Giving Away Your Power & Reclaiming It

Oct 23

Alexandra stands in the shadow of a forest of fir trees with her arms crossed looking off to the right

I took a trip and visited old places. Old in age and old to me. Places with long and convoluted histories, where one beginning is actually the late ending of an even earlier beginning. Where the stories go back and back and back, and the heroes are wolves in sheep’s clothing. I went back to New England where I was born, where I grew up and where I grew away. It was also where I returned years later with my first husband, evolved, had my Saturn Return, and left again. This most recent trip, I experienced a distinctly different sensation as my boots sunk into the carpet of leaves on back roads and forest floors. A current ran through the soil, deep into the crust of the earth and magnetically held my electric body in communion with the land and trees and granite ledges. I felt truly reconnected.

Like picking up with an old friend, there was the obvious passage of time that had occurred, but also a through-ribbon of respect and familiarity. We are both older and I had to do double takes at places now changed by the expansion of small economies and the erosion of years. I’m sure the trees didn’t totally recognize me either. Yet each time I set my foot down we were in stride, walking hand in hand in comfortable silence.

In this experience, I allowed the world I have been carefully building and curating for the last couple years to fall away from around me. I was naked and transparent with the red and orange leaves, the ripe black walnuts, bare facing the steady climb and descent of the sun throughout the day. Each visit, each activity was more full than I could have held alone, and I am beyond grateful for my loved ones who were there to share in each with me.

This land has old ghosts for me. I walked among them, talked to them, talked of them with those who also remember. In doing so, I felt how far gone they were and how far I’ve come. I left New England years ago believing that I’d never return. Because of my experiences, the place itself felt too challenging, exhausting. Now, I am so glad to have reconnected with the mycelium network that runs through that soil and through my own body. I feel a renewed relationship and responsibility to my home. It had been mine all along, I just finally chose to reclaim it.*

Sometimes, when we go through challenging experiences, we find that we have given away our power. We find ourselves panting, looking at the next ledge above us wondering how in the hell we will actually make the climb. We reach into our pockets to find that they’ve been sewn shut. In one way or another, we have opted out of the personal responsibility of our gifts and our strengths to let someone else do it or to allow a limitation to keep us from fulfilling our potential. Often, we seek others to boost us up and become reliant on their validation or support; to the extent that we value their strengths over our own and dismiss ourselves in the process. Other times, a situation that has caused us a considerable loss takes a definitive role in our story, continuing to outshine what we have gained.

Over the years, I’ve given up my power in many ways. I’ve offered it to my trauma, thinking I’d be fairly traded for some emotional relief. I’ve lost it to well-intentioned lovers who were fulfilling a need of their own—to be needed. I relinquished it to those who told me they knew better, despite my intuition screaming behind the door I’d locked inside of myself. In every circumstance, for whatever reason, it felt much easier to let the “other” be stronger and take my direction or purpose from it. Such as an experience with love dictating that I should be sharper and less intimate thereafter, or someone else’s strength as a provider being comparatively more valuable than my own contributions or the ability to care for myself. As time would go on, more and more of me would be lost to the drain that I allowed my power to sink into. And there have been several times that I’ve woken up and refused to even look in the mirror at who I’d become.

When we talk about giving away, losing, and relinquishing our power, we must acknowledge that it only happens because we allow it. On some level, we do not value whatever gift or talent or skill that we have of our own and we give over the energy to another. This is not always conscious, although sometimes we make the choice. A lot of times it happens by accident. We are tired or weary of fighting and someone or something swoops in or offers to take the load. So we hand over the reins and lay back, and the next time we look up we’re somewhere we never expected. It’s not always a terrible thing at first, but the longer we live without our power, the more we define ourselves by the lack of it. And then instead of embodying our fullest potential, walking in glowing wholeness with the world around us, we become dependent on the light and structure of others to give us form and shape—merely a shadow.

We are not stupid or incapable for giving away our power. It does not actually make us less than the other or more powerful thing. Weakness, if we are to define a lack of power this way, is a comparative judgement that only serves to show what needs attention. Giving away our power, however, is a form of self-harm and it capitalizes on itself. The longer we are without it and defining ourselves by the lack of it, the more difficult it can feel to get it back. Even the idea of having any power, nevermind autonomy, becomes a foreign sensation. And what is foreign, what is unknown, provokes fear and resistance. By the time we come to know that we have lost such a part of ourselves, we may even feel that we don’t want our power back. For that would mean picking the reins back up, and my they are heavy and the horses do pull! We have forgotten that we are the reins and the horses and the cart. To let someone or something else drive it is to continue to deny our birthright to autonomy and individuation.

It can take months, years, even decades before we realize the extent of what has been lost. But when we have that moment where the light turns on and suddenly we cannot unsee what has been going on all along, we face the choice to close our eyes or start honestly facing ourselves. This decision is not always so easy, and it has been said before that the longer we are without our power, the more difficult it can be to choose to take it back. When we make the decision to begin reclaiming our power, we must contend with the part of ourselves that is still fighting and the part that we no longer recognize. We become reacquainted with our wounds, and we enter into a new relationship with our gifts. We reestablish value within ourselves, which requires a deeper understanding of what makes us unique and what serves our growth in this life, this incarnation.

By learning ourselves anew, we give space to the transformation that the experience inspired within us. We come to see that the strength we believed to be lacking, was disguised in our innate talents. Owning them through embodiment and practice ignites tapers within us where we have been the most dark. When we honor these little flames, they illuminate possibilities and opportunities that we may have never considered or imagined. They light our very own path, and when we begin walking it we find that our power has come back to us with ease.

For some this only happens once in a lifetime. For others it is like the tide, ebbing and flowing in the story of their life, it is the definitive struggle that they are here to overcome and to light the way for those who come after.

I returned to New England and faced exactly what was there. And I found that the time I had spent learning myself since, had created a deeper root within me to the place I call home.
I returned to New England, stood in the flame of my own power, and bathed in the hallowed autumnal glow.

*I want to make a special note here about colonialism and its problematic hold on this area of the country.

Having grown up and gone to school here I have experienced first hand the erasure of Indigenous American history and culture in the northeastern United States. To this day, colonial establishments are celebrated and the atrocities of European emigration are waved away with a hand or ignored altogether and this does a grave disservice to folks who love the geography and the history of this region.

When I, a white woman, speak of reclaiming my home, I mean that the challenging experiences I have had here in my lifetime do not entirely define my relationship to this place. I mean that I have discovered a profound and limitless love for and connection with this region that roots me there.