Stop Giving Your Power Away (Personal Development Wisdom Snippets) | #613

[Agi Keramidas]
Welcome to Personal Development Mastery Podcast, and this is another snippet of wisdom where I select my favorite, most insightful moments from previous episodes. Let's dive right in.

[Rachel Harrison]
What I think is so fascinating about emotional well-being is that we tend to put so much energy on the outside for our emotional well-being. And one of the things I talk a lot about is that we give our power away. We give our power away by needing others to feel a certain way, needing others to provide for us something emotionally in a certain way, for the world to be a certain way.

You know, in politics right now, it's so divided here in the United States. So you know, it's like, if this wouldn't be like this, then I could be like this, right? So you're handing your well-being to somebody else.

And one of the tenets that is important in soul recovery came from the tenet of 12-step, which is to admit that we're powerless. And when you're an addict, you have to truly admit that you're powerless over your addiction. If I think for one minute that now that I've been sober for six and a half years, and I'm good now, right?

Like I'm emotionally good. I'm strong. Like I can have a glass of wine every once in a while.

I'm full of it. I have to admit that I'm powerless and that that is not, I can't have that. When you have an addict in your life, you have to admit with the same tenacity that you're powerless over somebody else's addiction.

And in soul recovery, you put addiction on the shelf because truth is everybody has addiction in their lives somewhere, but put it on the shelf. When we look at spirituality, all the spiritual masters teach us that we are truly powerless over everything outside of ourself. This is one of the major tenets of Buddhism, that life is suffering, that our suffering is attachment.

And our attachment is the attachment to it being different. And so we try to exert this energy. We try to exert this power, this illusion that we have the ability to control something outside of ourself, and it erodes our well-being.

And so I think the key to really looking at our well-being is to begin to look at, am I trying to control the uncontrollable? Am I trying to be attached to an outcome or to a circumstance or to how someone's showing up and in that, am I giving my power away? If we're powerless over everything outside of ourself, but we're asking it to tell us how we are, we don't have our innate well-being in our hands.

And so through this experience, what's fascinating is I'm still married to the same man, 32 years later, and we still have some of the same issues that used to drive me crazy. And they don't make me crazy anymore because I'm more present with just what is. And this concept that we are these souls in these human sleeves, in this incarnation, and we're all just here figuring our own stuff out.

And so when we try to believe that we're like, try to crunch it all into this small space to make it certain, to make it what we want, we're attached to an outcome, we're attached to how we want it to be, and we're missing the flow. And so for me, well-being has been around being so much more open, so much more flexible, so much more allowing of other people to be themselves. And that has given me more strength to have understanding of where boundaries need to be, where I need to choose how I'm going to show up, who I'm going to show up with.

It's changed everything. I'm in charge of my well-being.

[Agi Keramidas]
I will ask again in a different way. In order to have the self-awareness, it is not easy to step back into the moment and realize that this is happening. So is there something that you would say as a method, something to bring you back to have that self-awareness?

[Rachel Harrison]
Yeah. So I love that. I mean, I think the first thing is awareness, the word awareness.

That if we're really honest, most of us don't really see how much we're trying to control around us. So the first real honest step is to start to look more deeply at where you're finding discomfort, dissatisfaction, or irritation. If you are irritated, you are wanting it to be different.

And you're driving and you think, look at all these drivers, I can't believe this driver did this thing. I can't believe they're swerving. I can't believe they cut into my lane.

In that moment, when you step into your spiritually grounded self and you recognize this tool, which is to say out loud, I'm powerless over how this person is driving. I'm powerless over how many cars are on the highway right now. I'm powerless over the city's planning of how they have this traffic pattern going.

I'm powerless over how this person is irritated in the car. And instead of just saying it as if like, I'm giving my power away, I'm powerless, you really are actually bringing your power and your energy back to yourself and letting go of this tightness that you have that thinks, why can't that person drive like that? Well, you take that into your life and you move into your relationships and you use that same sense of kindness and compassion to release the energy that you have around the people in your life.

I'm powerless over if my husband's in a good mood or a bad mood today. I'm powerless over how he feels about his job. I'm powerless over whether he's stressed right now.

And we realize that we don't think that we're powerless. We think it's our responsibility or job to take care of those people and to do for them. So this tool of taking your own energy back by saying this mantra, which isn't about being weak.

It's about releasing this energy that we're trying to fix and do for everyone else. And all of our energy gets depleted because it's everywhere else worrying about trying to control them instead of coming back to yourself.

[Agi Keramidas]
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