4) Wholeness: Transforming Our Relationship to Power (part 1)
Sometimes we come up against ways we want to change, but we feel resistance to do the thing we need to do to experience change. I remember the first time I ever asked a girl out on a date. I felt so much fear of being rejected that I almost didn’t do it. On this particular time, my young teenage self pushed through that hesitation, drawing on power within me, to get the words out of my mouth.
When she said yes to me, the struggle was all worth it! That exertion of power allowed me to take a step toward who I wanted to be in relationship, not the child who was afraid but the teenager who was more confident.
What inner obstacle have you experienced recently? How have you brought your power to the situation?
Power is one of the ways we inject authorship into a situation. The agent of change is power. Power tells us how much energy is used over time.
For instance, water flowing through a hydroelectric dam under the force of gravity uses its gravitational energy to spin a rotor. The faster the rotor moves, the more power is generated.
Have you ever called your political representatives about an issue you care about? I think of this metaphorically as an expression of power. Like the rotor which resists motion, sometimes I feel lethargy and hesitation, so it takes extra effort for me to pick up the phone. Since I am sustaining that energy over a period of time, I am exerting power.
If change requires power, can we muster enough power to change our lives? I’m not referring to external power or activism, although these are also important. Rather, I think we need to muster inner power. I think we need to find the power to change ourselves.
When we focus on our inner power instead of our outer power, we can become catalysts for the best kind of change. I’ll suggest a strategy for this: shifting to a mindset of Wholeness. When we feel whole, we are animated and enthusiastic, yet humble and receptive to feedback. Wholeness tunes us into flow, allowing confidence to increase and insecurity to decrease. The more secure we are inside, the more our actions will serve the autonomy and empowerment of everyone around us. The less insecure we are, the less we use our power in an exploitative fashion.
Outer versus inner power
A half century ago, Dr. Martin Luther King advised us that we were in “a confrontation between the forces of power demanding change and the forces of power dedicated to preserving the status quo.” Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary to President Clinton, more recently wrote, “The system is created by people. The question is, which people? The central issue is not more or less government. It's who is government for? In other words, it's all a question of power—who has it and who doesn't.” King and Reich are talking about outer power, but even this is a secondary problem.
The primary problem is “Why does power corrupt?” This is a question of inner power.
In his book “How to Be a Anti-Racist”, professor Ibram Kendi explains, “The problem of race has always been at its core the problem of power, not the problem of immorality or ignorance.” While the quest for power often leads to immorality and ignorance, Kendi is urging us to focus on the quest for power itself as the ultimate motivation for racist policy.
For instance, to justify the enslavement of Africans, a narrative was invented among the dominant white culture that people with black skin had descended from the Biblical figure Ham and were cursed. This narrative was promoted to advance the economic interests of white people, and many white communities adopted it in order to justify slavery. The quest for outer power led to racist policy.
The European slave trade and the history of race relations in America are examples of power institutionalized in favor of white people. So is Manifest Destiny and the removal of Native Americans from their land. The current argument over who takes the lead in reducing carbon emissions is also about who gains and loses power.
Certainly outer power is important. I believe it is crucial for all people to fight for increased institutional power for marginalized groups. But for those like me who have inherited outer power due to, for instance, the color of our skin, it is additionally incumbent upon us to focus on the role of inner power.
We can ask ourselves: How much money, security, and control is enough? How do we increase our own suffering when we always need more? Can we change?
Insecurity as a colonizing mindset
When European colonizers arrived in the Americas, they were escaping difficult circumstances. Financial hardship or religious persecution led them to risk everything in the New World. The relationship between colonizers and Native Americans could have been one of cooperation, and it was in numerous individual cases. But overall this encounter was devastating for Native Americans. Treaties were broken, land and resources were stolen, and people were kidnapped or killed.
Is there a relationship between a mindset of insecurity and a mindset of exploitation? Without training in social psychology or anthropology I cannot speak to the specifics. I would just like to ask whether a sense of wholeness can play a role in healing ourselves and the legacies we have inherited.
Using outer power badly seems to draw, at least in part, from the habitual insecurity I discussed earlier. But while we usually turn to solutions outside of ourselves to feel better, insecurity about the unknown is really a question of inner power. And inner power comes from wholeness.
This article is continued in the next entry.