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.