Power and Purpose
“Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about …changes.
…One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic.
Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
I’m going to invite you to re-read this quote from the Reverend Dr, Martin Luther King, Jr in a few minutes from the perspective of personal inquiry and neuroplastic healing:
Remember what we reflected on in last month's blog “What are you practicing?”
We are in fact practicing something all the time - whether or not we are conscious of that.’
Looking at ‘purpose’ might help us get more conscious around why we are practicing what we are practicing. And this may show us something more about our internal sense of power and love.
As you re-read Dr King’s quote, reflect on
“What am I achieving?” Make a list.
“What emotions motivate my choices and activities?”
“What are the changes I am bringing about?”
“What nourishes the strength I need for achieving this change?”
“How do I offer this nourishment to myself?”
“What does love look like in my life?”
“Is some of my movement correcting everything that stands against love?
Inside?
If it is helpful, we can see this love as Agape from the Greek "to greet with affection."
This kind of love has also been translated [by the Christian mystic St Thomas Aquinas] “to will the good of others.”
This is where things can get complicated if we did not experience our own needs perceived and responded to in our earliest development.
When our emotional experiences and needs are responded to in our early development, we become wired into our sense of the field of “good will.”
If this responsiveness was not our dominant experience, the “good of this one” may be invisible on our radar as we are busy achieving purposes that do not include our own well being.
I would modifying Thomas Aquinas’ translation of agape: “to will the good of all, including ourselves.”
I now see an instruction from my first Zen teacher, Sobun Katherine Thanas, in the late 90s, as a clear foreboding of my, yet to manifest, chronic health challenges.
She reflected to me in a formal teacher student meeting, “Beth, I see that you misunderstand the teaching of compassion.”
I was shocked. I was active in the practice community, the librarian and part time bookkeeper and had other small roles to support practice in the community and I worked at a local clinic with people in pain.
Katherine went on to say, “True compassion starts right here.”
And she pointed in the dim light from below her soft yet sober face at me.
I was dumbstruck.
This had never occurred to me.
When I could finally speak, I said simply,
“I don’t know how to do that.”
Let’s look back at some vocabulary in the powerful teaching from Dr King:
Justice can be defined as ‘the treatment of individuals fairly.’
According to Wikipedia, in a 6th-century codification of Roman Law, justice is defined as
"the constant and perpetual will to render to each his due"
The same principle of a coherent field of compassion, including ‘this human right here,’ applies to justice especially when we are considering health and well-being.
So, what to do?
The 13th century Sufi poet Rumi instructed:
‘It is not for you to seek for love, but to seek for all you have built in its way.’
We can see Dr King’s words “Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.” mirroring this wisdom.
We, our survival reflexes in fact, have ‘built’ protection, unconsciously and reflexively of course, against the painful internal experiences that we felt when love and justice were not able to inform our environment.
And, yes, that protection, that bracing, heartbreakingly comes at the expense of our life force. Our energy gets invested in maintaining the freezing, internal holding, bracing or withdrawing responses.
To dissolve or unlock these protections requires a felt sense of what it was that was missing in that early environment that left us in need of such internal protection in the first place.
So bringing love and/or justice into our connection with a part of us that is frozen or caught in a tangle of tension can dissolve the barriers developed as protection.
Those formative moments when the absence of love, attunement and protective care required some internal protective response - a tension, a numbing, a withdrawal, a tourniquet against the feeling of pain, a barrier - can in fact be updated.
The formula is precise.
What was absent + attuned connection “greeting with affection” + the protective response built to protect the pain experienced in that absence = healing [definition: returning to wholeness]
Of course, heartbreakingly, the protective barriers are the very obstacles in the way of love now entering the parts of ourselves that needed and did not experience protection or attuned love/presence and justice/responsiveness in our early environments.
So if our purpose is to heal, to become more available to love and life, as we make contact with these protective barriers, we can bring attuned connection to the protection itself with the purpose of ‘good will.’ In this way we reestablish trust, open the possibility for connection and barriers dissolve.
What would it look like to re-orient ourselves toward this purpose?
What fuel would we need to become the one who can offer this love and ‘fair treatment’ to the parts of us caught inside protective barriers?
….to be motivated by love and justice, as a reclaiming of our power.
What do we need to rest into, to nourish us, so that we can develop this sense of love and recover our ability to achieve purpose, to recover our power, our aliveness?
Some of my osteopathic teachers call this source of nourishment the ‘fluid field’, ‘the original matrix,’ ‘life force.’
It is the field certain osteopathic practitioners rest in and become a conduit to in order to bring what has been missing to meet the patterns of protection, contraction, distortion in a living being.
This movement in my body feels expansive, flowing, alive… like my body responding to love, really.
No effort is required.
Just presence, awareness and attention - resting in ‘the field’ and being in gentle responsive contact with a ‘protected’ location with no agenda to change anything can be transformative.
Your access to the ‘fluid field’ might come through tuning into a memory and live-streaming that in your felt experience: memories & present time experiences of being in nature, the ocean or with a particular being or color that brings the felt experience to our system: “‘I can just be here exactly as I am’ can be opened to - like opening our pores to let the goodness in, intentionally and then staying with the pleasant sensations of our body’s response. This is called savoring.
It’s easy to overlook at the pace we collectively move these days. And your deep brain will never compel you to do this because it’s in the survival business, not the refueling, nourishing, achieving purpose business.
So we need to be intentional about this, maybe even make it a habit.
The imaginal or live experiences that support us in accessing this felt sense of okayness - a signaling to the deep brain that protection is not needed in this moment - are called resources.
What brings your system into connection with a state of ease or presence can be very personal so feel your way to memories of times you felt you could let down, just be, felt deeply present…resting in a peak moment, awe, a religious or spiritual presence or being.
What gives you even a drop of that sense?
This is the way, the way back to our power, to our connectedness, to nourishment for the strength for change.
Not through expending more effort, more energy; but by slowly remembering, through this nourishment, that who we really are is a location in the great matrix of life, with access to boundless resources and that when we are experiencing tension, pain, symptoms, stress, we are receiving communication from a part of ourselves that does not have access to those resources.
If that access to resource or ease is not available through our own direct connection, and our purpose is to heal, our power is to reach out to / to open to what or who helps reconnect us to this experience of ease so that we can be the conduit to ‘good will’ and ‘love,’ bringing a sense of safety, connection and belonging to the parts of ourselves that cannot access this nourishment alone.
