ICRAVE Personal Power

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Personal Power represents the divine quality of endurance and symbolizes the majesty or integrity of the Divine.  It also represents the qualities we need in order to “stand up” as individuals.

  • The spiritual goal is to help us mature in our self-understanding – the relationship we have with ourselves, and how we stand on our own and take care of ourselves.

How we feel about ourselves, whether we respect ourselves, determines the quality of our life, our capacity to succeed in business, relationships, healing, and intuitive skills. 

  • Self-understanding and acceptance, the bond we form with ourselves, is in many ways the most crucial spiritual challenge we face. 
  • In truth, if we do not like ourselves, we will be incapable of making healthy decisions. 
  • Instead, we will direct all of our personal power for decision-making into the hands of someone else: someone whom we want to impress, or someone before whom we think we must weaken ourselves to gain physical security.
    • People who have a low sense of self-esteem attract relationships and occupational situations that reflect and reinforce this weakness.

Given our particular body, environment, and beliefs, we will make choices that enhance our spirit or those that drain our power into the physical illusion around us.

  • We enhance our Inner Power by “reordering” our lives when we choose spirit over the illusions of physical circumstances.  
  • With each choice we make, we either become more involved in the illusory physical world, or we invest energy into the power of spirit.

Re-source: Remerge

become apparent, important, or prominent again

We require power in order to live, to thrive, and to function. 

  • Illness, for example, is the natural companion of powerless people.

For all of us the challenge is not to become “power celibate” but to achieve sufficient internal strength to interact comfortable with physical power without negotiating away our spirits. 

  • This is what it means to be “in the world but not of it.” 
  • We are fascinated by people who are immune to the seductions of the physical world; they become our social and spiritual heroes.

At this point in our evolution, both as a culture and as individuals, we can recognize that external or physical power is necessary for health. 

  • Health is a direct consequence of the spiritual and therapeutic principles we absorb into our everyday life. 
  • Both contemporary spirituality and psychotherapy emphasize that personal power is fundamental to material success and spiritual balance.
    • It is involved directly in the creation of our personal worlds as well as our health.
  • Radiate a quality of power that feels like grace itself.
    • “Call back our power” from experiences that drain the life-force from our bodies.

The sacrament of Confirmation represents the emergence of the “conscious self.”

  • The spiritual quality conferred by the sacrament of Confirmation is self-respect. 
  • This sacrament also symbolizes the passage from childhood to adulthood. 
  • We all have faced or will face an experience that reveals to us our own internal strengths and weaknesses as separate from the influence of our elders. 

The symbolic meaning of the sacrament of Confirmation is that we become “alive” Inside by becoming internally empowered. 

  • Self-esteem and conscious personal power sometimes develop at a memorable point in life that signifies an initiation into spiritual adulthood. 
  • Perhaps, in a sudden flash of insight, you saw how you could accomplish a task that had been previously overwhelming. 
  • Perhaps you saw yourself as powerful and realized that you could accomplish goals of all sorts, from physical fitness to financial success. 

Becoming internally empowered shifts a person’s center of gravity from external to internal – a mark of spiritual passage.

  • Developing the confidence to pursue goals is one way that personal power becomes an agent of personal change. 
  • At the same time an equally impressive level of change can occur within a person’s spiritual or symbolic life. 

craving and resource from “Anatomy of the Spirit” by Caroline Myss

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