How To Reclaim Your Power
When it comes to problems, the typical Western thought pattern goes something like this:
- I just pay someone to repair it–I don’t know how it works.
- The doctor says this pill will fix me.
- The government didn’t do enough for me.
- I’ll have to ask my spouse first.
- My parents wouldn’t approve of that.
We can all relate to these moments. Each one of us has either consciously or unconsciously placed authority for our own lives outside ourselves. This state is like sleepwalking through life–we allow ourselves to be guided along to various experts, products, or institutions that supposedly know what is best for us.
When we allow those agreements to become absolutes, we misplace authority over our own lives and become accustomed to searching for change outside ourselves. Take a look at this example:
A patient visits a psychologist for mood swings. The doctor assess her condition and determines a diagnosis from the DSM-IV, the standard book of psychological disorders. He prescribes her Zoloft, an anti-depressant, and tells her to come back in two weeks.
There are a couple of ways our patient could approach this. The majority of people will say to themselves, “this man has a Ph.D., he’s been in practice for several years, and he’s telling me this drug is safe. I’m just going to take it.”
The alternative approach comes from an awakened state–a recognition of the self-responsibility in every choice:
The patient listens carefully to the doctor’s explanations. She probes him for more details when something is not understood. She receives his knowledge, but she recognizes that it is not an absolute. Science changes with every new experiment, and what he was taught in medical school could be less relevant now and possibly skewed toward drug company profit-making.
In any case, taking any drug into her body is an important event. The diagnosis is not perceived as an order from an authority, but rather a conversation between two equal human beings, one having different information than another.
When she goes home, she recognizes that the prescription is a recommendation, not a requirement. She researches the drug and its side effects. She searches for websites where people discuss their success on the drug. And she looks for non-drug therapies that may assist her without the ingestion of a brain-altering chemical.
She may call the doctor and let him know that she is going to talk to a counselor instead of taking the drug, or taking up meditation so that she can explore her own mental constructs that are causing her problems. Or she may choose to try the prescription for a while and see if it works. But that choice would be fully hers, and not the result of blindly following a prescription.
Your power is reclaimed when you recognize that everything you see as an external authority or control factor over your life only has that power because you gave it to them at some point. Take it back and consciously make your own choices. The power has always been in your hands.
You are born alone, you live your life alone, and you die alone. Your loved ones can support you, but only you are living your life. You, alone, will experience the effects of your choices, whether you were awake or asleep when you made them.
Let me know your thoughts and experiences in the comments.
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