decision. Maybe she keeps the job for a while because she doesn’t want to deal with everyone’s drama. But if she’s standing in her power, she’ll know that she is choosing this for herself, and that it’s not their fault that she’s making this choice.
(Although in practice, someone who’s fully owning their power usually doesn’t choose to cater to the drama of those who aren’t owning theirs. There’s a reason why the primary Hindu deity of empowerment is Kali, the goddess of death and destruction.)
It really, truly does not matter one tiny iota how real some kind of power over you looks. It actually has only as much power over you as you give it.
Which means that everything in your life that seems to control you is actually just a mirror reflecting your own power back to you.
Subtly, that is the universe inviting you to take your power back.
Nothing is more caring than empowerment
So, what do you do if someone you care about has given you their power?
My advice is, do the same thing you would if they weren’t giving you their power:
Be an example of freedom.
Their pain from you owning your power isn’t really because of you. It’s actually because you’re reflecting back to them the lie that they’re telling themselves — namely that they need your cooperation in order for them to be okay. That lie is always causing them pain. You’re just shining light on it by living the truth.
If you accept their offer to trade power — that is, if you accept responsibility for their well-being — then you’re just helping them hide from their own lie. That might seem to save them pain, but it’s actually encouraging them to generate more, because you’re playing along with their self-lie.
The problem ultimately is that they aren’t owning their power. How can you possibly make them own their power? What would that even mean?
So, you cannot save them. Only they can save themselves.
The best you can do is to show them how, by example.
And, I claim, that’s actually pretty damn powerful.
Breaking the chains with ferocious love
The spiritual teacher Matt Kahn talks about how every struggle we endure is actually for the whole species. Every time you work through the pain of loneliness, for instance, you’re helping process all pain of loneliness everywhere so that our species can eventually move beyond it.
We have been collectively struggling with how power works for at least as long as we’ve had traditions (i.e., at least since the transition from the Third Age to the Fourth). Every soul who has felt abused by power has been processing this. Every person who wanted good in the world and found themselves pressuring others to make it happen has been processing this. Every wage slave, every manipulated child, every parent, every priest and official, nearly everyone, for literally thousands of years.
This is pain we’ve all inherited — as patriarchy, as oppression, as soul-crushing obligations, as our training as children to surrender our power when asked for it.
And we can break this chain forever, right now.
We do it by standing in our power, by being living reminders to everyone that all power comes from inside each of us, and that every soul can choose to embody this whenever they want.
We do it by being indomitable, by doing what makes sense to us, even when others criticize and condemn us for it, even when they naïvely try to convince us of our powerlessness.
We do it by living from love — and by embodying the hard-earned collective wisdom that we very much cannot show love by trading power with our loved ones and taking their responsibility for their well-being from them.
The human race has done the hard part of this processing:
We’ve played out the anxious/avoidant relationship trap for so long and in so many ways that we know its script. We know it hurts, we know how it hurts, and we know that it doesn’t stop just because it’s an attempt to express love.
We’ve built countless religious traditions based on threatening people into “good” behavior — threatening with Hell or torture or armies or jail or shame. We’ve tried every permutation we could come up with, and we have seen for ourselves that every one of them results in pain despite the loving intentions.
We’ve pressured men to stomp down their feelings, believing that will make them strong and healthy, only to discover that we were horribly, horribly wrong.
We’ve pressured women to be loving and caring, only to find that the methods of pressure twisted into condemnation and criticism and dismissal.
We’ve tried to create peace and prosperity through armies and threats, again and again, and every time we find ourselves unstable, hurt, and scared.
And on… and on… and on…
So we already know that trying to manipulate each other results in predictable pain, even if we’re trying to do so “for their own good”, even if everyone around us says we should.
We don’t have to play out those scripts anymore.
We are ready to be free.
What it means for us to really care, with the full brilliance of our hearts and thunderous force of our voices, is to stand with strength and proudly own every drop of our ferocious freedom — without compromise, without waiting for acknowledgement or permission.
And yes, some beloved souls will hurt as we breathe our fire. They have to, as we remind them of the collective pain they’re so compassionately embodying and continuing to process. They’re helping to reinforce this collective movement into our full glorious selves. Their suffering is sacred. It’s to be honored. Let them do that work. And when they are done — which happens exactly when they decide they are done — they will join us in freedom.
What a beautiful world we’re entering, where every soul recognizes that they are a living manifestation of the full power of the Divine.
I invite you to choose to recognize this for yourself, right now and forevermore.
Om Kalikayai Namaha!
What a powerful and liberating message my friend