This truth is often missed. Perhaps your inner work’s momentum hasn’t quite gathered yet. Perhaps your struggles are still in your face. Delight in the fact that still elusive outward changes are a reflection of how you’re changing inside; they just haven’t quite taken form yet. And things may not be all that pretty inside. Instead of being neurotic that change hasn’t manifested, realize it’s in process; you’re working it.

The truth of the matter is that empowerment is ongoing. You have to climb a while before reaching a plateau. And then the path still continues.

Empowerment is personal power. It’s used for routine tasks such as getting up, making breakfast and going to work. It’s also used as self-determination and integrity. Personal power properly claimed and wielded, can bring you emotional freedom and peace of mind. There has to be a modicum of personal power to just survive, let alone thrive. Depending on your ‘story,’ your bio, you may have been raised in an environment that provided this. Then it can be built on. If not, and even if so most of us still need to work on it, personal power is personal: You must dust it off and let it shine. No one else can really do it for you.

Everything that we’ve shoved away, we shoved away with a curse; most of it came from the outside. With a curse comes a hiding, comes a shame. To dare to be seen and to speak from what’s authentic undoes a curse. It’s time to stop hiding behind some fiction of “bad me” and burn through to shining.  — Jeannie Zandi

With personal power comes tremendous trust and energy. You’re able to trust yourself, and life. It energizes your psyche which fuels your imagination, purpose and passions. It lifts you. Personal power can be a diamond in the rough, however. Its best use isn’t for you to impose your will over your circumstances. This can be destructive, short-lived, and in service of the ego.

Humility does not mean you think less of yourself. It means you think of yourself less. — Ken Blanchard

Once personal power is actuated and exercised regularly in a balanced way, it begins to become empowerment. Empowerment is a settled resource, while personal power can fluctuate. Empowerment is lifelong and more of the spirit. Personal power giving way to empowerment is the transition from ego to soul. The soul is truth. When you know your spiritual truth, all other lies fall off. It’s a knowing that can’t become unknown.

This is the pinnacle of empowerment, but it doesn’t have to be fully reached before being radically effective in your life. You need empowerment in your career, for personal growth, to heal, for spiritual development. If you’ve put in the work to find some psychological wholeness, and also reached into your soul and are on a spiritual path, the practices you’re engaged in, the realizations that come, and the way of being that establishes itself in you are all naturally empowering. Over time it becomes firmer and firmer, more and more knowable and reliable. There’s a gentleness to empowerment, a detachment. Even with annoyances or more substantial issues that may still come up, empowerment once accessed filters into your life, and eases your way.

Truth is empowering. Everytime you turn to truth, it empowers you more. Knowing your true nature, and before that growing in understanding it, being it, experiencing life from its perspective is empowering with each encounter. Each moment of spiritual practice polishes your diamond.

Fear does arise on the way to empowerment. Fear is a many-headed beast. Therefore courage is a must. Ironically, you need courage to be empowered, and empowered to show courage. They are inextricably linked. One feeds the other. Courage is a fire that burns away fear. Empowerment keeps the fire going.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. — Ambrose Redmoon

Power is essential to life. Every living thing needs to be powered somehow. Humans are powered by soul consciousness, light, breath, life force, and food and water. Of these, consciousness is the overseer and director, and life force is the ‘electricity’ and subtle hub making each item work with all the parts of a human.

If consciousness and life force are trapped in past hurts, or projected into future worries they aren’t available now where you need them. Their power is diminished greatly, and you’re left powerless in the present. Loss of power is much more than lack of energy. It can lead to depression, confusion, and low vibration choices which exacerbate your situation.

To reclaim and cycle your power in through your present moments is an act of empowerment. Feeding old ghosts or giving juice to future fear dragons is disempowering. Your power is needed now, here with you.

But the greatest power is always love. Power can be used in the service of love, but not vice versa. — Ram Dass

…

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© Pamir Kiciman 2010

This was the topic of the monthly dojo meeting I have with Reiki practitioners I’ve trained. Here are the salient points.

Humans have the unique ability to experience emotions. We think that because we have an emotional capacity, it has to be like a faucet that’s constantly on. Just because we have this ability doesn’t mean we have to be constantly emoting! The opposite also happens: emotions get shut off, like a faucet which is rusted and stuck. Emotions both delight and scare us. Some equate emotion with peak experience. Some are victim to their emotional nature. And some keep emotion firmly in lockdown.

Emotions are valuable. They are a large part of what makes us human, and they can enhance life experience, as well as provide helpful feedback. The trouble is, we indulge emotions too long too, often and turn the whole thing into a command performance for a drama award. We must learn the fundamental difference between ‘having an emotion’ and our capacity to feel.

Being able to feel is the real attribute that gives life to our emotional nature. Emotions themselves aren’t as important as our ability to feel. Sadness is an emotion we don’t necessarily want. Sadness can be turned into a happy feeling. Thus it’s our feeling capacity we must prioritize. Being able to have an emotion isn’t sourced in the emotion; it’s sourced in our ability to feel. Sadness and happiness are emotions on a continuous stream of feeling. We like happiness and don’t like sadness. It’s skillfulness in feeling which facilitates the transition from one to the other.

Our feeling nature is an intuitive faculty. It comes from a part of us that’s not limited to spacetime. What’s behind our feeling ability? Awareness. Just like feeling ability is behind emotion, awareness is behind our ability to feel. Without awareness we’d be automatons. There are degrees of awareness. To increase our degree of awareness, emotional healing is usually needed. We all have wounds that need healing. Unless this work is done, emotions continue to trap us in their ongoing cycle of charge and reactivity.

Once we make whole emotional wounds, other levels of awareness open up. The emotional heart must be made whole before the spiritual heart becomes available and real. On one end of the emotional spectrum we remain in churning waters, unable to escape. On the other end, we’re happy, even exulted. Beyond either is a whole range of uncaused feeling.

Peace is such an uncaused feeling. It’s sourceless. It certainly doesn’t come from the emotional heart, or the human mind. Peace is simply there. We can access peace, feel it and embody it. We want to be clear and available enough in our emotional heart, so as to feel the peace that’s constantly beckoning us. Peace is a feeling state. It’s a state of being. States of being don’t become part of our experience when there’s still a lot of emotional crud to disperse, or we operate only at an emotional level, without knowledge of the whole range.

‘Emotion’ and ‘feeling’ aren’t synonymous. Feeling is a spiritual faculty sourced in self-reflective awareness. Awareness and its ‘tools’ lead to healing, as well as point to uncaused states such as peace or joy which inspire and propel our personal evolution.

continued →

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While I write, I’m listening to NPR’s stream of the Newport Jazz Festival. This too is a form of receiving through the ears and the soul. As a longtime jazz aficionado, I’ve never been to this historic festival but since I’m open to technology and noticed updates on Twitter about the streaming, my weekend is being enriched.

Receiving is traditionally pooh-poohed. Probably because it’s a developing nation, Hindu spiritual teachers invariably advocate feeding the poor. In Christianity there’s the ethic of charity. Even in social media, the blogosphere and new business models, the mantra is give, give, give! And giving is vital. Giving is a great way to live. It’s necessary, powerful and inspirational. We’d be nowhere without givers.  The question is, can there be true giving without also receiving?

Culturally, morally and spiritually we’re programmed against receiving. There’s a lot of judgment against receiving. It’s deemed unsavory. Receiving has been made “wrong.”

• Help and serve others.
• Share and give.
• Don’t be selfish.
• If I accept something, I’ll be expected to return in kind.
• Accepting something is a sign of weakness.
• Be self-sufficient.
• Don’t be indebted to anyone.

This is all one-sided. The ‘flow’ is absent. Without flow there’s stoppage, blockage, constipation and rigidity. We become dry and humorless. Our edges get sharper and sharper and pretty soon everyone is pointedly staying out of our way!

And it goes against natural law. Flow can’t be one way. Penetrating and yielding, action and stillness, the lingam and the yoni, giving and accepting, speaking and listening, pushing and pulling…the list is endless.

Another layer of this is that we all have broken parts, parts that say, “I don’t deserve,” “This will never happen for me,” “Everyone else has better luck!”

The universe will fill your cup — if you carry a big cup, a little cup, or a thimble! — Sonia Choquette

There’s this too: Imagine you’re a person who has a one-way flow, outward…You like to meditate, enjoy spiritual practices, are into healing, want to be a better human being. Yet after sincere attempts your practices seem to hit a wall, time after time. There’s an opening, a great sigh and then the same humdrum returns. It’s discouraging and confusing.

The divine qualities you so want to engage can’t enter if you’re ability to receive needs work. If that’s the case, take that into your practice, bring the light of awareness to that until there’s a balance. Then see how your inner experiences broaden. Notice the wisdom and power that comes through, the sweetness of unattached love, the mesmerizing light and arcing joy.

Rumi says it really well:

Open the window of your heart

Do not worry if our harp breaks
thousands more will appear.
We have fallen in the arms of love where all is music.
If all the harps in the world were burned down,
still inside the heart
there will be hidden music playing.
Do not worry if all the candles in the world flicker and die
we have the spark that starts the fire.
The songs we sing
are like foam on the surface of the sea of being
while the precious gems lie deep beneath.
But the tenderness in our songs
is a reflection of what is hidden in the depths.
Stop the flow of your words,
open the window of your heart and
let the spirit speak.

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When it comes to healing, life seems to do all the ‘beating’ necessary to bring the unhealed out to the surface. This is a good thing. Then life sits back and watches to see if you avoid direct contact. When you don’t engage the healing in front of you life seems to fan the flames, so to speak, until you do.

Then the tendency is to go into a thinking mode of, “What’s going on here? I’m falling apart. It gets worse everyday!” and you continue avoiding the healing that’s in front of you. Avoidance leads to intensification of symptoms, relationships, situations, conditions, patterns. The more intense it gets, the more dramatic it becomes, and you add a good dose of drama too, because that’s another sure way to not engage the healing that’s calling you.

© Pamir Kiciman 2010

What exactly stops you from stepping up to healing? You feel it’s safer, easier, less work, less painful to avoid direct contact. You’re mistaken. Beating around the healing bush is a self-preservation strategy of the ego to not succumb, to retain control. Unfortunately, in so doing it perpetuates pain. It keeps you stuck in the brambles.

Brambles of shame, suffering, guilt, hurt, wounds, abuse, unforgiveness and untruth. Brambles that become your story to the exclusion of everything else you are!

This story is a limiting one. One that snags you on your way, keeps you captive and bound. It’s a story of spinning your wheels and getting nowhere; throwing mud in every direction. Throwing the mud of projection, the mud of blame, the mud of self-pity. All that kinetic energy in a closed loop of increasing drama!

If you but answer the call of healing, a pathway opens up in the underbrush. There’s a direction and a magnetic pull at the other end. The closed loop burning itself out becomes an open system with options. Possibilities arise that couldn’t be known in the thick of crisis living.

Please realize that when you beat around the bush of healing, you deplete and cannot replenish life force. Thus you must source it elsewhere and that elsewhere is power, albeit negative power, derived from people around you dancing in lockstep to your series of crises. In other words, you draw power by being a victim, which is a dead end.

Do you see the vicious cycle and how many rings it has? The fear of healing is nothing compared to the fear avoiding healing installs in your being. Give it up! Relent! Succumb! Embrace healing and let it embrace you.

Healing is a holy encounter full of perfumed grace. — PAMIR

Work with me:

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This is dedicated to my mother, a good friend, and my paternal grandparents for whom I was woefully unavailable, as well as all caregivers.

___________________________________________________________________

Are you the caregiver for a dependent? Does it feel unrewarding? Is it burdensome?

Well, take a load off. It wouldn’t be caregiving if it was all fun and games. You’re not a robot. Sometimes, perhaps often it’s not going to feel good. At all. Ease up and be good to yourself. It is a great and arduous service.

Here are four qualities to cultivate as you navigate this experience:

• Compassion
• Detachment
• Recognition
• The long view

Compassion

Compassion is a selfless form of passion, a self-indulgent emotion transformed by wisdom into empathy for the suffering of others. The emotional energy of compassion is every bit as potent as ordinary passion, but rather than scattering energy and disrupting equanimity with bouts of unrestrained emotion, compassion focuses energy and motivates intent to apply one’s wisdom and other resources towards helping people.

–Daniel Reid

Compassion is an essential life quality. If it can help the Dalai Lama keep his equanimity, it can help you. When compassion becomes an anchored part of your being, your human heart becomes greater. It is no longer so little and fragile. There is this grid that becomes available, like steel rebars that support concrete buildings. Except this steel is steely without losing feeling; strong without being harsh; immaterial but so very present; long lasting without loss of meaning.

Compassion makes the heart sacred and it is from there that you serve, not from your personal heart. Compassion is the extra hand to carry, ear to listen, pep to finish, patience to linger, forgiveness to smile, and surplus kindness.

And it isn’t only for the other. It is for both of you. Compassion is available to you and you are in as much need of it as your dependent. Compassion doesn’t separate and classify. There isn’t any hierarchy in it. Compassion isn’t allocated by approval, you don’t have to qualify.

You do have to make yourself available to it.

Detachment

Learn to detach…Don’t cling to things, because everything is impermanent…But detachment doesn’t mean you don’t let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate fully. That’s how you are able to leave it… Take any emotion–love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions–if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them–you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that love entails. But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, ‘All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment.’

–Mitch Albom

Detachment is a place of self-control and objectivity. It is the starting place of the long view. When detached your goat is ungettable! Your buttons are unavailable and you protect yourself. There’s fluidity of motion and action and patience is effortless. Detachment allows service to come through you, rather than from you.

Caregiving is a series of tasks, on one level. These tasks may become tiresome and put pressure on your time and energy. Yet the tasks are unavoidable. When approached with resentment, dread, inattention and emotional escalation, you’re tired and unavailable from the get-go.

Detachment creates spaciousness in heart and mind, and powers your limbs for the tasks at hand.

Recognition

I wasn’t able to find an appropriate quote for what I want to say here, so this one is mine:

Recognize that everything that rubs you the wrong way about your dependent is an unhealed part in them expressing itself, crying out for help, looking to be recognized and loved, to be heard and held, to be made whole however desperately.

Recognition is to see the person behind the dependency. More, to see the soul behind the person. Recognition is to not equate the person with their suffering. Suffering is part of the person, but it is not the person. It is something they are going through and they are in fear. So are you probably.

When you recognize what is actually happening, your buttons are again unavailable, your goat is happily bleating and there is more spaciousness. The way your dependent makes you feel is not personal. It is about them and it simply is. You must let their behavior bounce off of you, for they can’t help it.

The other side of recognition is to be very aware of your own resources and limits. Like compassion, recognition works both ways. Where do you stop and the other person begins? You may be a caregiver, but you retain autonomy and the two of you haven’t merged.

Recognize not only your limits but also your own needs. Endlessly giving doesn’t work for either party, quality care suffers and so do you. This requires a promise. A promise you keep and act upon. It is simple but you must be resolute. If you need a fill-in, be resolute about that too.

The long view

Kalpa: An exceptionally-long (but varying) period of time in Hindu and Buddhist thought.

Every 100 years, a bird flies over the summit of Mount Sumeru and, in so doing, brushes the pinnacle with a red silk scarf held in its beak. A kalpa is the period of time it takes to wear the mountain down to nothing by this activity.

No, that is not how long you have to give care! It is only a lens to help you get perspective. The burden of care you’re giving is circumscribed in the temporal. There is much more to reality than the temporal.

Service is merit and merit is spiritual currency you want to have as you navigate eternity.

Not only that, but when you serve meritoriously it gives the served an opportunity to grow and evolve too. This may be very hidden and completely unobservable, but do not despair. Practicing awareness enhancers such as compassion, detachment and recognition creates a crucible of heart energies and thoughts for personal growth and spiritual development to take place, even if the other person is not actively engaged.

Furthermore, the way you view the person you care for, how you approach and interact determines greatly what responses and reactions you receive. If you think they are cranky and demanding, then that’s what they will be. You get what you expect. One way to avoid this is to expect something different. Envision and affirm more productive and cooperative behavior and interaction.

Hold this person in a new light, the light of possibilities. They may be entrenched in their patterns and misery, but you can trust that they would rather not be. They would rather have dignity returned and show appreciation, share a smile and a warm look.

Create the space of sacred heart for mutual acknowledgment, trust and solidarity. You’re in it together and the sooner you surrender power struggles, the more rewards there will be. This may include you neutralizing any power plays coming from the person in need of your care. Yes, it seems like you have to do all the work, all the inner work, and all the outer work. Yet, right there a gate opens to a garden where the sun shines and the beauty of flowers is available equally to both of you.

I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.

– Kahlil Gibran

Anything that invests your energy and awareness outside the present moment is not a practice of wisdom. It means that you’re not present to that which worries you.

This is not to say that we don’t have concerns in general, or in our practice of Reiki with others (others including our perts and animals). The question is what serves the life form you’re helping? Does your worry serve their healing, wellness and happiness? Is worry a healing agent or does it get in the way?

The answer is clear. Growing into non-worrying is a practice. This practice begins and ends with the wisdom of knowing that you are not responsible for the results of sharing Reiki with others, or the health of the recipient. You are only responsible for the quality and consistency of being the best Reiki practitioner you can be.

Usui Sensei kept it quite simple:

For today only: Do not anger, Do not worry,
Be humble,
Be honest in your work
Be compassionate to yourself and others.

Although anger is a different emotion than worry, its effect is the same: It removes you from the present. Anger is mostly about the past and worry is mostly about the future. Both are not the present and the present requires your full awareness.

Who you share Reiki with requires your full awareness in the present.

Someone I know said it like this:

We’re probably given such challenges in order to learn how to balance the tension of opposites, to hold both sides of a situation and be strong in the middle of it.

She’s right on! As practitioners of spiritual and healing arts we’re the clear, pure, central conduit in a world of duality. Anger and worry muddy up the conduit. These two emotions also wear us down, tearing at our birthright of true power and love.

“I’ve developed a new philosophy…I only dread one day at a time.”
–Charlie Brown (Charles Schulz)

© Pamir Kiciman 2007

Related:
Ever-present Love
Threshold of Healing
Spiritual Love
The Self
Self & Divine
Existence
Wholeness / Duality
Order & Unity
Rounds of Incarnations
Pain
Searching

Then courage in the from of an honestly raw accounting of the mess you’re in. This is what I call the ‘blood and guts of healing.’ It need not stop there. In my case and the possibility exists for everyone, taking responsibility for myself lead to something much scarier: embracing my true nature. It launched me into a quest, which wouldn’t have been possible without the ‘first’ courage.

One of the biggest things we run from is our true nature. Afterall drama is so much easier. You know it inside out, can give a command performance in your sleep, and really validate how miserable your life is like 2+2=4, no room for error. This is the persona I’ve donned, these are my poisons and you better get the hell outta my way! I’m running from my Self and even Olympic athletes don’t have the steroids I do.

I did that into my early-mid-thirties. Amongst many other things. It was hedonist, escapist, lustful, fun, utterly dysfunctional, I loved and wept and guffawed, opined, judged, raged, gave and stole, alienated and hurt people and myself, danced my tush off…and…

One dawn after Hurricane Andrew had torn through Southern Florida, I woke up. The proverbial light bulb. And that was still way back in the dark days, when the courage I knew I’d have to muster terrified me.

You have to be brave to have courage. Ironic isn’t it?

Folks, I’ve news for you. There’s so much unseen Grace. Divine intervention is waiting like a flickering candle about to drown in its own wax at the edges of our willingness. Initially it only takes your cupping the flame to steady it against the draft, to tease the wick out of the wax. That’s all. That moment of caring attention where you’re quiet and still enough that your true nature can enter, after its years of knocking and show you your colors.

Then the journey begins of healing the wounds of the human, and even more fear-wrought, that foundation propelling you into Self.

Self can be described in many ways and it’s not so important to do that here. What’s important is that upping the ante is courage on an entirely different level. This is the courage to own that while you were broken, your spirit never was; while you believed you were flesh and bones, your soul smiled and winked; while you felt worthless, gold poured into your heart; while you felt unloved, you were cradled in patient compassion; while your mind was weak, your consciousness was fortified; while you were in darkness, the Light buoyed you; while you were lost, wisdom protected you.

I know this. As a child, even though my personality never took it seriously, even though it was by rote and I thought I didn’t know how to pray, my soul took over and prayed and prayed and prayed everytime my house was filled with voices bellowed, things smashed, doors slammed, love crushed and laughter squelched. When later I consciously prayed my soul just beamed warmly.

In the physical world, you can’t ignore a wall. In the spiritual life, you can’t ignore Eternity. Eternity in this sense is the absence of time, not an endless span of time. Eternity is as real as the street you live on. Your street exists in Eternity. So there are two choices. Numb and run, and my god are there countless ways to do that! Consumerism is geared for that alone.

Or, allow the bravery of your true nature to infuse you and take the lead. This is going to require spiritual backbone, vigilance, recommitments, endurance, sourcing courage again and again, along with a host of other resources. But it then becomes a meritorious life. And simply happy and healthy.

That’s the one I chose, choose and re-choose.

I’ll end with a haiku of mine from way before my dawn, a kind of precursor:

hide and seeking
our souls
games people will play

© Pamir Kiciman 2007

Read the original meme “What Gives You Courage?” by Lorraine Cohen

© Pamir Kiciman 2007

Love simplifies all.

I love for I know only good comes to me.
Where there is love I am safe.
Where there is love I can trust.

Unconditional love fosters unconditional healing. Unconditional love is Divine love, and it permeates everything. Such love is hidden and scarce, yet contains all.

© Pamir Kiciman 2007