The Spiral of Integrating Power
By Kristen N. Fox
At first I was just following my intuition, doing what I felt I was energized to do, hoping I was going SOMEWHERE. Somewhere different than where I had been and different than WHO I had been. Fundamentally, I was stepping into my own power and stepping out of my role as a victim although I didn’t know that when I started. Victim-thinking can appear in different dramas for each of us – some of us may feel powerless in dealing with money, or men/women issues, or family, or career, etc. These “issue” areas can be some of the most challenging and rewarding aspects of becoming aware enough to turn ourselves around and start creating joyful situations instead of struggles and duality.
When I first started confronting those semi-detached areas of myself where I believed in fear and separation and powerlessness, I was happy just to get through them at all. I floundered between great anxiety and then great relief in huge tides of emotion. I didn’t know what I was doing – I just knew that I was, at various time, being faced with “real” situations that caused me to doubt everything my heart was telling me. Was I crazy? What was I THINKING? The world was showing me how wrong I was to believe in what I did and it appeared I was being cocky enough to think I knew better. Could I trust myself? What was going to happen NEXT??
After a while, I got a better FEEL for these situations, as there seemed to be an energetic patterning beneath the seemingly disparate surface effects or events. I connected these uncomfortable situations with ideas that I had regularly, if unconconsciously, thought about and yet had payed no more attention to than background elevator music. Ahhh, I thought, so THIS is what it means that we get what we focus on – this is how I was focusing/creating in this area! So, for a while I battled these thoughts, desperately trying to get rid of them so I could to focus on what I WANTED to create instead. But resistance really IS futile and I grew tired of pushing myself to be so ever-vigilant and paranoid.
By the next round of uncomfortable or fear-based situations, my eyes opened even further. Instead of fighting them or trying to look away when I could do nothing but gape at my own creation, I gave in. Giving in felt like a defeat at first, especially after years of knowing that STRUGGLE was the way to get ahead, but it was all there was left to do. I stopped trying to fix, or hold at bay, or manage these unconscious creations of mine. I knew I couldn’t keep the “damage control” up forever and didn’t really want to anymore.
I started to look at my creations and how I habitually felt about them and myself when I was in these situations. I stopped re-acting (acting again), stepped back, and started OBSERVING myself. Who was I in these situations and how did I feel about them and myself at these times? Finally I saw the judgment and rejection I was applying to these supposedly “bad” situations, those places where I knew only conditional self-acceptance. Could I love myself even when I was NOT “okay” or when I wasn’t doing what I “should”? For even as I observed, I certainly didn’t FEEL okay. Or did I?
The observer allowed me to take that step away, allowed me to see the larger perspective of ME, and therefore, to stop identifying so exclusively with the duality and judgment in these situations. I started to trust my inner voice, my heart, and to open up, just a little, perhaps.
And then a weird thing happened. I was feeling great, trusting myself and my creations, and whump – it all happened again! What? As aware as I was I found myself reaching into that familiar box to pull out those old reactions again… and I found out the box was empty. I tried to feel frustrated, but you know what? I really didn’t. I tried to feel powerless, but I really didn’t. I didn’t feel ANY of the old emotions that I had attached to these situations. Apparently, somewhere along the spiral of awakening, I had dropped them, perhaps so I could climb with both hands free.
I looked over these creations and felt as if I saw them for the first time, like examining an apple in my open palm. These parts of me had only been trying to get my attention. They weren’t huge, intimidating monsters. They’d been consistently showing me the parts of me I had been struggling with, both inside and outside. Ahhh, I said again, I see. What seemed like “real life situations that needed to be dealt with responsibly and in the manner expected” weren’t all they seemed to be, weren’t all I had believed them to be. They were just… me.
I saw the spiral I had been riding, around and around, gradually up and out of the entanglement of conditional love and limitations that is the illusion of duality and codependence. Soon I discovered that I was no longer spinning and was riding straight up the center of that spiral.
I felt love. I felt power. I realized that I was very familiar with these things. All the places of my life where I created effortlessly and without thinking twice were simply SATURATED of these feelings, these vibrations. I had been riding this one victim-spiral so long however, that it shocked me that the current result of the ride should feel so familiar and yet so amazing all at once. A new coat of paint in an old room.
Why am I writing about all of this? Because conscious creation isn’t JUST about creating the experiences we want in physical reality, it’s a pathway of self-awareness and expansion. As we step along, we re-integrate those parts of ourselves we’ve been struggling against and step into the powerful love of wholeness. We create in physical reality what we are – sometimes it just takes us a while to remember what exactly that is – powerful creators shaking cobwebs from our heads. That’s when we understand that creating isn’t work – when we really understand that all we have to do is accept ourselves to accept what we want in order to BE/HAVE what we want.
[Originally published in The Edge, June 1999.]