Like many women, I have had an interesting relationship with power, and finding my own feminine power and authority.
A few years ago I had a facilitating session; and although it seemed to be about money, it soon turned out to be about beauty and power. The old belief I had been living was that it was dangerous to be powerful and beautiful. I chose a new belief, that power and beauty are my birthright, like it is for all girls and women.
Over the four years since, I have see-sawed in between these two realities of danger and birthright. Standing in what I can do, and then falling away from that to protect myself from perceived danger.
Two years ago, I first started travelling to Sydney to run workshops there. Over several days, I facilitated at least two groups a day and really enjoyed it. Driving back on the long drive, I developed a tooth infection which lasted for several days and which kept me in bed in excruciating pain.
I was planning to go to the U.K. to run my first workshops there. A series of events ‘turned’ my confidence into fear and I spent a couple of months in a challenging and painful time. I went to Sydney again, having been a few more times since that first time, and ran my first larger group to an audience unfamiliar with Aware Parenting, and really enjoyed it.
I came back and again got a severe tooth infection, which I got rid of after a couple of days but which morphed into a strong flu (I rarely get ill!). It lasted all week and meant I was too ill to write the articles I’d been planning to write about Playful Discipline, and to make the videos I was planning to make.
Later in the year, I started watching videos about making videos, and we had a power cut! By now, it had become kind of funny.
Clearly, I was still harbouring the old belief, that power was dangerous. Or at least, that being consistently powerful was dangerous.
In working with clients, I have been helping them see how beliefs came into existence and thus how we can free ourselves from them. When we were very little, we did something – for example, we did something that felt powerful, or fun, or connected; and the big people in our life reacted in certain ways. Because we were so little, we had too limited a cognitive understanding to know that they did those things because of their own feelings and beliefs, not because of what we did. So, when we were exuberant and happy and connected to our own deepest selves, and our dad shouted at us and sent us to our room, we didn’t think, “Oh, daddy finds it painful when we are happy and lively because he learnt that being like that would mean being punished and being in pain himself.” Instead we thought, “When I am happy and most myself, I end up alone and terrified.”
Our lightbeam of awareness and understanding is small when we are babies and children – we locate causality for what happened in ourselves, and we generalise it to all similar things. That really helps us as small children, because it protects ourselves from that same kind of painful experience.
However, thirty or forty years later, we are still carrying that same conclusion we made as a three-year-old, from that same three-year-old point of view.
Every time we start feeling exuberant and happy and connected to our own deepest selves, we mysteriously get really scared, or end up alone, or something appears to happen from the outside which ‘stops’ us feeling exuberant, including the apparent actions of others. We keep ending up not being exuberant and happy and connected to our own deepest selves.
So I kept thinking about that way of thinking about the genesis of beliefs for myself. The belief I had, that being consistently powerful would lead to something scary and dangerous, was an interpretation that I had made as a very young child when I had very limited information about what was really going on, and when I could only ascribe causality to myself. In other words, I had a very little torch to shine on the situation, and was seeing things through that small amount of torchlight.
The things that seemed to happen to me – the tooth infection, the flu, the power cut, were all ways I kept on protecting myself from danger.
Each time I remind myself that the fear, the belief in danger, is an interpretation that I made at a very young age, an inaccurate interpretation; then I am free to see the bigger interpretation – that I had probably been being consistently in my childlike sense of power – exuberance, being loud, speaking up, speaking my voice, saying what I knew, and someone big in my life had found that uncomfortable because of their own old-fashioned beliefs. They had responded in a way that was really scary, for me, and I had come to the conclusion that speaking what I knew, being who I was, and feeling powerful, was really dangerous.
So, as I keep reminding myself now that the belief was never true, it was only a construction I made at the time to make sense of things, then I have choice to see what really happened. It really wasn’t true that it was dangerous. The truth was simply that someone much bigger than me had found it painful to witness. It had never been about me.
Consistent power, speaking my voice, knowing what I know, had simply been what I, as we all are, born with. Something beautiful and fun and deeply fulfilling. The beliefs and feelings about that had been a misconstruing of my small and limited understanding of the world.
Phew, what a relief it is every time I connect with this.
And the next year, I had a wonderful external movie show of this process. I had been driving back from an Introduction to Aware Parenting talk I had given to a new group of mothers and babies, which was an hour and a quarter away from where I live. With still about an hour’s driving left, I was thinking about the talk and reflecting on how I used to feel during and after these introductory talks when I first started, nine years ago, and how different I am nowadays.
At that precise moment, my car suddenly went slower. I kept on driving, wondering what was happening, and then it happened again. Straight away, the words came to my mind that it was ‘losing power.’ Concerned about whether it was dangerous (!!), and whether I might break down (!!) on the motorway, I stopped the car, in what did actually turn out to be a dangerous place. I phoned the car rescue organisation and they said they would need to tow me to a safe place.
Everything that happened was a clear story about power. Two minutes later, another tow truck turned up, and the man got out. He was nothing to do with the actual car recovery service. He parked behind me with his light flashing so that cars coming over the hill would see me and wouldn’t crash into me. The other man arrived and towed me to safety. He told me that he was in a new tow truck that was unfamiliar to him and that it wasn’t automatic for him to use it, like it was for him in his usual truck.
He dropped my car and I off in a huge car park and another man arrived to look at my car. He couldn’t find anything wrong but he said I would need to get towed to a garage (which would be very expensive).
After he had left, I spent a moment connecting with my intuition about all this. I was calm and collected; I had realised after a few minutes that this was all about ‘losing power’, and I was willing to keep choosing that power was my birthright, like every girl and woman.
I had already received the message that there were lots of people and resources out there to help me. I phoned a local garage but they were busy. It was getting late.
I had the ‘aha’ of just driving around locally, not getting on the motorway yet, and seeing how the car went. I turned on the engine, and the first words that were sung out of the DVD player were; “You think something’s broken but nothing needs fixing.” With that clear message, I drove around a bit and the car was fine. I held that piece of information, that nothing needed fixing, for the rest of the day.
I got back on the motorway, and all was fine.
I went under a huge, lit up sign that covered an overbridge (I’d never even seen a lit-up sign like this until this moment), that said, “IF YOU THINK YOU CAN, YOU CAN.” I chuckled to myself!! The sign changed into, “HAVE A LOVELY DRIVING HOLIDAY IN QUEENSLAND.” I laughed some more.
Until about 30 minutes later when I started worrying about whether there was something wrong and I might lose power. As soon as I thought that, lo and behold the car lost power until it came to a standstill. I turned the engine off and reconnected with the knowing that there really was nothing wrong, and if I thought I could, I could. The car started again and worked perfectly for another half an hour, until I was coming close to home and needed to cross a busy intersection. As I did, I got worried again, and yes, you’ve guessed it, the car lost power as soon as I had got across, and again came to a standstill. Just like I have repeatedly done last year. I waited for a while, re-connected with the knowing that there is nothing wrong, picked up my daughter from her sibling-mother, and drove the rest of the way home.
The next day I took my car into my garage, knowing that nothing was wrong, but wanting to be diligent. When the mechanic phoned up and told me what had happened, I laughed.
They had found on the car’s computer that there was history of the last few things that had happened to it – the fan coming on repeatedly when the water had mysteriously all gone, for example. “It appears that after about three of these things, the car starts doing strange things. All we needed to do was clear the history, and then it was fine.”
I laughed to myself – nothing was wrong, it was simply the recording of the past that was making the car, and myself, lose power.
Just as I had come to see that all I needed to do was know that the belief simply came from a misinterpretation, and to make a bigger, more aware conclusion, so had my car simply needed it’s history cleared so that it could be the never-broken car that it truly was.
As these words flow out of the computer, I remember a song I learnt when I was in a singing workshop fifteen years ago. I chose the song, “Hands”, because the words so resonated with me. “My hands are small I know, but they’re not yours, they are my own, they’re not yours, they are my own; we are never broken.”
As I keep clearing my history and seeing things through newer, more expanded lenses, I trust that I will be more and more able to do what I want to do in the world, and share my love of understanding children and their feelings with more and more parents. And to help women become the powerful women that we always really are.
And I send warm wishes to you, who are reading this, and an invitation to know that your old beliefs were simply ways that you interpreted things to be, when you were littler and smaller and did not know what you know now. I invite you to explore your relationship with power, and to reclaim it as your birthright, and to see your life change as a result.