The Direction of Intention

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Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Dear Horatio,

I want to respond to your question and it will take a few posts. First, to let everyone into the conversation: you asked me to give examples or anecdotes of the relationship between control and power and how to break the cycle. You told me that you recognized how this dynamic works in your life but that it is also an abstraction. I responded, telling you that my fascination with this topic (power) comes from the ubiquitous paradox within your question: how can you know how this works in your life but also experience it as an abstraction? That experience is true for almost everyone; when you are in it, you know it in your bones and it is almost impossible to wrap your fingers around it. So, to begin:

I know that it sounds too simplistic but the picture changes when people recognize that 1) They have choice in where they place their focus and 2) They have choice in how they interpret their experiences. These are among the most powerful and transformational recognitions that people can have. It’s easy to say and hard to do when you are convinced that what you see is truth.

Seeing is never passive, no one is ever an objective observer – despite what the past 300 years of science has asked us to believe – it’s now telling us something different. Recently I read Brain Rules by John Medina and in the chapter on seeing he describes what happens in your brain – literally – when you see something. It is akin to an image dispersal and reassembly process. The glue of the reassembly is past experiences: we make meaning of our seeing based on where we’ve been and what we believe about our past. If your life story is one of fear you will most likely see fearful things everywhere. If your life story is filled with adventure you will see opportunities for adventure.

Because seeing is not passive – because you are telling yourself the story of yourself at every moment of your life – you have the capacity to change your story. To see is to interpret and we interpret according to patterns of our lives and how we group things: “this is like that.” You first have to become aware and then detaching from patterns is possible.

For many years fear was my focus so fear was my creation. Living in fear is the equivalent of living full time in resistance and so my story was a story of resistance of the future. I am a dedicated edge leaper so leaping was my first idea about how to get out of fear. If I just kept leaping, if I just kept seeking I was certain I’d find “it.” And then I lost all that I held dear and this is what I saw (finally): It is not in the leaping (the action); it is in the seeing (the story I tell). The shift was immediate. I was a dedicated vampire and suddenly I was practicing something I’d been preaching for years: I was creating power-with. And I know you know what I mean.

[to be continued]

Filed under: Awakening, Truly Powerful People |