Hello!
Wow; what a couple of weeks I’ve been through!
How about you? I know that lots of people seem to be going through lots at the moment!
Every time I launch one of my courses, I go through a healing process about whatever the course is about.
So, with courses starting often, I’ve been through another process around power.
Have you ever found that whatever it is you need help with healing, that the world seems to help you in doing that healing?
That’s what I’ve found.
Oh my goodness!
There were powerlessness sweet spots everywhere!
My car lost all power, and has been at the garage for three weeks!
My internet lost speed and connection!
Everything I aimed to do, I seemed to be thwarted at every attempt.
I couldn’t upload my courses.
I needed to cycle to a friend’s house (no car!) to run webcasts.
My shoe broke when I needed to cycle back home.
I spent hours on the phone to my internet provider, in tears, trying to get it to work.
I walked my dog to the vet only to find that the appointment had been cancelled.
I cycled to my Love Being a Mother group (no car!), and on one path there was a swarm of bees, so I went the other way, and a big crow swooped me and scratched me as I cycled home.
My daughter and I had planned a girly movie night when my son was at his dad’s one night, and iTunes wouldn’t work, despite all my efforts. So we didn’t get to watch our movie.
Luckily, it was school holidays here last week, and my daughter was out every day at ballet classes, and my son was playing with the neighbours on holidays, so I could really just be with this powerlessness sweet spot; I wasn’t really in the parent place anyway; I had gone back to being a little child.
I cried and cried so much last week.
It seemed to me that whatever I did, I couldn’t make an impact.
It seemed that however hard I tried, I couldn’t do what I wanted to do.
It seemed that I just didn’t have any power to get anything to work.
And of course, with my power portal process, that I’ve talked with you about in a previous letter, I did lots of healing with all of this.
What it really reminded me of was the sense of being in that incubator as a baby, and being so powerless to do anything.
Calling out for connection, and it not coming.
Not being able to make things change.
Feeling powerless to move, to be seen, to be heard.
How can we tell something is a sweet spot?
Well, it’s when the feelings we have seem much bigger than the situation warrants.
Because another person would have responded differently to those situations of having a car with no power, or slow internet.
But for me, it was an opportunity to connect with, feel, and heal from those early feelings and experiences.
I got, at a much deeper level than I ever have before (after 26 years of ‘self-development’), how powerless a baby in an incubator feels, and how those experiences of powerlessness are constantly calling to be heard.
And with all the crying I did last week, and all the empathy-giving to that little me, and the insights I’ve had, I trust that there is more spaciousness for me around power now.
And one particular thing really helped.
I was wondering what it was like to finally get out of the incubator, after five weeks, and how that might be linked to the fear that arises in me whenever I go to put something out into the world.
And I sensed the fear of leaving the incubator.
The sense that it had kept me alive.
And that leaving it, I was scared that I might not be warm, be able to breathe; that I might die.
And those is the kind of feelings that I often feel when I go to put something out into the world, like a course or a video or a webcast.
So, I said to that little part of me, “It’s safe to come out. You made it. You CAN breathe, you can be warm, you DID live.”
And straight away, there was a huge relief.
For that little part of me to know that it is safe to come out; for her to catch up with what did actually happen after I got out.
And now, when I feel the fear of putting something out into the world, I’ve been saying similar words to that little baby me.
Immediately I feel a gentling, a settling in me, as she hears that she doesn’t need to be scared any more.
She did make it. I did make it. I am here.
And after I connected with that, I cycled off to run some webcasts (still no car and still slow internet).
As I was cycling along, a car had stopped to give way. And as I was literally right in front of it, I continued cycling. And as I did, cycling right in front of me, he started driving forwards, just inches away from knocking me over. I screamed, and he stopped just short of knocking me over.
And there I saw the message – it’s actually dangerous to NOT be seen. Being seen is vitally important. Not being seen is dangerous.
In other words, it was opposite to what I’ve been believing – that it was dangerous to be seen in the world.
Phew!
And this morning, I still have very very slow internet, and no car, and my Power and Powerlessness in Parenting course was about to start tomorrow.
And I remembered again one important thing from my PaPiP course. That one really important element of power is choice.
And so, although I had already postponed it for a few days, and although I’ve never postponed one of my online courses, I decided to postpone for a few more days.
And what a relief!
That means, now that I have healed another piece of powerlessness, and received a new belief about being seen,
I have another week to really do this course justice.
To be seen with it in the world.
Because power for mothers is really important to me.
We’ve had thousands of years in a domination system, which meant that the most powerful one (such as the king, or perhaps the pope), had power over the next layer, such as the noblemen, and so on and so on, with women and then children at the bottom of the hierarchy.
And in that domination system, power was wielded with rules and laws, guilt and shame, punishment and violence.
And although we seem to live in a modern society, we are still carrying vestiges of these beliefs.
In the outer world, these beliefs still carry on, with women in many countries only recently having the right to vote.
But even in the West, with all its modernity, as mothers we often don’t realise our power.
We often don’t realise the power of our bodies in giving birth.
We don’t realise the power we have to shape the next generation, and thus the world.
We don’t realise the power of honouring our needs, our intuition, and our desires.
And it is vestiges of these beliefs, and our own powerlessness sweet spots, which mean at times we feel powerless (like I did last week!)
Powerlessness sweet spots are times in our lives when we felt powerless.
That could be, like me, after birth. It could be when we had medical procedures. It could be if our parents were authoritarian. It could be if we went to an old-fashioned school where we were powerless to choose what we did.
And when we are believing those powerlessness beliefs, and when we are in powerlessness sweet spots; it’s at those times that we feel powerless when our child won’t cooperate.
It’s those times where we might try to use power-over them – to get a bit louder, more forceful, to use our greater power in some way to make them do something they aren’t doing. We might get a bit threaten-y or punish-y, or harsh in some way.
And really, we are only doing that because we feel powerless at that moment.
We’re believing the old paradigm,
or, we’re in a powerlessness sweet spot.
So, there are TWO main ways we can avoid resorting to power-over our children.
1. Change our beliefs about power:
For example, power for me now is about choice, and being able to make a difference, and connection.
2. Heal our powerlessness sweet spots:
For example, we can ask ourselves what this moment reminds us of, and go back to that younger version of us, and hear her; give her empathy, and let her speak, and tell her what might be heard.
I wonder if you resonate with any of this?
Do you notice that you resort to power-over when you feel powerless?
Have you explored your powerlessness sweet spots?
Have you found your own, more modern, definitions of power?
Do you find ways to claim your true power in your life?
I’d love to hear from you!
Lots of Love,
Marion
xxxx