What is Power?

Feriesy alert!

Lately I have been thinking a lot on the Feri phrase that we all pass along and say, “We don’t give away our power.”  On the surface, this sounds great; of course we don’t want to give away our power, and our culture has trained us since birth to do just that.  But the problem is when something becomes dogma, and people stop thinking about what something really means and just take it at 100% face value.  I have had many people ask me about this, as they have reached a point in their practice where their concept of not giving away power has become problematic.  We tend to not distinguish between different types of energy in our shared Feri technical language. 

 So what does that mean exactly?  What is OUR power? 

When we breathe in the air around us, does that make the air ours?  Well, maybe for a breaths amount of time, but do we hold our breath and never exhale so that we don’t give away our air? 

 We don’t just have one kind of energy running through us; our energy body is just as complex as our physical one.  The vital life energy that has a million names, but that I will call basic chi, flows through our body just like breath, and with our breathing.  You don’t own this energy any more than you own the air; it is constantly coming into and out of our body.  Holding onto this energy so that we “Don’t give up our power” is just as toxic to us as holding onto that one breath.  When we hold onto this energy psychic gunk and emotional residue build up like energetic carbon dioxide. 

Emotions are powerful, and we feel them strongly and fully, and then we let them go on the winds of our breath.

 The Power that we don’t surrender or give away is the Power of our Soul.  This is what I think is meant by Personal Power.  It is the part of your energy body that, for the time being at least, is totally you and yours.  The parts of our soul that splinter off into complexes, the parts that we give away when we surrender to a life that we don’t want to live but are too afraid to fight.  When we give in to the little voice that self sabotages your path to cultivating this power, that is when you give it away, and that is what we want to avoid.

But here’s the rub, I have never met a single person, Feri or otherwise, that NEVER gives away their personal power SOMETIMES.  We all do it, and so there is no point in berating oneself for behaving like a human being.  The idea is to be aware as much as possible.  When we are aligned, when we are centered and living in the moment, we can minimize the damage that our psyche does to itself.  We can call back the little bits of ourselves that we have splodged away over time.  We make Kala to repair and revitalize both our Chi and our Souls.  We monitor our actions and motivations, so that in the moment we can act, not react, to the stimulus around us.  When we take charge of our life, we stop giving away this power, while letting Chi flow through your Fetch like the blood flowing through the soul body of the Goddess that it is.  And then we fall again, and we pick ourselves up and start over, and each time it gets easier to do so. 

 So then how can you tell if a particular energy or feeling is part of your Chi or part of your Soul?  Only you can decide that, in the moment, in alignment, and when you have enough information.  Then you can Act with Your Power and know what is right for YOU.

The Way of Shitty Things

My personal work has been very Fetch based lately.  I have been using a different focus with some Taoist mechanics to really ground into Fetch first before making HA.  I have found it to be very helpful for sustainably maintaining connection to Godsoul more throughout the day, outside of meditation.  Upon rereading Etheric Anatomy, I remembered the part of my training that talked about a different way to focus on the 3 souls, that of their "aura" within the body.  The energy body of Fetch is the aura of your whole body that extends only about a half inch.  The body of this soul is the energy of your physical body, so I have been revisiting a lot of my qigong.  This ties in with healing from my injury as well.  I am far from perfect here, I have a lot of work to go, as part of caring for Fetch is caring for the physical body.  To be totally in 100% alignment at all times, one has to have a healthy physical body, which is very difficult.  There is no judgment here.  I haven't met a single person, initiate or not, who is 100% in alignment at all times, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't kindly strive for it.  There is always room for improvement in everything we do, we always are growing and moving.  When we think we have perfected something, it can become stagnant.  If you are perfect in something, why keep at it?  There is no way to improve perfection, so why try?  

 

Most of us expect self perfection, but self perfection is an illusion, so why do we torture ourselves?  

 

Because, for what ever reason, pain is the most effective catalyst for growth within the human condition, initially anyway.  I like to think that at some point growth will come for growth's sake, but in reality if I look back on my path, it has been the very painful times that have spurred the most movement.  If you are comfortable all the time, what is the drive to change?  What would make you get out of bed and do something?  Without discomfort, I suspect life wouldn't have evolved past single celled organisms. 

 

But does that mean we are doomed to suffer for our whole lives?  I guess that depends on who you ask.  I am personally not a Buddhist, so I think that the goal is not to escape pain, but to accept it and move on.  Our brains are wired to retain painful memory far more readily than pleasurable experiences.  Its evolutionary, we need to remember the painful things so we can avoid them in the future.  But we can make a concerted effort to remember the good things too!  Why do we forget amazing, ecstatic trance experiences, but remember the mean thing our mother did to us when we were 10?  The answer, with so many other things, is knowledge.  By being aware of how our brains work, we become less bound by their patterns.  By being in the moment, being aware, and being as aligned as we can be, we can make choices to change our patterns.  But it requires action, intent, and purpose. 

 

And then shitty things will still happen again.

 

But hopefully we can use the things we have learned to make those shitty events less painful and not hang on as long.  We can remember "Oh, I need to do Kala now.  I need to not throw this painful energy down into the subconscious abyss of Fetch.  I can look at it here, look at it now, and transform it.  I can take right action in the moment to minimize the fallout.  I can act in Love and in True Will.  I can Be!"