Have you ever noticed how much of your own energy appears to be directed toward trying to change the behaviors, beliefs, and feelings of other people? Have you ever wondered whether that is indeed the best use of your awesome energy and your precious life?

What happens when we decide to reclaim our right to use our own creative potential in an entirely different way? Should we make such a choice, what might it look like for us to reclaim our personal power and then consciously redirect it? And toward what would we redirect it, if not toward “fixing” or “changing” others so that this world would finally be a better place for us all to share?

These questions have lately come alive within me. Why? Because after many years of “helpfully” trying to change other people in order to create a better world that will work for everyone, it at last became clear to me that the only behaviors, thoughts, and feelings I truly have any power to change are my own.

Additionally, I have realized that the only way I can influence (not change) anyone or anything else is by being true to my own inner process of self-discovery, and through setting an example that others may someday choose to follow. What though, do I do with all this newly recovered energy and potential if I no longer use it to try and fix, control, or destroy all those “awful others?” That question deserves much deeper investigation.

Squandering My Awesome Power

When I delve, deeply and honestly, into my own historic behaviors, thoughts, and feelings, I can appreciate the countless ways I’ve squandered my awesome power. I can also appreciate that I did so quite earnestly, and with the best of intentions. I can therefore forgive myself for doing so, especially since trying to change others (through the use of physical violence, bludgeoning them with intellectual reasons, or applying painful emotional pressures to bear on their psyches) appears to be quite common in human society.

I further feel intense self-compassion whenever I think about how much time and energy I’ve expended to accomplish so very little, and when I further realize that in my liberal use of force to try and solve problems I may have inadvertently helped to create even greater problems than those I was hoping to solve. How though, do I translate this newfound compassion for, and forgiveness of, my own behavioral errors into a brand-new way of being—one that honors the sacred power that life has so trustingly vested in me?

Faithfully Observing My Own Actions

It begins with me being willing to say, “I don’t know.” For in truth, I do not know all that I’m capable of achieving once I redirect my attention to faithfully observing my own actions, noting my own impulses to judge and fix, and spotting how often I criticize others (be it aloud or internally) for how they are choosing to be.

I am further discovering that simply by noticing these behavioral patterns I gain the freedom to shed my impulses to make others over in my own image, or to my personal likeness.

I am also noticing how much awesome creative potential flows through me and into the world when I simply ask, “What is THIS that is showing up, and what does it need in this moment?”

As I make that simple inquiry an integral aspect of my own life practice, something amazing is beginning to happen. I am discovering that I possess absolute power to realign my own inner attitudes toward reality. Life moves through me more fully when it’s no longer being compressed, channeled, or confined to flowing in ways that my mind asserts it ought to go. Instead, I gift the boundless power of life permission to move through me—as its temporary human expression—unimpeded by my personal ignorance, judgments, or beliefs about where it “ought” to be directed.

Reclaiming My Own Inner Power

I am choosing to invite into myself, as the first step in reclaiming my own inner power, the trust that life always knows exactly where it needs to go, and why. That trust enables me to open myself more fully to inspiration from the living field, and to receive whatever shows up from a state of willingness to commune. In that, I gain the courage to remain anchored in the present moment so that life’s energy can maintain a stable flow through me. And because I feel anchored in the moment (regardless of how it’s presenting itself) I can always invite compassion for myself to arise when it feels needed, as well as compassion for all who may be struggling to master their own internal energy potential.

Because love arises wherever compassion is found, love fuels this new approach and magnetizes my awareness through the power of my own heart. And because love is present, kindness then becomes the default tool I seek to use while communing with other life forms. I choose kindness because I have discovered it makes room for patience to forge a resonant field while seemingly disparate life forms search for common ground upon which to commune.

The Gift

The gift of this approach? I find that when I allow patience to assist me in forging the common ground necessary for living in communion with disparate life forms, I empower myself to be peaceful within—and thus to be peaceful without—while life unfolds.

These days, I trust life to have my back while I practice shifting my own internal energy. I am striving, within the eternally present and infinitely creative energy field of life, to explore my own highest and best capacities to be love, fully embodied.

I experiment with my own potential secure in the realization that life indeed knows what it is doing; and that—as life—full access to life’s power of love has ever been my birthright. By relaxing and allowing life to “do me, through me” I am experiencing the unfettered power of unconditional love in the only moment that ever truly exists—this precious NOW.

And since it is eternally NOW, I realize that I can never fail to create more love in this world. I can only temporarily miss the mark—which then teaches me how to improve as I progress.

© Copyright by Eileen Workman.
Reprinted with permission from the author's blog.

Book by this Author

Raindrops of Love for A Thirsty World
by Eileen Workman

A timely spiritual guide to surviving and thriving in today’s pervasive, gloomy atmosphere of alienation and fear, Raindrops of Love For a Thirsty World, lays out a path to life long self-actualization, and reconnection through a shared consciousness.

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About the Author

Eileen Workman graduated from Whittier College with a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and minors in economics, history, and biology. She began working for Xerox Corporation, then spent 16 years in financial services for Smith Barney. After experiencing a spiritual awakening in 2007, Ms. Workman dedicated herself to writing “Sacred Economics: The Currency of Life” as a means for inviting us to question our longstanding assumptions about the nature, benefits, and genuine costs of capitalism. Her book focuses on how human society might move successfully through the more destructive aspects of late-stage corporatism. Visit her website at www.eileenworkman.com

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