Empowerment

This talk was given by the discarnate spirit, Aaron, and channeled by Barbara Brodsky. The talk was originally presented in November 1992 at our Wednesday Open House.

Aaron: In recent weeks, several questions have been asked about the twelve step program, which suggests surrender to a higher power. Is it really necessary to surrender to a higher power? If you do so, what happens to your own empowerment? What does the word surrender mean? Are personal empowerment and surrender mutually exclusive?

Many women find the term surrender to be difficult, if not offensive, because they are trying so hard to find a personal sense of their own strength. Added to this is the sometimes masculine image of God; if you surrender to God, are you surrendering to a masculine energy? Now, of course God is not masculine or feminine; this is only the interpretation sometimes given to that energy. Nevertheless, having grown up in this culture, you've been repeatedly subjected to that father image and it has left its imprint, so that the idea of surrender to God may be repugnant to a woman who's trying to establish her own power.

Every act, word, thought-everything-in your lives takes effort, which comes from a place of love or of fear. Sometimes these alternate quickly, so the movement is subtle. When your choices are catalyzed by fear, you are trying to protect yourself or to assure that your own needs are met. You experience the small ego self straining to manipulate the environment to create the illusion of safety. So many of you have learned to exert such control with great skill.

For human survival, it is necessary to manipulate the environment to a certain degree; otherwise, we'd all be shivering in caves. Even a squirrel collects nuts and other types of food, and finds a warm home for the winter. That action comes from a place of love. When you've learned to harmonize your energy with that of your environment so you and your loved ones are fed, warm and safe, that is skillful control. Choice grows out of a place of love and respect, with the awareness, "I wish to take care of myself and my loved ones. I wish to create a warm house, enough food to eat. I cannot simply sit outside in the cold and trust that everything I need will appear. But I wish to do this with peaceful intent and harmlessness to all that is."

When your choices come from a place of fear, you're constantly fighting what is, grasping here and pushing away there, trying to peer into an as yet undetermined future and manipulate it to your will. You get your home, and it looks adequate. Then you notice that your neighbor's home looks a bit bigger, the walls are thicker, there's more food in the pantry. Fear takes over, and says, "I need more!" Fear and more fear. Fear pushes you to manipulate, control and grasp. But the more grasping, the more distortion. Each being is like a thread in a great tapestry. The thread itself cannot create intricate interweaving by controlling the other threads. It can only make itself as beautiful as is possible. When one thread struggles to dominate the tapestry, the design becomes distorted and the beauty of the threads is lost to that disharmony.

Humans are almost always holding on, which act creates tension and disharmony. Holding not only grows out of fear, but enhances fear through the practice of fear. The act of letting go, through practice of generosity, and awareness, is a foundation for spiritual growth. Letting go takes great faith, and an awareness that in human form your perspective is limited, that you cannot know everything, cannot always know what is happening below the surface levels of perception.

So here are two catalysts for effort, fear and love. You have spent many lifetimes learning to be masters of your environment, and, suddenly, you're becoming aware that fear is often the push for that mastery. Love teaches you to see your connection to everything. You understand that rather than being a master, you need to be a co-creator with all that is. You can see this lesson most clearly in the environmental difficulties of earth, all the vast problems of pollution, of the holes in the ozone layer, the diminishing rain forests, acid rain, animals that are becoming extinct, and plant species. All of this has grown out of man attempting to become master of his environment, without having any clear understanding of the interrelationships. Now you are finally coming to the awareness, "I am not the master here. If I cooperate with my environment, then I can support it, and it can support me. While I try to control it through fear, I destroy it." This is part of the catalyst for learning faith, learning to let go.

You've been learning all of these skills through this lifetime and through past lifetimes as well. Letting go is not an event, but a process. Slowly, you're becoming a bit better at it with these constant reminders that are thrown your way, threatening the very earth itself through barrenness, if you don't learn. Under that kind of pressure, happily, you are learning.

The being who is feeling disempowered and grasping at empowerment is living in great fear. I am not saying that being is bad in any way, only that there's misunderstanding, fear, and a great deal of separation. It sees surrender as letting go of control that it's so desperately trying to maintain, because control seems the only way to survive. Often, such beings have been abused in some way or another, have felt deeply hurt by their world and felt helpless within that hurt. Out of that pain have grown the defensive patterns of control.

We return to the spiritual perspective. As is obvious, surrender is easy for a being with no fear that goads it to be in control. If all around you was great abundance, never any shortage of anything, generosity would be very easy. Anything that anybody asked you for, you would willingly give, because if you wanted another, it was there for the taking. What meaning would generosity have? In similar circumstances, what meaning would faith have? What meaning would surrender have if there was no fear, no need to control?

Those who find the idea of surrender most difficult because it seems to draw away from their sense of personal empowerment are in that situation precisely so that they can learn true surrender through letting go. They're given the ideal catalyst to look at the issues of control and fear so that they may begin to transcend them. It takes a great deal of courage, and a great deal of awareness to look at that intense fear in yourself, especially for one who has been abused, been hurt, or who has lacked that which seemed necessary for security.

As you look with greater space and clarity at the arising fear which demands judgment, you may penetrate a haze that has previously been opaque, and open a door of compassion for the self. Then you begin to see the divinity in yourself. When we speak of surrender to God, we must remember that all of you are God, that this divine energy is in each of you. Surrender to God doesn't mean saying "I give up.", but letting go of the fear and coming back to that divine aspect of yourself. This is what you have faith in, and it heightens your sense of personal empowerment, because you know at the deepest level that you are and have always been invulnerable. Yes, you've suffered, but spiritually, you're invulnerable. You have always had that power. It is the power of love within you; it is the strongest power in the universe.

So you begin to look at the fear in yourself, the part of you that needs to control this, change that, needs to manipulate and hold on. You begin to notice, with gentleness, the fear from which need to control arises. You begin to treat yourself with compassion for those fears, rather than self-disparagement, to allow yourself to have had fears, to be gentle with yourself. As you do that, the need to control begins to dissolve. Your heart opens into connection with all that is. You are personally empowered because it's no longer a private empowerment. That being that knows its connection with all that is, knows its infinite power because it is not MY power or YOUR power, but the power of all living and loving energy wrapped together, hearts connected.

What, then, of this twelve-step idea of surrender to a higher power? You are not surrendering to something that is outside and separate from you. In surrendering to that higher power, you are surrendering to your own deepest wisdom. You are surrendering to the deepest place of love and connection within yourself. You're aligning yourself with that divine energy, opening yourself so that this energy may move through you, letting go of the walls of fear that have blocked it. This is what you must see, that surrender does not mean helplessness, or a making smaller of the self in any way. It is an expansion of the self by allowing the divine and the self to merge. Your surrender IS your empowerment, and when you have reached that place of surrender, you truly know that God's will for you and your will for yourself are one and the same. When you say "Thy will be done," you can say it with perfect trust, because that divine energy works in perfect harmony with your own deepest wisdom and love.

Copyright © 2000 by Barbara Brodsky