SUMMARY:
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Giving away your power happens when you elevate someone else above yourself in authority. Doing so allows others to exercise control over you.
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We give away our power for many reasons: We feel others are smarter than us, they wield positions of power or authority, or they’re better than us in some way. It’s a common part of the human experience, and we’ve been conditioned to do it since we were small.
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It happens on scales both large and small — systemically and interpersonally. On a systemic level, we’re seeing it happen a lot right now with the campaign around vaccines. In the effort to persuade people to vaccinate, there’s a lot of shaming, a lot of “shoulds”, and plenty of confusion. It can be hard for people to listen to their intuition about what is right for them. A similar dynamic can play out on a personal level, with doctors, teachers, healers — we often follow their authority without question. Or if we do question it, we feel pressured to follow them anyway.
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We don’t like to feel confused. It makes us feel unstable, uncertain, and we’ll try to resolve it — even by allowing ourselves to be manipulated. So be on the lookout for times that you feel confusion, and when you do, allow yourself to pause. Allow yourself to be in the discomfort. You may need to center yourself in your body, move, breathe, or get into nature. It’ll pull you away from the confusion. From that place of centeredness, you can check in with yourself: Is the thing you’re being compelled to do (or not do, etc.) actually congruent with you?
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Giving away your power is a dishonoring of your own brilliance and sovereignty. You may not yet feel your brilliance. It often takes some focused frequency work to clarify and perceive it. It may come in glimpses, and there’s no one way to feel it. But once you start to release the distortion patterns that make it difficult for you to have true awareness of your brilliance, you may feel amazed by your own magnificence. And you’ll likely want to honor yourself more and more.