Being of Power

I once heard a story about how Michelangelo supposedly used to walk through the streets of Florence carrying a slab of uncut marble on his back, saying, “There is an angel inside here screaming to get out.” This masterful artist didn’t just see a big piece of uncut stone. Rather, he saw the statue he would create as already hidden inside the marble, and his job was to chisel away all the excess so it could be revealed.

It’s the same for us as human beings. We’re already whole, complete, and lacking nothing; the problem is that, for the most part, we don’t believe this about ourselves. Since we were very young, many of us have adopted the belief that being ourselves is not enough, and from there we added on all the fix-its in an attempt to navigate a world where we are not enough, we want to please others, and we receive the admiration and acknowledgment that we’re craving. We’ve obscured our true selves and thus lost our power. Our work here in this practice is to break off the excess marble that keeps our authentic, whole selves encumbered.

We hear a lot in the spiritual and self-help world about the idea of letting go. That’s pretty common these days, right? I mean, how many yoga teachers have a bumper sticker or T-shirt that says something along the lines of LET GO? We all know that there’s something philosophical to that notion. In reality, though, beyond just being a nice sound bite, letting go is a key tool to rediscovering your power. Being of power is all about coming back to our naturalness—it’s clearing the clutter that’s preventing us from tapping into what’s possible.

Our higher self is not something we have to go out and seek. Over the years, I’ve met many individuals who have tried to turn yoga into “the path”—those who seek out one guru, teacher, or workshop after another or journey far and wide looking for enlightenment. But maybe there really isn’t some higher self that you need to find somewhere in India or the Himalayas. Consider that you already have it right now, that you were born with it. It’s right here, in you, waiting for you to wake up to it. To be about what you really want in life, in your heart of hearts, you only need to give up whatever is standing in your way.

I’m reminded of a lesson I learned when I was 18 years old. I was traveling with my parents to Myanmar (formerly called Burma) on one of their pilgrimages to the East. We visited a very old Buddhist monastery where we met with a group of monks, and my dad was introduced to the head monk as “a famous guru from America.” After a few minutes of polite chitchat, the monks wanted to test my father to find out if he was for real. “It’s customary,” our guide explained, so Dad agreed.

The master handed him a small, ancient bowl with Buddhist symbols painted all over it and asked, “What is the most important part of this bowl?” I remember that there was this kind of macho-monk energy exchange going on as we all waited in anticipation for my father to give his answer.

He looked over the bowl as if he were keenly interested in the symbols painted on it, the texture, and the shape. Finally, after a long pause, he answered, “The space inside.” It was the right answer. The energy in the room lightened, and everyone started laughing. My father and the Buddhist master instantly got on as if they were old friends.

When I train people, I work a lot with the fundamental idea of space, which is the “rice bowl” in which personal transformation happens. One of the barriers we typically bump up against when we’re trying to forge a new direction in life is occupied space. We try to do something new without first making room for it. The problem with this is that we can’t build anything new on top of old, stuck energy. That would be like trying to erect a new building on top of an existing one; it simply won’t work. So before we can move forward to create the life we want, we first have to clear out whatever debris of the past might be cluttering our space. This chapter helps us do exactly that.

Eric came to a training that I was leading looking for a spiritual and physical renovation and renewal. He explained that he imagined his entire life as a building that needed to be torn down, piece by piece. He wanted to “break down the walls and flatten it all to the ground,” and I told him that this particular imagery works well.

I will refer here to the things we need to let go of as bricks. We carry around these heavy blocks of disempowering beliefs, fear, resentment, expectation, resignation, cynicism, and blame, to name a few, so it’s no wonder people feel so exhausted and burned out!

Giving things up is a health secret. One by one, brick by brick, when we drop the heavy bricks that have been weighing us down, we immediately feel more energized. We lighten up and even begin to look that way. You can actually see the difference between people’s energy when they arrive at a Baptiste training program versus when they leave. Typically, they come in with dense, stressed, resistant energy that had been building up from years of living a reactive existence. But then somewhere around day three, this embodied resistance and heaviness starts breaking up, participants start breaking through into a new lightness of being, and everything about them changes. Their eyes start to shine and they stand taller, get a bounce back in their step, and start to glow with an inner brightness. It’s like a total mind-body makeover, but from the inside out. The breakthroughs happen when they shift from asking what they need to do to the question of what they need to give up.

When students feel stuck, I usually ask them, “What do you need to give up right now to be at peace?” Not surprisingly, one of the most common answers is, “Fear.”

Veronica, a 35-year-old executive, once shared these comments at a workshop: “My whole life I’ve been held back by fear. I’m afraid of what people think, afraid of failing, afraid of succeeding … afraid of everything. But then, this morning during meditation, I realized that when it comes to ability and opportunity, there’s actually nothing real standing in my way. I’m smart, educated, and fortunate to have a good life and a solid support system around me. So, really, all things are possible in my life—fear is the only thing in my way.”

Veronica is right. We can’t be of possibility and run our fear-based story lines at the same time. The limiting perceptions born out of fear keep us from finding love, acting on our dreams, and succeeding in taking on and accomplishing the aspirations that ultimately fulfill us. It pretty much follows that whenever we feel stopped, fear is at play.

Just imagine for a moment what your life would be like if you could transform fear into faith-filled action every time it comes up … what you could be and do if that brick wasn’t weighing you down. It’s a pretty empowering possibility, isn’t it?

Another big brick we carry is expectation. In any circumstance where we feel frustration, this is usually at play. Expectations rob us of a sense of peace in the present moment, because they keep us in the divide between what is actually happening now and what we believe should be taking place. Take Sid, for example. He is a Christian minister who came to a teacher training because he loves Baptiste Yoga and wanted to advance in his own practice but not necessarily teach it. Well, not a lot was going right for Sid as the week began. On day one he pulled a muscle, and for the next few days he was frustrated because he couldn’t physically work at the level he wanted.

I explained to Sid that while his physical pain is real and needs to be respected, it was important to distinguish that from his mental reaction and emotional experience of the injury. What was causing him to suffer was his presumption that his body should perform differently than it actually was.

Dropping the expectation, as in giving up the brick called this should not be happening this way, shifts us into a more empowered space of equanimity and acceptance rather than frustration. You can simply be with what is just as it is, without having to make anything wrong with it, and new, unexpected opportunities for action will occur. We’ll talk about this more in “Practice #7: Embrace Naked Reality,” but for now we must consider that our expectations (and subsequent frustrations) prevent us from gleaning what’s available on the actual path that’s unfolding right before our eyes.

There are plenty of other bricks that we human beings carry around. Start looking for the ones of heavy seriousness and significance that you bring to nearly everything in your life—including your yoga practice, if you have one. Root out the goal-driven, get-it-right, be-right, and do-it-perfectly-or-not-at-all attitude and give that up, because it’s a pure killjoy. Give all that up in order to lighten up. Stop making such a big deal out of things. Relax already! Stop taking things personally, because they aren’t.

As you drop these heavy bricks, you become one of life’s players in bringing lightness, fun, joy, and ease into everything you do.

Let’s say fear shows up a lot for you. You can alleviate its effects by doing the following:

— The first step is to become aware that fear is present. Each time you do so, it’s an opportunity to give it up. Right in that moment, you can choose with a clear perspective whether to continue to let fear control you or to drop it.

I’m not talking about resisting, since what we resist we empower. The more powerful path is to acknowledge it, feel it, let it come up, and let it go. Remember, when we’re not paying attention to fear in this way, it has us in its grip—it’s driving the bus. But when we’re aware of it, we can choose whether to give it control or take back the steering wheel.

— The second step is acceptance. It’s the action of embracing the fear as it is and as it isn’t and giving up any of the resistance to what you see and feel. You give up judging what is bad or good, right or wrong, and release any fault, blame, or whatever other story you’re spinning about it (“This shouldn’t be happening,” “I don’t want this,” and so on).

We’ll deepen our exploration of this in “Practice #5: Let it Be,” but this is a good place to start.

— The third step, declaration, is exactly what it sounds like. You simply—but intentionally—declare, “Right now, I give up fear.” Note that I didn’t say, “I’m going to give up fear,” “I’ll try my best to give up fear,” or “I want to give up fear.” There is immeasurable power in declaration that works if we own it in the present as if it’s already real, true, and in existence. The amazing thing is that you don’t even need to believe it’s true in the moment. Just the act of declaring in words, silently or aloud, sets the intent energetically in motion and primes the space to bring that thing into existence. It also puts our attention on what we want to have happen and takes our intention off what’s stopping us.

This isn’t magic. It’s a practice. We don’t declare something once and then boom! we’re done. A student named Donna had a deep fear of speaking in front of big groups, but she desperately wanted to be a leader for change in her community. She was very clear that it was fear standing in her way—specifically, a fear of how people would perceive her—so on day one of her training she got up and declared that she was giving up the brick of fear. And then she immediately said, “Hmm … but the fear is still here.”

It’s like that, right? You give something up, and then it just slithers right back in. The voice of the inner saboteur in your head says, “That’s a crock … you’re full of it.” Well, it’s important to understand that it’s not an instantaneous transformation here! Just let that voice be, and give up the brick called fear, again and again, in every moment. When you give it up and it comes back, acknowledge it, feel it, and simply give it up again. Take every opportunity to release it.

If you have an apprehension of speaking in front of groups, for instance, every time someone asks you to do it, acknowledge the fear, give it up, and stand up to openly share from your heart. Repetition is the mother of mastery until ease and confidence crystallize as something real and permanent in your way of being. Acting courageously doesn’t happen in the absence of fear, but rather in the face of it. As you learn to dance with this emotion in a more playful way, notice how it loses its strength. The impermanence of fear becomes obvious when we get present to it.

This isn’t just a simple, “Oh, give it up.” It’s not a gloss over. People will oftentimes tell others who are going through something difficult—like heartbreak, for example—that they should let go and move on. But on some level, the individuals who are saying that know it doesn’t really work, even for them. You can’t really give anything up or let it go until you’ve taken ownership of the experience of it in the first place. Just let the feeling or thought be there, and then in the moment of distinguishing it as something separate from you, put some space between you and the experience. From this context, you’re no longer consumed by the fear or heartbreak or whatever else is causing you a loss of peace. Its grip on you is released. You can’t give up the heartbreak if you’re caught up in the story about it, but you can give up your resistance to the heartbreak and take ownership for what’s underneath. You can give up the brick of “this should not be happening,” accept that it happened, and feel what you’re feeling with the intent to heal and get whole. As Robert Frost said, “The best way out is always through.”

This is how we give up and go beyond whatever it is that’s standing in the way of our being of power. Moment by moment, brick by brick: awareness, acceptance, declaration.

I love the physical focus of yoga. The emphasis on getting grounded and tuned in to our bodies is an access point to our power. Asana practice is a waking up and energetic clearing out that directly connects us to our bodies, which is the space in which we exist in every present moment. It helps us remove the blocks and trapped energy we store there, sometimes for years or even decades. Giving up and dissolving old energy patterns allows us to empty our rice bowl, which clears the space and allows us to listen from our body intelligence and take intuitive, decisive action.

The three practices and techniques of Baptiste transformative methodology are physical asana, meditation, and inquiry. Meditation, as I teach it, is a body-based observation practice. You can accomplish a lot by taking ten minutes in the morning and evening to energetically go through your space (your body) and check in, scan, and create a clearing of good space.

The following is a meditation exercise I use that you can do on your own at home. I suggest having someone else read this to you, or record yourself reading it and play it back:

— Choose a seated position in a place that feels comfortable to you. Lift your bones and relax your muscles in a way that is empowering to you. Close your eyes, and let your arms hang loosely as you rest your hands on your lap. Relax your entire body with the intention of checking in and getting a sense of your physical space.

— Start by giving attention to the physical space you are sitting in. Sense the earth or floor beneath you, the sky or ceiling above you, and the natural environment or four walls around you. Notice your body occupying physical space in relation to all those elements.

— Move your attention to your inner space. Get a sense of your spine and bones as the support structure for your body and of your skin as the container for its contents.

— Now, funnel your awareness into your hands, and feel what’s going on inside of them at this moment. Notice how where your focus goes your energy flows. Continue to scan your arms, then move up to your shoulders, neck, and head. Imagine that your attention is a warm, thick, glowing, golden liquid, and let it pour down from the top of your head into your torso, arms, pelvis, buttocks, thighs, calves, ankles, and feet. Just be with the sensations inside your body, and check in with what’s happening inside your space. Imagine yourself as a magnet, open to receiving a flush of warmth throughout your space as you do your scan. It’s okay if you don’t feel the energy flowing through you at first—don’t get caught up in evaluating what you feel, see, and sense or the running mental commentary about it. Don’t make anything bad or wrong; just feel whatever you feel and experience whatever you experience while staying aware and inside your physical space.

Don’t worry about the specific position or condition of your body. Just be here, inside your space, looking around. Look at any mental images that happen to arise, and let them pass by and move through. Whatever feelings or thoughts come up, let them, and then let them go. Move your attention into your organs—your heart, lungs, and abdomen. Scan your whole inner space, top to bottom, bottom to top, from your toes to your temples, from your skin to your bones.

— Now move your awareness up to your head, and just notice what’s there. Is there a quality of spaciousness or contraction? Take a look at the area behind your eyes and around your brain. As you breathe and scan, let any sense of tightness or clutter in your brain, skull, eyes, or jaw muscles dissolve like an ice cube in hot water. Just breathe, experience, let be, and relax.

If you locate aches, pains, tightness, or fatigue anywhere, look at these things up close. Specifically, locate the feelings of stuck energy and resistance in your body. Move your attention exactly to where the tension, discomfort, or sensation of tiredness exists. Where exactly is it? How big is it—the size of a grape, grapefruit, or watermelon? How far in is it? What color does it have? What is its texture? Is it moving or static? Are there any thoughts, judgments, or images from your past that are attached to it? Just notice what’s there without trying to change it; simply watch and be with it.

— Next, imagine your body as a clear glass container that’s filled in every nook and cranny with warm, golden, liquid sunshine. Notice the quality of inner brightness that this liquid carries as it fills your feet, calves, thighs, pelvis, torso, and arms and continues to move up steadily all the way to the top of your head.

— Now visualize that each of your ten toes and fingers has a release valve at its tip. Open these valves, and let the warm liquid begin to drain slowly out of you. Feel it draining downward from your head and neck and through the rest of your body, cleansing your space. As the substance drains out of your body, imagine it having a spongelike quality that allows it to absorb and soak up any resistance, toxic energy, tension, judgments, negative beliefs, and other junk that has been polluting your space and making it heavy. Remember the intention here is to clear and unclutter your energetic space. Let every last drop of the warm liquid release out of you.

— To complete the exercise, once more do a body scan and look around inside, noticing how you’ve cleared your space. If you notice any remaining holding patterns, just let them be. Breathe deeply and enjoy the sensation of a fulfilling, healthy emptiness. For these last few moments, imagine a flame near your heart igniting a glowing brightness that streams throughout your inner space and infuses every part of your body with the energy of pure possibility.

— You can open your eyes now and stretch.

As you get more connected to your space, you’ll be amazed by the feedback and messages you receive about what you’re doing in your life that’s working, what isn’t, and the old stuff you may be carrying around that’s weighing you down.

At one of my programs, a student named Bill described to the group how in his life he had faced a lot of challenges. Most recently, he’d been struggling with depression. He shared that, through his scanning meditation practice, he got in touch with a body sensation of coldness that had been present for a long time, and he began to shiver. A powerful image came to mind of himself as a five-year-old boy in Philadelphia on a day when it had snowed. He was playing outside, when he suddenly got very cold and passed out on the sidewalk. He remembered experiencing a tremendous fear of being left alone, which has haunted him ever since.

Bill told us, “I realized that this cold, deadened sensation has always been there in the background for me. So I tuned in to where it was showing up in my body—specifically, it was my belly. Up until then, I always thought it had been a problem in my body, but I suddenly realized that the feeling wasn’t physical at all. It was fear. So I kept going, tuning in deeper, to see if I could figure out what I was actually scared of. The answer came really quickly: I was afraid of being left alone to die.”

Even through years of therapy, Bill hadn’t gotten in touch with the loneliness that was so dominant in his life, because he’d always resisted it. He told us that after fully experiencing the feeling of aloneness, the cold lifted, and he felt greatly relieved. The chill was replaced by a flush of warmth throughout his body, as he realized that being alone is different from being lonely. He saw how he’d been adding a lot of negative meaning to both, but due to the internal work he did, the coldness subsequently dissolved permanently.

It’s helpful to discern why body patterns such as Bill’s persist. Often, there’s a hidden energy and emotion underneath the symptom or sensation that keeps it in place, even when the person wishes for it to change. Bill was only able to let it go once the concealed feeling came to light. Only then did the pattern lose its hold over him and new energy was freed up in his body.

When we scan our space, unconscious blind spots come to view. We see mental dynamics that have had us in their grip, and they begin to dissolve as we practice working with them in a new way. Those who ignore the sensations and feelings inside their bodies miss out on the possibility of experiencing deeper personal insights regarding whatever has happened that caused those dynamics—and thus being able to release old patterns and come into new vitality and freedom. From this open space, we have direct access to our higher intuition and spiritual gut sense, which comes from the core of who we are. That’s our authentic power, right there, waiting for us to wake up to it.

Jeremy was entirely sure his mother had taught him how to walk when he was a small child. He was convinced that if it weren’t for her, he wouldn’t have attained that skill as a toddler. I told Jeremy I fully understood that he thought his mother had taught him how to walk, and I believed that she held his hand and explained things to him along the way—but, in fact, she did not teach him how to walk. Instead, as a young child, he had expanded his space to include the possibility of walking, and then progressively filled in that space with steps until he fully walked. Mostly, his mother just got to observe and support the process.

I pointed out to Jeremy that if people really needed to be taught how to walk, there would be books like How to Teach Your Child to Walk and Walking for Dummies on the shelves of bookstores. But there aren’t. Children who are ready to walk simply do it. As a parent, you can help the process along, but you can’t speed it up or slow it down—not really.

Today, as adults, this is how we acquire new skills. Our space is where we’re coming from, and our purpose—-our goals—is where we’re going. Just as when we learned to walk, the only things we can ever do in life are the things we expand our space to include. Today, just as when we were kids, we have the ability to know intuitively if we can do something. And I mean really know. And then from that inner knowing, we just go ahead and do it.

Think about it: was there anything in your life that you just knew you could do? Maybe it was something creative, brave, or physical, and even if you didn’t have the technical knowledge just yet at that point, you knew deep inside that you could take it on.

This inner knowing is generated when you’re coming from a clear space, because it creates room for grace to enter. When life supports our efforts and paves the way for us so we can move effortlessly ahead, that is grace.

The biggest breakthroughs, awakenings, support, and results that come your way are through grace. The practices you’re learning here create the space for these types of expansive manifestations to occur. Clearing the old stuff out to make room for grace means that you’re willing to be the recipient of a gift. To be really open to all that life wants to give you is to come from a place where you fully embrace your self-worth—even if you don’t just yet. When you believe that you’re not enough, you’ll struggle with being receptive to something that you don’t feel you deserve. If you experience being unworthy, you won’t be able to accept life’s abundance—you’ll be blocked from receiving miracles.

Consider that if you don’t feel this abundance and support from grace, it’s because you’re not living these practices that serve your transformation. You’re being a “no,” needing to know “how,” having to be right, looking good, and having to do things the “right way” or your way (which is all about trying to control circumstances). One way of being is about reaction and survival, the other is about trust and possibility. With the first one, you’re working so hard to survive something, and there’s no space within the knots of that struggle for grace to come in and support you. If miracles aren’t happening, consider that it’s because somewhere in there you’re playing God and, therefore, grace—the universe—can’t get to you. Giving it up to get empty is actually a beautiful practice, because it allows us to let go of all the limiting perceptions and stuck energy and be malleable, willing recipients of the gifts of grace.

Remember how I said that you can look at something and know if you can or can’t do it? A simple example is looking at a door and knowing whether or not you can walk through it. Can you get to it? Does it open? Assuming it’s physically possible, if you declare to yourself, “I can,” then it’s as if you’ve already done it. In your being, it’s okay to go ahead and walk through the door. You don’t have any doubts or obstructions standing in your way.

It’s the same with any intention you set for yourself in life. Once you clear your space, your aspirations become easier to reach, since you’ll know right away if something is attempting to distract or derail you. I remember receiving a phone call a few years ago informing me that my son had been injured playing football. He was only 11 years old, and it was a bad injury; his lip had been torn, and he was in the hospital needing stitches. I recall the sensation of immediately expanding my space to look ahead, get out the door, and dart directly to the emergency room. In my mind, I was there with him already. There were no reasons or excuses why I couldn’t get to the hospital. With the clear purpose of getting to my son, nothing and no one could have gotten in my way. I remember getting there with a lightness of speed and moving through any blocks on my path with ease.

That’s the power of intent. If you connect clearly to the things you know you can have and want, then you’ll find that the actual process of doing them is an effortless flow. Intention gives us new vision, in which suddenly things that seemed impossible appear as possible. Having a focused intent is what will enable you to give up what stands in your way. It’s not magic; you have to take the steps, use the tools, and do the work. But you’ve cleared the space and invited in grace, which, when present, gains you access to the realm of transformative possibility.

We need to repeatedly come back to the fundamental practice of giving things up to get empty. (A physical reminder I use is to focus on my hands and visualize: with one hand I clear space and allow creative energy to enter into it, and with the other hand I create fulfillment.) Whenever you feel stuck, are unsure about what steps to take, or are ready for something bigger in your life, the question to always begin with is, “What do I need to give up right now?”

The mind always clings, but we increase our power and freedom when we drop the clinging. Each day is new; each moment is new. Each day we move into a new world, either dragging the past with us or letting it go to attract and act in ways that fulfill our higher commitments. If we give up the barriers and pretenses and bring into view the things that we weren’t aware of about ourselves, take responsibility for them, and clear them, what we have underneath is love. Love is what’s left when we get all the other junk out of the way. In the space of love, all things are possible.