True power is the experience of volition. Ultimate power is the power to choose to be with life exactly as life is. When we do this, we experience power as strength, a fundamental feeling of “rightness,” vitality in the body, and the capacity to magnetize the world in a way that is congruent and harmonious with our deeper desires. The ways to access power are:
We feel powerless because we feel life is happening to us. Caught in a trance of our own creation, we believe we have given our power to another person or experience. We alternate between feeling at the mercy of, or feeling as though we are being forced into doing something, so we fight, block, or dig in.
This feeling of powerlessness is the result of operating out of accord with a life that rewards by powering us. We demonstrate an unwillingness to make the descent into the body to break the spell and access our power. As a result, any descent or loss of control causes a collapse of consciousness.
Compensatory power is where we begin to activate power. However, compensatory power hasn’t fully evolved; instead it’s more a sensing of our impact. One of its primary expressions is commerce—we may feel powerful by withholding, causing another to suffer as a result. Women often withhold sex, approval, and the emanation of turn-on from men. Men often withhold vulnerability and intimacy.
Compensatory power fails to acknowledge that all experience is shared experience. To acknowledge this would be a realization of true power wherein the rewards are intrinsic, meaning they are self-rewarding: nothing else is needed because the experience itself is whole and complete.
Extrinsic rewards, on the other hand, are those that come from outside the experience, such as receiving a promotion and using that as a sign of power. When we feel a lack of power, our bottom line is the question, “How will I get mine?” And the result is a power play or power struggle as we look for rewards outside of connection itself, without cultivating internal power. With this mindset, we confuse power with authority.
Power is a surge within the body that gives us the strength to carry out the wisdom that emanates from within it. Authority is the force the rational mind employs to carry out idea-based rules of consciousness in a manner dis- connected from the body. Authority is therefore finite while true power is infinite.
In practice, we learn to open up to this raw power that, because of the circumstances of everyday life, can easily erode into excitement, anxiety, or fear—emotions that share the same energy, only laden with residue. In practice, we learn how to be with the raw form as a purifying force rather than as something that merely sustains our congestion.
Will to power is an aspect of power where raw power has been turned up beyond our capacity to steer it. Its aim isn’t to get something, but it’s a drive to express ourselves that has not been given the brakes. This kind of power can be beautiful and dangerous.
Will to power is a drive that causes us to create beyond what our bodies can withstand; it is behind much of what we know as great art or innovation. But without this power’s full connection to a consciousness that can steer it, it can run over people and cause damage in situations where the pursuit overrides the needs of the moment.
Evolved power is an elegant system where consciousness makes the trek down into the body, fully hooks into its depths, and agrees to serve with its vision. This is where the vision and the capacity to steer and navigate with care from above are met with the drive for intimacy that would otherwise transgress boundaries.
Consciousness adds a brake as well as a gas pedal to the experience of power, allowing us to use it with precision and resonance. Power can now be employed in its deepest realization: empowering others on their terms. This is where we sense true unconditional power, the sense that no one is doing anything for or to anyone, only that this is what there is to do.