Letter #25: From Disempowered to Empowered
Office for practising the art of being at one with nature; the Pai River in northern Thailand
Dear Friend
Do you view yourself as empowered? What does ‘empowered’ actually mean? If we are disempowered, how is this so?
It’s Letter #25, and it’s a special Letter!
Empower yourself
Here is a truth of life I have determined for myself from my own experiences, observations of human behaviour, research, reflections and understandings:
the more we - ordinary human beings - empower ourselves the less power we give to the maniacs, miserable ideologues, and corrupt dacoits who have infiltrated all positions of leadership in all areas of human endeavour within our societies.
In fact, I would like to say, it is our OBLIGATION to ourselves and to all of life on this planet to empower ourselves. Until we do, our troubled, and often traumatised, human world is not going to get better.
But what does empower mean in practical reality?
To empower oneself means to put power into our own life, instead of outsourcing our decisions and responsibilities to external authorities due to our own lack of power.
It means to stop looking to others for answers to our problems and challenges, and instead to look within and find our own answers for our own life in our own context of life.
To empower yourself means acquiring certain key skills, core knowledge and know-how, leading to tremendous gains in self-confidence and self-belief.
Think of it as acquiring your very own ‘Essential Toolkit for Holistic Living’.
When we become skilled in something we gain in confidence. When we gain in confidence we are more prepared to take on new skills, new activities, new approaches, rather than resist due to lack of confidence or belief in ourselves.
Empowered people have within them a synergetic mix of cognitive and communication skills, self-knowledge and self-belief.
Over 99% of us have been disempowered
Interestingly, but not in a good way at all, during our schooling we were (and today’s children are) blocked from developing this very set of skills, knowledge and inner belief that are the essential pillars for a rock solid foundation that we human beings need to create a motivating, enjoyable and fulfilling life for ourselves.
Because of this, and without some kind of second REAL education, all adults struggle to achieve any kind of health and wellbeing that is our birthright as human beings.
It is axiomatic to say we need good physical health, sound psychological wellbeing, and spiritual connection if we wish to experience fun, joy, camaraderie and love in our life. And that, surely, is our number one objective as a human being?
Yet these anti-human school systems the world over disempower us, disconnect us, demoralise us, and dehumanise us; that is, they steal from us our power, our connection, our sense of morality and principles, and our very human essence. It’s why we have so much division, conflict, and suffering in our human world.
It is your human essence which carries infinite reserves of love, peace, camaraderie, confidence, courage, trust, respect, compassion and many more such beauties.
(Always in life there are noble exceptions, eg the school system in Finland, but we need to understand the mainstream ways and the bigger picture if we wish to understand ourselves, to heal ourselves and to evolve and grow in our life.)
So, if we were all disempowered while children, how do we empower ourselves to transform the way we experience our health, our relationships and our life??
How to empower yourself
We need to discover and nurture our inner authority, and activate and cultivate our human essence. The first means learning skills, and learning who we are and how life works; the second means (it’s my mantra!) unblocking your mind, unlocking your heart and unleashing your soul.
The key to being human is heart-centred living. Since our schools narrowed our minds, tried to completely shut our hearts, and set about crushing our souls, we have much work to do. It’s called inner work, self-inquiry, and I call this journey and exploration into ourselves A Spiritual Revolution, hence the name of my website, my YouTube channel and my first book.
We need, first and foremost, to become skilled in the learning and communication skills*: developing your listening, speaking, reading, researching, writing, self-awareness and reflective thinking skills, and multiple sub-skills arising out of these key skills.
We need to learn who we are, and that means asking ourselves pertinent questions:
Who am I? What is my mind? How does my mind work? What is the soul? What makes me do or say things I later regret? What makes me do or say things that I don’t want to do? What is my purpose for living? How can I evolve and put myself on the journey of self-growth and self-development?
How does the web of life work on our planet? How am I related to others? How am I connected with everything else? How does one live with an optimal level of health and wellbeing?
What values to I admire in other human beings? Am I practising them myself? If no, why not? If yes, how do they improve my life?
This is the second education we all need thanks to the rotten first one we got, which in fact was an anti-education.
What happens when we do empower ourselves?
We transform our experience of life
we dramatically improve our health and wellbeing
we develop strong and healthy relationships
and we become confident, curious, compassionate, creative, productive and reflective.
We realise, from doing all this, something that is so true, and which speaks to our core being and our consciousness at the deepest level of being human:
when we discover the joy of learning we discover the joy of living; when we master the skill of learning we master the skill of living.
We become a lifelong learner, leading to our continual evolution and self-growth. That doesn’t mean we are always changing, always on the go, no, far from it. I love nothing better than a month on my hammock on a deserted Thai white sand beach, just me and the glorious nature, my reggae and African music, a good book, a notebook, and plenty of walking, swimming and eating delicious healthy meals.
It primarily means we never get stuck mentally, emotionally, psychologically; we are always able to solve our own problems and that we, in fact, prevented most of them in the first place. We are able to overcome challenges, and we know what we know and don’t know, and we know how to do the research to fill the gaps in our knowledge.
*See the section after the next section for more on learning and communication skills.
Karmic law is a major empowerment tool
I’ve talked about karma and karmic law before, but since this is the key understanding of life itself, and how life works, it can never be mentioned too many times.
Very few western people seem to know what karma actually is, and many in fact dismiss it as woo-woo stuff and not real.
It is real alright!
But even when people discover karma and accept it, that 'you reap what you sow’, they have not consciously reversed this to see how they can take charge of their own life, health, relationships and destiny.
Those who live by the law of karma, and who use it to proactively shape and navigate their own life, are the true leaders in our world. And, in this way, we absolutely minimise the suffering and pain that seems to be so commonplace in the human world these days.
And be sure about it, any human being can be a true leader: you learn to lead yourself, and then you will be an excellent leader for others by being a mentor and motivator, leading by example.
Karmic law, using my own words to present its meaning, is that you reap what you sow, cause and effect, action and reaction. It’s the flow of energy, from one space to another space, from one time to another time, from one mind to another mind. Life is the flow of energy, the flow of energy is movement, movement is change, so life is change. Karma is the flow of this energy. Everything is interlinked, interconnected, intertwined. Everything.
Now, while we may look at the situation of our life today, and see bad things, feel pain, experience suffering, be reminded of a problem we have, and just bemoan our bad luck, our situation, the actions of another person etc etc, then we are stuck.
But what we see now is the effect of something that caused it before now.
What we are reaping today is based on what we sowed before today. It could be good, it could be bad, but the karmic law works just the same.
So, the intelligent way to live is to ask ourselves: “What did I do before today that has led to what is happening to me now?” If you like what is happening today, repeat the causes; if you don’t like it, make informed intelligent changes to the cause so that the effects are changed.
By always asking ‘why?’, always reflecting upon things, we gain understanding of real life situations, and this leads to the development of our innate intelligence and gives space to our instincts and intuition. Instead of resisting that which has already happened (and therefore resistance is futile), we learn why it happened, and takes steps to avoid a repeat.
And then we become skilled in being a ‘farmer’: we plant and sow seeds that we expect to lead to a great reaping and harvest, full of flowers and fruits!!
We are in charge of our life.
We are empowered.
Learning the art of communication skills
In what ways will your life improve if you become a skilled and attentive listener and a skilled and confident communicator, able to express yourself without fear of what others think, and to articulate your understandings to others who are interested in listening to them??
How will your life improve if you feel valued, listened to and understood by others, and you value, listen to and understand others?
While we can teach ourselves almost anything in the field of knowledge—especially with the internet, which has effectively brought the whole gamut of all knowledge and information that humans have accumulated throughout our history into our very living rooms (except for the bits that rogue human beings have censored from us)—what we can’t do by ourselves is develop and master our relationship skills with our fellow human beings by developing and mastering our listening, speaking and social skills.
We need to learn and master these skills in the company of others, because how else can we practise communication? With ourselves? In the mirror?!
And we need to feel emotionally supported so that we can express ourselves without any fear of negative judgement.
So we need a learning environment where everybody feels emotionally supported, and in this psychological climate we are able to open our hearts and minds and express ourselves. When you express yourself and your ideas, you ARE yourself.
With an open mind and heart we are now set for optimal learning, and learning is the ‘Mother of all Skills’. Learning comes from communicating, and communicating comes from learning.
Schools blocked us from all of this.
In this emotionally supportive space we can now be cognitively challenged, which means developing ours skills in solving tasks and overcoming challenges through collaborating with our classmates or peers.
Teamwork, working together, creating synergy, harmony, respect, trust, for each other. Evolving and growing individually in collaboration with others.
Precisely what we need for everyday human life.
In such a learning environment, every single human being will thrive in ways beyond their prior imagination. When we can express ourselves, to willing pairs of ears, and when we feel automatically motivated to listen to others expressing themselves, then joyful things stir the heart and soul, and the mind feels deeply rewarded and fulfilled. (See my learning quote up above.)
I know this to be true because thousands of people have experienced this in my classrooms for over quarter of a century.
I am currently in the middle of doing three online training sessions for over 250 leaders of a spiritual-minded group which has 100,000+ members all over the world. Next week I’m going to share with you some of the feedback I’ve received from them, in particular what they have said about having discussions in small groups of three or four participants.
They unanimously loved being put in small groups with my questions to guide their discussions, and they loved it when we come back together into the whole group and compare what each group discussed and thought.
This is true learning that all human beings find motivating, fun, inspiring and rewarding.
And empowering!
A whole array of learning and communication skills, and social and collaboration skills are practised, and super levels of self-confidence, self-belief and inner motivation are felt by everybody, and they then take this back out into the world at large and into their own home and work contexts.
I believe such an education to be crucial to the healing of humankind, because it’s communication skills which make or break relationships, and it’s learning skills that enable us to make informed decisions for ourselves, and to underscore our own evolution and self-growth, instead of being coerced into doing or accepting things we intuitively feel are wrong, on the threat of some kind of negative repercussion.
And here is the real magic: when the adults are now skilled in learning, communicating and teaching/leading themselves, now they can truly make a difference for the children of our world. If we can’t teach ourselves, how can we teach (and parent) the children??
The best leaders are always mentors and motivators, not tellers and yellers. We lead by example and never ask anything of others we cannot or will not do ourselves.
I also want to share with you the text I wrote for the spiritual leaders about external authority, inner authority, human essence and facilitative leadership. The purpose is for each of us to regain our inner authority, suppressed from us during our formative years by a society that is run on the principle of external-authority-knows-best.
Offering live online learning, communication and self-leadership skills courses is going to be the bedrock of my venture over the next 4-5 years. I will bring you news of this as soon as it’s up and running. Which will be soon: we are now half way through the year already!
It’s transformative education and it’s going to transform the education system and empower the human world into a glorious new era.
No problems! So be with it, get with it!
Until next time, cheerio.
Philip
