4 Ways to empower yourself, and make a lasting impact.

The news cycle right now is dramatic. And clearly, a real change is needed. But with so much division and well, insanity, how do you find ways to empower yourself? Insanity by my definition is a lack of clarity, a lack of right action. Insanity is propelled by deep-seated fear and a subconscious avoidance of the deeper truth of reality. But you can do something about that.

The root cause of insanity is the concept of separation. Separation is a very deeply ingrained ME vs YOU story. This story is played out by our fear, as an ineffective way to define safety. But we are all in cahoots with this storyline. We all have wounds that are unconscious and act out the narrative of fear. And that is how the set up of ME vs YOU and US vs THEM, or other fear-based story-lines like defeat, lack, limitation come into play. Fear and separation are at the root of the issue.

So for transformation to occur, its profoundly helpful to go to the roots. However, that is easier said than done.

Overwhelm

Most people involved in emotional healing and spiritual growth have worked hard to cultivate sensitivity and connectivity. That means a little information goes a long way for a sensitive human. Therefore, when global events heat up to intense levels, it can feel unbearably loud and overwhelming. Because a sensitive person is neither numb or asleep, those loud events can be so, so loud and traumatizing. A screaming alarm is shocking but helpful if you are dead asleep, but less useful if you are sleeping lightly, and really overwhelming if you are awake.

And that is okay.

The screaming alarms are useful to many. So the solution for the sensitive and connected person is space. You will need spaciousness to recenter yourself. Being overwhelmed by your thought stream or your emotional stream doesn’t lead to clear action. We all need space and grounding to act from clarity. Luckily, spaciousness is a privilege available to all. And actions that create solutions always require some clear space inside of us.

You can create some space by turning off the screens and turning to nature, meditation, and to self-care rituals like long hot baths or showers, yoga or workouts, making really good food, and connecting to people you love. These self-care and wellness movements make clear action much more accessible.

Spiritual Bypass or Spiritual Transformation?

Spiritual bypass is using a concept of spirituality, or a concept of wellness and healing, to trance out. This means you disconnect and put your energy in a private bubble of ungrounded delusion. We can recognize trance because it is a zone out, instead of a zone in. It is to become unconscious and dreamy, instead of awake and clear. It’s like being stuck in an eddy or on a trip, instead of being centered, connected, and engaged.

Whereas spiritual transformation is where you use the insights of your healing journey to go right to the source of the matter and alchemize your wounds or pain bodies that are being activated by these triggers.  Our devotion and responsibility to this crisis, and any crisis, is to work on the parts of ourselves that unconsciously act out from our fear and a subtle (or obvious) story of separation.

So, the truth is that bypass is simply defined as acting from fear instead of clarity. Therefore the solution to any bypass is to use this crisis, this trigger, to identify your own pain body, your own traumatized wounds. Once identified, you can harness your connection to Source, God, the energy of life, the creator, or love, to tenderly embrace this wound. (Meditation is a perfect place to do that.) Surrounding yourself in healing energy, in love, in tenderness, will go a long way to diminishing the charge of fear on your system.

Once your wound and the underlying fear is deescalated, you will find it much easier to organically and spontaneously move into action. Real connection naturally and effortlessly acts, rather than hides or avoids. Fear hides out, fear avoids, fear pushes for chaotic action—all these are bypasses.

An Urgent Pressure to Act NOW & Speak NOW!

The collective energy field, which is a collective field of emotional, psychic, and mental kinetic energy that surrounds us, is very charged. It’s an addictive kind of energy, that is vigilant and tracking for problems. It’s an energetic pull, pulling you out of the present moment. Paradoxically, it caries an energetic signature that is both chaotic and vigilant.

And it is seductive. It can feel like pressure, like resistance, like an inability to settle deeply. The collective field of energy affects our own energy by creating a hum in the background, playing on our subconscious, tracking for problems so that we are challenged to drop fully into the present moment. 

To be released of the collective charge, you need to drop below it. You need to put your own awareness deeper than the static noise on the surface, the resistance and stuckness. This includes dropping below your thought stream and below your emotional stream.

We can do this by walking in nature, sitting on the porch or by the water, staring at a fire, and of course meditation. My personal hack is to drop into the sensations of your body, and from there, see if you can identify where pleasure and something that feels like ease or even delicious is, and do that. It’s my hack to help you move from resistance into the present moment via this little transitional phase. Pleasure makes it easier to settle.

The present moment is spacious and SAFE. But to really know that, and to really harness that true safety in your daily life, you need to move your awareness way down below the thought stream and emotion stream. Both of these are populated by fear and separation. Down below all the noise of fear and separation is safety. Always, 100% guaranteed. But you can be the judge of that, because once you sense that depth, you will recognize the simple obviousness of that safety.

Clear Action

Clear action is an action that comes from clarity. Simple enough to define, but it is actually very sophisticated in action.

First, you need to harness clarity, and to do that, you must touch into silence. Yes, it’s ironic: in order to move into clear action, you first must settle into stillness and listen to silence. The silence that lives in the deeper dimension of the present moment is ripe with clarity. In fact, it is the only place clarity lives.

Clarity is not man-made. It is deeper and comes from the vast intelligence of the infinite energy surrounding you. Which makes this a privilege available to all. A privilege no person is truly separate from.

An additional bonus in finding clarity is that it has its own agency. An agency towards action that is not generated by your will, by your control, or by your vigilance. This also means it is an agency that is present regardless of your gender, skin color, sexual orientation, age, privileges or disadvantages. Again, this is because it is not man-made. It’s an agency that comes from clarity. Isn’t that great news!

But here is the best news: when you access clarity, and that agency comes along for the ride, you are suddenly presented with opportunity, solutions, bizarre and miraculous gifts, and peace. Again, this abundance is regardless of your position in life, or your advantages or your disadvantages, because it doesn’t come from what we might call the world, our tragically insane world, rather it comes from the deeper dimension of this present moment. It comes from what I call life. Life itself, the pulsation of life before you.

However, we can block this agency. We can block it with an insistence of lack and limitation. An insistence that we are unsafe. An insistence that we are separate and must fight to survive.

From our mental and emotional stream, which is fueled by fear, we have only the agency of control, and it depletes us and leads to unclear action. But unlike control, clarity is not man-made, it doesn’t come from you, but is consistently available to you.

So I want to invite you to empower yourself. This may be the very storm needed to step up to your real agency in the world. (Not of the world, but in the world.) Once you do the work to harness real agency, your own internal process will be very powerful and very valuable.

So, lets keep this very short and very simple.

What You Do to Empower Yourself and Change the World

What Can You Do Now?

The above steps are going to take you some time and space to fully execute. And that is awesome, our global dilemmas are not going away soon, and they really won’t change unless we execute from clear action.

In the meantime, it will be helpful for you to feel empowered and engaged.

1. Call your senator or government representative.

Call your government representatives today. You can call them any day you want and make a short, simple, and clear request of them:

“Hello ___________, my name is _________ and I’m a grateful constituent. I would like you to block __________’s nomination because they are unqualified. [and/or] I would like you to protect the rights of _________ because it infringes on my rights and it doesn’t represent my values.”

You can Google the number for your representative in your country if you don’t have it by the phone already.

If you live in the USA, call the United States Capitol switchboard: (202) 224-3121

2. Follow the leaders you admire on social media.

They are planning and acting and you can support them by listening when you have space.

FYI: These are some inspired leaders…

Carmen Perez: Executive Director Gathering for Justice
Opal Tometi: Human rights activist, founder of Black Lives Matter
Linda Sarsour: Executive Director of Arab-American Association
Vanessa Wruble: CEO Questlove: Socially Aware Media
Paola Mendoza: Award Winning Filmmaker
Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood
Ai-jen Poo, the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance
Marianne Williamson: Award winning Author and Activist
Gloria Steinem: Award winning Author and Activist
LaDonna Harris: President of Americans for Indian Opportunity
Delores Huerta: Humanitarian and Labor Rights Leader
Rachel Cargle: writer, lectures on the intersection of race and womanhood
Lizzie Carr Founder of Plastic Patrol, environmental activist
Nyle DiMarco American model, actor, and deaf activist
Befeqadu Hailu:  Award-winning writer, activist
Behrouz Boochani: Kurdish journalist, filmmaker, human rights activist
Charlie Dark: DJ and poet leading a diverse group of young activists
Franchesca Ramsey A comedian and activist.
Kat Blaque: An activist, and feminist, black trans writer
Mai Khoi : “Viet Nam’s Lady Gaga”, artist, activist, and musician
Nancy Herz: Norweigan human rights activist
Amnesty International: profiles leaders who are inspiring human rights

3. Make donations to the services and organizations you care about.

Even a $2 donation is action, support, and voice for what you care about.

This world is a mirror of our collective energy. In reality, how you feel and how you act is real power, and that gets reflected into the mirror called “the world”. You don’t have to act from fear, you can feel empowered and inspired to let clarity act. This will mirror change back to you and is the only way anything will or can change.

XK