Power Begins Within – Rev Linda Jackson
This video features the Sunday “talk” only. Watch the full service on our Facebook page.
DESCRIPTION
Power can be a triggering word. We can soften the trigger by doing our inner work to create a clean relationship with our personal power. Join us this Sunday as we explore what inner clean power feels like.
SUMMARY
Rev. Linda Jackson discusses the idea of “Power to the People” and how to develop a healthy relationship with personal power. She introduces the four types of power – power over, power with, power to, and power within – and explains that true power comes from within rather than trying to control or dominate others.
Key points:
- Power is not about control, but about freedom and presence. True power comes from being fully present and mindful, not from seeking to control circumstances or other people.
- Power grows through compassion and sharing it with others, not hoarding it. Using power to create happiness and harmony expands our own power.
- Cultivating true power is a practice, requiring consistency in developing mindfulness, self-awareness, and the ability to choose our responses rather than reacting emotionally. Meditation and conscious breathing are suggested practices.
- The goal is to go within to connect with our own innate source of power, rather than feeling overpowered or seeking power over others. This leads to greater freedom, happiness, and the ability to collaborate with others effectively.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev Linda Jackson (00:00):
While we get our technology figured out, I just want to say thank you again to our music team. Unbelievable. Talk about power, right? So thank you all for being here. It makes me so happy to come here and see all of you and know all of you folks are online. I am Reverend Linda Jackson. I use she her pronouns, and I am kicking off our October theme, Power to the People. So we’re using the CSL theme, that’s the Centers for Spiritual Living theme. And this idea of power to the people, if you’re of a certain age, it feels like a bit of a throwback, right? I know Connie mentioned that too. In the sixties, this phrase was used as a statement against the establishment, right? The dominant group who held all the wealth and power. And the idea is to give the power back to those who don’t have the wealth and power.
(00:59):
And I did a little digging and found that the Black Panthers used a similar phrase, “all power to the people” also protesting the rich, ruling class. And then there were students who protested the American’s involvement in the Vietnam War, same phrase. Poked around a little more, and even found that in many other countries the phrase is used from Pakistan to apartheid in South Africa to Margaret Thatcher. And it was applied to different ends of the political spectrum. And as we’ve heard there, songs that are written about it, movies made about power to the people. And this concept of power affects all of us. We can have power struggles in any part of our life, whether it’s work or relationship. When you hear the word power, you might think of politics or big corporations or fancy titles or the ability to boss people around.
(02:06):
It could just be a controlling friend or a bossy neighbor. But we’re talking about something deeper. According to Thic Nhat Hahn, the Buddhist monk who wrote the book of the month, true power has nothing to do with dominance or control. So in his book, The Art of Power, he presents a much deeper and a more refreshing definition of power. And I think we come here to get refreshed, don’t we? So I appreciate this. He invites us to get into right relationship with our inner power and to release our hidden agendas and to express our true power with integrity and authenticity. So that when we come together as group of people who are all in their authenticity and their integrity with their power, and when we have a shared or common desire, then it multiplies what we can do together. And we’re not caught in the drama of power struggles, right?
(03:17):
And Hahn says that Buddhists are also interested in power, but only the kind of power that brings happiness and not suffering. And he has us begin by going within to discover our beliefs, especially around power, and then to heal our inner relationship with power to develop that healthy expression. It’s not about dominance and control of others, it’s about mastering ourselves. And so the talk title for this first week is The Power Begins Within. Again, we’re working with the CSL themes and titles, and I’m sort of enjoying this approach, but I found it a little funny because last month was all about peace begins within and it’s how it works. So in science of mind and religious science, everything we experience out here all comes from in here first. So rather than trying to change something out here or make something different out here, we have to do our work on the inside.
(04:26):
And I first just want to acknowledge that power can be a triggering word, understandably. If we look at the ways it’s been used, especially right? It carries an energy. So does anyone in here have a reaction to the word power? Anyone? Anyone online? Throw it in the chat. Nobody wants to admit their reaction. Okay, we got one back there. What’s your reaction? Oh, (…) is what she said. Yes, it’s a sort of energy I think. And sometimes a contraction or a nervousness or a feeling like you have to go against it in a way, something that’s what occurs for me. But the idea here is that we can soften the trigger by doing our own inner work to have a clean relationship with our own personal power. And they use the analogy of like we talk about shifting the sources of energy in the world to clean sources of energy so that we’re not polluting and doing the same with our personal power to clean up our inner power.
(05:42):
Before I jump into some of the book’s concepts, I’m bringing some ideas from conflict resolution training. There are several different authors who have written about the four types of power, and I’m unclear who the origin is, but the four types of power are power over versus power with power to and power within. So power over is when someone makes a choice that affects someone else. It comes with an assertion of dominance. There might be coercion, criticism, blame. Shame that I’m right, you’re wrong. They’re fighting every fight. Do you know anybody who’s fighting every fight? There’s punishment. I mean, most of us experience that as children and we might even continue that pattern with our own children. Power over asserts, control through authority. Many of us have had a boss at work who made decisions without considering the team, considering the impact. And they might get compliance, but there’s a loss of morale, right? And the more subtle, not any less harmful, but more subtle version of power over is that sort of coercion or manipulation. I see this in significant relationships and between parents and children. Has anyone here ever coerced or manipulated?
(07:30):
Yeah, not in the last 10 minutes. For those of you online, that’s what we’re laughing about. Well, I can shudder thinking about my past before I started cleaning up myself. But for many people, that’s the norm of a relationship, is to try to get things to be how they want it to be, to try to control something. And sometimes there’s even withholding love, affection, money, any way to try to get what you want. And then we have power with and power too. And I put them together because they’re both sort of a collaborative approach. Power with is when a group makes a choice that affects all of them. And power too is when we give someone power, we support someone to make a choice for themself. They’re both collaborative, sort of shared leadership styles where we work as equals with a common goal. So a manager who supports the team in making their own decisions, values their input. Like Reverend Amy, lead Cityside, inviting cooperation, wanting mutual success.
(08:52):
A distinction between the power within the power too is that power two specifically defers to another’s expertise, empowering someone else to choose for themself. So these two ways of being in power support one another. We’re supporting one another to be fulfilled, trusting and encouraging one another, finding win-win solutions empowering one another. And as I was working through this, I had the awareness that power over sounds like codependence and power with or power to sound like interdependent relationships. It’s not based on superiority or inferiority, but in any case, the trigger that we discussed with the word power, if you’re like me, it comes from the idea of power over and we’re activated because of past experience with someone having power over us or power over someone else or a misuse of power.
(09:56):
So the last of the types of power is power within. And the idea is that power with and power to support mutual empowerment. And that requires us to draw on our power within and in our power to the people theme. We’re being asked to clean up our tendency to seek power over and to have an eye on creating power with and power to and supporting one another to draw on our power within. That’s true power. And I mentioned earlier that science of mind always invites us to begin within. And we believe that it’s not what you pray to out here, but where you pray from that matters. And going within to do our inner work to create the outer expression, whether it’s money, love, health, power, it always begins within in the change your thinking, change your life class. We’re in the midst of this class.
(11:14):
We recently reviewed the fundamental model of science of mind where they’re planting the seeds of conscious thought in the soil of the subconscious where the law is always creating and saying yes. And we see the plant take form and you get the plant that matches the seed. You have to clear out the subconscious of anything that would prevent the plant from growing, right? But if I plant a tomato seed, I’m not going to get a watermelon unless I left a bunch of watermelons in there from last year. So I have to clear out the old stuff to make sure I’m getting what I’m really planting. And Han, I have to say that very intentionally. Han also uses the metaphor of planting seeds in this book, and it’s based on Buddhism’s levels of consciousness. And in his teaching he talks about the consciousness of mind is like a garden.
(12:22):
And the store consciousness is where all the seeds are stored. So both positive and negative. So positive like love and compassion, negative like anger or fear are stored in that store consciousness. And he says through mindfulness we water the seeds or through neglect, we let the seeds get out of control. So by consciously nurturing positive seeds and not feeding the negative ones, we can transform our mental landscape. We change our experience. It’s very similar to the science of mind teaching. In order to develop a healthy and balanced relationship with power, we have to develop self-awareness. We have to do the self-discovery work. We have to look at our beliefs and behaviors about power and ask what seeds am I planting? What seeds am I nurturing? And in this inner exploration, we can uncover any distorted perception of power. And then we get to take responsibility for any ways that we misuse our power or deny our power.
(13:42):
So when I asked earlier if you had ever coerced or manipulated, that was not to create blame or shame or guilt, it was the beginning of the inquiry, the beginning of the looking within how we reclaim our authentic power. We have to begin within to begin to heal. And the author of the Color Purple, Alice Walker wrote that the most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any. So if we preoccupy ourselves with all the ways that others have misused power with power over us or power over others, then we are underestimating and undervaluing our own power.
(14:37):
And what we focus on, we get more of. So we have to stop focusing on what someone else is doing wrong and focus on what we need to be doing to clean up our side of the street. Because if we stay in that pattern, we miss the opportunity to initiate the healing process within ourselves. And I just want to clarify if this is someone who’s in an abuse situation, it’s different. Of course you want to go get safe, you want to ask for help and then do your work. I’m not suggesting that you should just act like they’re not doing anything. That’s often a misconception. We’re not saying just to roll over, we’re saying the work begins in here.
(15:28):
So I really resonate with these Buddhist teachings and I can see the influence on the science of mind. And many of the Buddhist concepts are very layered, lots of layers. There’s seven of this and six of those and four of these. And then those four have three more. And so I’m not going to try to do justice to this very complex teaching here. I’m just going to share some of the key takeaways that I found in the reading that resonated with me. And the first takeaway for me is the power isn’t control, it’s freedom. We’re freeing our minds, freeing selves, freeing our emotions. And he says that even if we’re not aware of it, most of us seek to be in power because we believe we’ll be able to control our circumstances. We believe that power will get us what we really want. And he says what we really want is freedom and happiness, but we’ve just gone this other way to try to get it. We’ve been taught to think that power means getting people to do what we want, but if our mind is full of fear or anger, we’re not really free, we’re not really happy. And that certainly doesn’t feel very powerful.
(17:02):
Han asks, how free are you if your decisions are driven by fear or your anger controls you? True power comes when we are free from our own negative emotions and distractions. Were free from fear, anger, jealousy, and desire. So it’s about being able to stay calm and compassionate no matter what happens around us. And this example of an experience I had a long time ago with a client in my brand identity design business came up in this idea of power. They were a very important client for my business. I have a small business and they were a large portion of the revenue and they had 40 offices across the country and I worked with all the different people. And this one day I was making a presentation. This was long enough ago that things were still done on traditional art boards. It wasn’t electronic. And I had these art boards out and they were half dozen people in the very fancy CEO’s office. And I made the presentation, I included all that he had asked for and the people seemed to like it. I felt good. And as we started to have a conversation, he looked at the boards, he said something and he took the boards and tossed them onto the ground.
(18:36):
My heart, I mean I take pride in what I do. I felt like I had done a good job. And here is this person dismissing what I had just done. And somehow by the grace of God, I don’t know how, because it would’ve been my inclination to get into fisticuffs with him. But somehow I had the presence of mind to feel that he was wanting to feel in charge. He was needing to feel like he was the one because other people were responding to what I had done. And so I was able to take a breath and bring myself back into my body and I asked him a few more questions and somehow I sort of let him see that it was his idea what we had done, we had just executed it right and that we had accomplished what he had asked for and helped to get his buy-in. And so things went on, and I’m going to continue this analogy here in the next section. Another takeaway concept is that power comes from presence. Being fully present in each moment. It sounds easy, right? I should say it sounds simple, but it’s not necessarily easy. We get caught in our work, our worries, our future plans are maybe just on our phones and we forget how to be here now.
(20:18):
And Han talks a lot about mindfulness as the foundation of true power. Mindfulness, true power requires living in the moment mindful of what’s happening right now. If we’re triggered, we’re triggered from something in the past or we’re fearing something in the future. So being mindful of what is happening right now. And so my example with the client and the art boards, I might’ve left my body. That’s something that I do. I kind of go, but that breath and that awareness of just come back, just walk through this, it brought me present. I was able to stay calm, otherwise we might have been in a power struggle. And he had a history of losing designers and I thought, I don’t need it to be that history. I don’t need to repeat this. Let’s just see what’s really here. And Han invites us to give 100% of ourselves to everything we do. He says even lighting a candle to use both hands to light the candle so that you’re totally bringing your attention to the lighting of the candle.
(21:36):
He says, holding the hand of a child to bring all of your awareness, all of your attention and your presence to the hand of that child. You don’t get those moments back. He says, the most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention. Have you ever been with someone who’s on their phone not really listening to what you’re saying, or have you been the one on your phone not really listening to the other person? You feel the disconnect? Mindfulness and presence not only give us clarity, but they give us a sense of connection. It strengthens relationships. People can feel when you’re really present with them. And that is a form of power. It’s true power, not the temporary control that comes through fear and dominance, but lasting power through respect and appreciation and it requires presence.
(22:47):
So the third concept from the book that I’m taking away is that power comes from compassion. And he emphasizes that power isn’t just for us, it’s for others too. And real power grows when we are compassionate and use our energy to help others. When we help them to feel seen and heard and cared for. And we use our power to create happiness and harmony in the world around us. Power grows. So my client, when I think back and I had no idea that I was doing this at the time, it’s just sort of in hindsight, I think he felt seen and heard when I asked him questions, when I reminded him of what we were working on and what he had asked for. And he softened, I won’t go all the way to say that wanted me to feel seen and heard, but there was a step in the right direction. And like Han says, power is not something you hoard. It’s something you share.
(24:02):
Power does not diminish. When you share it, it actually grows. And the fourth concept is that we have to practice. We have to cultivate true power in our everyday life. So just like we learned last month that peace is a practice, Han is teaching us that true power comes from developing the mindfulness and compassion to free ourselves of the fears or the desires that keep us seeking power over or seeking control. And he tells us that practice to cultivate true power in our lives requires consistency. And he gives deep breathing meditation, conscious listening. He gives us a whole section in the back of his book on all these practices to use. We need to train ourselves to stay present, to bring mindfulness and compassion and to choose how we respond. Because the only thing that we can control is how we respond.
(25:11):
So when you can pause your knee jerk reaction, that is true power. And I remember a turning point in my work life at the same time I was working with this client. Like I said, they had 40 different offices and there were 40 different people or more that I was working with and keeping the details of each of their programs and each of their materials and many of them modeled after their leader and wanted to dominate. Not all of them. There were some lovely people to work with too. But rather than allowing every intense email to put me in a frenzy, I had to learn to sort of pause, breathe, and let go of my emotional response, not feel an emotional connection to what was being asked in the email, to just read it as an email without it being personal, being present, not controlling the outcome, being present to what’s here. Now we can stay neutral and we don’t have to try to move into that power over.
(26:23):
So choosing how I want to respond when I let go, I can get curious and I can get related to what is underneath their request. What are they really asking for? What do they really need? And I discovered that collaborating with people actually created the best outcomes because they had information I didn’t have. So if I could really open myself to hear what they wanted, we would get the best results. And he reminds us, Han reminds us that we’re invited to practice every time we’re driving down the street. And the next time that someone cuts you off in traffic, instead of going into frustration, take a deep breath. It might sound small, but that is a moment of power. You’re choosing how you respond. You’re not letting your emotions control you.
(27:27):
So the key takeaways in summary, power doesn’t come from controlling others. It’s about mastering ourselves, which is the freedom we free ourselves free from the distraction of fear, other negative emotions. And the way we master ourselves is through practicing being mindful and present and fully engaging with the world around us, appreciating the gifts of the present moment. And true power grows when we share it. When we use it for compassion and kindness, it expands and we feel power through love and respect, not false power through dominance. And we can cultivate true power in our everyday life, not through control, through control, but by taking time to practice all of the above. So the next time you’re feeling powerless or overwhelmed, remember that you already have the most important power, the power to choose your response, the power to stay present and to approach the world with compassion. We all have this. It’s just a matter of being mindful enough to tap into it. And he suggests that when all else fails, just take a deep breath.
(28:49):
So I’m offering this simple one line affirmation I go within to connect with my source of power. So we’re not trying to get our power out here, not feeling overpowered by someone or trying to have power over someone. We go within to connect with our own source of power. Han says that meditation consists of two elements. First, stopping, calming the mind and concentrating and second, looking deeply to get insight. So all those meditations I mentioned are in the back of the book and it’s through practice that we develop the ability to be present, to gain insight. And this idea of pausing, calming the mind and concentrating, then that looking deeply happens automatically. The insights come. You don’t have to try to get the insights, you just open yourself and the insights come. So if you’re willing, I’m going to invite us to pause for a moment and take a few slow breaths, calming the mind and the body. And perhaps you can say to yourself, I go within to connect with my source of power.
(30:17):
Feel yourself anchored in your seat, bringing yourself to center, whatever that means for you. Perhaps imagine breathing in and out of your heart. I go within to connect with my source of power and just begin to notice how the body is feeling. Getting related to this supports us in our day to day experience so we can notice when the body is signaling that it wants attention and we can choose how we want to respond. I go within to connect with my source of power, scanning the body. Physical sensations without story, just developing witness consciousness, the ability to be self-aware.
(31:33):
What is the body wanting? Now, noticing any emotions, avoid making up a story, just noticing the emotions. Again, getting related so that in our day-to-day routines, we have the ability to notice. We can notice when there is an emotion and we can intentionally choose how we want to respond. I go within to connect with my source of power. And of course there will be thoughts, just noticing the thoughts, not attaching to the thoughts, just watching them, continuing to breathe in and out, creating calm in the body, creating calm in the emotions, creating calm in the thoughts, breathing in love, peace and calm, breathing out love, peace and calm.
(33:21):
I go within to connect with my source of power. And in this relaxed and calm state, we move into looking for insight. He says, looking deeply for insight. And again, we don’t need to make anything happen. When we are relaxed and we have set the intention for new awareness, the insights reveal themselves. So let us set an intention. Now I open myself to new awareness. I am open to a healthy relationship with power. I trust the right ideas come to me to support my growth. Allow a recent time to come to mind seeking power or control, trying to make things turn out a certain way away and just sensing, what did you really want?
(34:41):
What were the emotions that were running you? Power comes when we are free from fear, anger, jealousy, and desire. What does this information have for me? What do I really need? What do I really believe? Han says we really want freedom and happiness. Let us give ourselves the gift of freedom by letting go of control. What is wanting to be let go of? What control can I release giving? Thanks for any insights. I invite you to practice this throughout the week, every day this week, making time to affirm. I go within to connect with my source of power and I’ll take us into prayer to close out the service in this place of deep connection with self and with the infinite intelligence that operates within us. That divine wisdom, that guides us, that speaks us, that informs us, inspires us. I know that I am one with all it is.
(36:16):
I am one with the power. I am one with the love. I am one with the freedom. And I know that this is true for every one of us. Each one, an individual expression of the power, the love and the freedom that is the power of the divine, the love of the divine, the freedom of the divine. And I affirm that each one is deepening in their knowing themselves as this conduit for power, love, and freedom. That they are awakening to the high idea of who they are here to be. That they are completely sourced, totally sourced by the divine, not something or someone outside of them that their power comes from within all of their needs are met. That we are stepping into the high idea of who we are here to be here and now. And it is good. And what is good for one is good for all. And I’m so grateful. I’m so grateful for all of the hearts that have said yes to this exploration. I’m so grateful to the work that we do on ourselves to create a better world. I’m so grateful for the fulfillment of this prayer. I release it into the law knowing it is so, I call it good. And together we say and so it is. Thank you.
(37:47):
Thank you, Reverend Linda.