EMPOWERMENT

Buckle up! You are about to embark on a life adventure. It will call forth from you inner resources you may never have known you had. It will help free you of self-imposed limitations. It will provide you with the means to shape your own destiny. You will learn the art of creating your life as you want it.

Most of us settle for far less in our lives than we are capable of achieving. We fall victim to impoverished dreams, dreams that don’t begin to do justice to our potential. We need to learn how to dream; how to boldly and courageously reach for our highest visions. This book will help you dare to dream and, equally important, give you the necessary skills and tools to realize these dreams. You will learn how to harness the passion of your heart and the power of your mind and express your full potential. The process of accomplishing this we call empowerment.

On this journey of empowerment, you will discover what it is you really want for your life. Discovering what you want is often a revelation in itself. Knowing your deepest heart can mean avoiding years spent pursuing other people’s dreams.

Once you have a life vision worthy of your fullest effort, you will learn techniques to transform limiting beliefs and bring your life vision into full manifestation. If you engage wholeheartedly, you will come away from this journey feeling alive in a way you may never have thought possible.

Why is it that so few people are willing to dream boldly, to reach for their highest visions?

Part of the reason is that our culture is primarily pathologically based. It focuses on what is wrong with a person. Many therapies consider success to be helping people get “better,” with better being defined as the absence of neurosis. There is rarely a direct focus on full potential or optimum well-being.

This is not a condemnation of these therapies; rather, it is a sober look at our dominant cultural belief. This belief assumes a view of life in which each of us learns merely how to cope and fit in rather than to excel and move out. Much of the personal growth work that has evolved over the past few decades reflects this dominant pathological attitude of our culture. This approach is rather like a gardener who spends so much time finding and pulling weeds that she ignores the planting, care, and cultivation of fruitful plants.

If you have gone through some of these therapies or growth experiences, you will probably know why your life doesn’t work—in great detail. You will have developed a theory as to what caused you to be the way you are now and learned some tools for coping. This work is valuable and important, in that it does help you cope more effectively with problems in your life.

However, it needs to go further. Knowing that the reason you feel insecure is that your father withheld love from you when you were a child and learning how to accept this are just the first steps. Developing the self-love and inner resources to feel secure and confident throughout your life is another matter entirely, and you must learn the ways of this new world if you are to express your full potential.

We call this other world creating a vision for your life. To create an inspired life vision, we must develop an acute awareness of the possibilities that lie within us. Until we do this, our potential remains dormant.

Specifically, it teaches you how to transform the limiting beliefs and behavior patterns that are causing you difficulties. And then it helps you release and direct your creative energies toward achieving what you really want—from a healthier body to better relationships; from material success to a richer spiritual life.

We refer to this shift as moving from pathology to vision. It is shifting our basic attitude toward life from problem solving to vision crafting. For many of us, this is a subtle and dramatic shift. It requires us to let go of the deep, problem-oriented programming of our culture and accept the belief that we can and will create the life we want.

One person who went through this shift described it in the following way: “With the empowerment process I challenged myself to move away from the safe and familiar world of my problems. I developed the specific skills for exploring the risky, exciting, and positive frontier of creating what I want in my life.”

Making this powerful a change in perspective is more than a simple overnight process. It takes time and requires us to be patient and compassionate with ourselves as we learn how to think and act in this dynamic new way.

There are many reasons people choose to take this journey. The following list of reasons comes from people who have taken our Empowerment Workshop. See if any of these motivations ring true for you.

• I’ve got a lot of inner shoveling to do, and I need to muster the courage to do it.

• I want to stop pulling the rug out from under myself whenever I get close to success.

• I have been too preoccupied with my work and want to find a way to be more balanced so I can discover the rest of my life.

Once a person has gone through the empowerment process, creative breakthroughs and dynamic self-growth begin to occur. The following stories come from people who took our Empowerment Workshop. They are examples of the kinds of challenges people confronted and the positive changes they brought about in their lives.

Janice had just ended yet another relationship. She felt devastated, sad, and alone. She had seen this pattern to her breakups before, and this time she felt as though she didn’t have the energy to pick herself up and try again.

Through the empowerment process, Janice began to examine her deep beliefs about loving herself and others. She slowly recognized how harshly she judged herself and how many beliefs she held about not being a worthy or good enough person. She realized how her own beliefs—conscious and unconscious—sabotaged her ability both to love and to be loved. She learned more about her true self, not the self she thought she was supposed to be. She began the process of forgiving herself and others and building new life-affirming beliefs about herself.

When the workshop ended, Janice was clearer about both what she wanted from a relationship and what she had to offer. She was much more realistic about the hard work, commitment, and ongoing self-love required to make a relationship successful. Janice continued to use the empowerment process daily and attracted into her life a healthy, loving, and enduring relationship.

Lou came to the Empowerment Workshop with a prestigious job he had worked hard to achieve. He also had a good marriage and family life, yet he felt empty; something wasn’t right. He felt as though his life was on automatic pilot and all the passion was gone. This confused him because it seemed as if he had everything society said he needed to be happy. He kept saying to himself, “I don’t have the right to be unhappy.” Yet he knew in his heart there was something essential missing in his life.

With the same dedication he used to create success in his professional life, Lou dove into the empowerment process. With the help of the exercises, he reexamined his basic attitudes and premises about life. He looked closely at the life he had created for himself. He found that while he had devoted tremendous energy to taking care of his external life of family, home, and job, he had ignored his internal life—feelings, reverence, wonder, spirit, and connection with the mystery of life. Lou was out of balance in a way that is typical of people in our culture. All the emphasis is put on the active state of “doing” while the receptive state of “being” is ignored.

With the assistance of the empowerment tools, he began to nourish his interior life. He created time with his family each week in which they could share their feelings and deeper thoughts with one another. He slowed down and spent more time with nature. Lou began learning the fine art of being: a soft, receptive state of mind in which he felt content in the moment without having to do or reach for more. After several months of genuine commitment to this new orientation, a profound shift took place. Lou felt more joy than he had ever remembered. He had a new verve in his work, more love to offer his family, and peace of mind. He had created balance between his outer and inner life.

Michael was an engineer with twenty years of experience in his field. Like Lou, Michael had a feeling of inertia, low energy, and a lack of joy in his life. Though their problems were similar, the empowerment process led Lou and Michael to very different destinations. It became clear to Michael that his career as an engineer no longer met his needs. Though engineering had originally been something he liked, it did not reflect who he was now. He recognized that by staying in his field of work he was numbing himself to experiencing life. He came to understand that if he wanted to feel energetic and enlivened again he needed to change his career.

Michael learned to clarify his current priorities and passions. He became aware that his real love was the outdoors. He discovered that he wanted to find work outdoors that was meaningful to him and assisted others in their growth. With patience, dedication to his new vision, and an ongoing use of the empowerment tools, Michael did two things within the next year. He left his engineering job and he began working as an Outward Bound instructor, leading men and women on wilderness vision quests. He now had the passion and meaning he was looking for in his work.

Fran grew up with a mother who regularly let her know that she wished that Fran had never been born. Fran felt hurt, angry toward her mother, and sorry for herself. She had also acquired a bad allergy at a young age, which she felt was somehow connected to this situation. As she embarked on the empowerment journey, Fran faced a double-edged challenge: She needed to heal her relationship with her mother and overcome her own cycle of feeling victimized.

She began examining her beliefs and attitudes, and saw how they had trapped her in the role of feeling helpless. Her web of beliefs looked like this: To feel like she was a lovable person, her mother had to love her. Since her mother’s love for her was shaky at best, she had proof that she was not a lovable person. If she wasn’t lovable, she couldn’t love herself.

Fran became aware that the only way she could be free of her old self-negating beliefs was to cut herself off from her past and start loving herself. She succeeded. Fran even discovered that she could love her mother while not condoning the way her mother had treated her. By the end of these few months, her acute allergy was gone.

In these stories we see people who felt a certain lack of well-being or had a desire for greater satisfaction in their lives. Can we call these stories miracles? Yes—the kind of miracles that are available to any of us who are willing to dream boldly, look honestly at ourselves, and commit to a process of self-growth.

If someone told you that what you longed for in your life could be yours, would you believe it? Before we used the methods we teach in this book we might not have believed a claim like this. However, after years of seeing the powerful results in our own lives and witnessing the remarkable achievements of others we’ve worked with, our answer to this question is an unqualified “Yes!”

The first questions that need to be answered on this adventure of self-discovery and self-creation are these: “Where do I want to go?” and “How will I get there?” It’s time to chart your course.

A Chinese proverb says, “If you don’t know where you are going, you won’t know when you get there.” An addendum to this is: Even if you do know where you are going, you can get there sooner and with less wear and tear if you know how to take such a journey. But this is no ordinary trip. The journey of self-discovery and self-creation is the most exciting, challenging, exhilarating, confounding journey you will ever take. It may be fraught with wrong turns and dead ends, and has been known to be quite uncomfortable at times. It also has the potential to bring you happiness, peace of mind, joy, fulfillment, freedom, and insight into your life’s purpose.

We invent all kinds of reasons to explain why we don’t have what we want in our lives, but by and large they boil down to two: Either

Throughout this book, you will continually ask yourself these two questions, which lie at the heart of the empowerment experience: “What do I want?” and “How do I create it?” The answers to these questions are what this book is dedicated to helping you achieve.

To answer these questions, you will undertake an extraordinary journey. Fortunately, you are not the first person to travel this path. It has been navigated by many fellow travelers. And to assist you in reaping the greatest benefit from your journey, you will be accompanied by two seasoned guides: us. We will offer you insights gained from guiding many to their destinations.

John Steinbeck said, “We don’t take a trip. A trip takes us.” The person who returns from a true journey is never the same person as the one who departs. The returning traveler has new insight, new perspective, and new richness of being. Life and self are seen with deeper wisdom and compassion.

We’ll begin by giving you an overview of the inner adventures that lie in store. The journey of empowerment, like all trips, has three distinct stages: getting ready, traveling, and returning home. A successful trip requires proper preparation, a good itinerary, and a way to meaningfully integrate the experience into subsequent everyday life.

If you get yourself in shape prior to a journey, you can benefit from and enjoy it more. The first part of getting ready is to make sure you’re well-conditioned for the trip. On the empowerment journey, being in shape means both learning how to use your mind to create what you want for your life and developing the personal power to sustain your growth over time. With this preparation, you will be in an excellent position to profit from your inner adventure.

Before leaving on a long trip, it’s important for you to take stock of important things and put them in order. The second part of your preparation involves taking stock of the way you view yourself and the world around you.

These views form your core belief structure. If these beliefs are healthy, you have the optimum environment for growth. If they are unhealthy, they can sabotage your ability to grow. As you take stock before your journey of empowerment, you will acquire the fundamental self-knowledge to build a healthy core belief structure. With this done, you are ready to begin your travels.

Your travel itinerary has seven legs, and this is where the action really starts. Each leg takes you deep into a vital aspect of your life, where you will work to discover and create what it is that you most desire. The seven legs you will travel are:

In each of these areas of life, you will follow four steps—what we call the empowerment methodology.

1. Awareness: Gather information to help you learn about what is truly important and meaningful to you.

3. Transformation: Identify and transform the limiting beliefs that inevitably arise when creating something new and, if needed, adjust the vision to make sure it is believable.

4. Growth: Work with the subtle skills of directed thought— affirmation and visualization—to build the new belief system and the next developmental step in manifesting your vision.

If you diligently do the exercises in this book, by the end of this inner adventure you will have new visions for each part of your life, along with the means to manifest them. This will testify to your commitment to living your full potential as a human being. In this last stage, your return home, you will learn the most effective ways to continue this personal growth over time.

This book is divided into three sections, which correspond to the three stages of the journey noted above. The chapters in each section contain concepts, principles, and ideas to help you discover your next level of growth in each area, as well as exercises and activities designed to bring that understanding into your everyday life. Each chapter builds sequentially on the knowledge and skills developed in the previous chapters, so it’s important to follow the road map that’s been developed for you. By following this map, you will comprehensively cover all aspects of your life.

The exercises and techniques you will be working with are highly effective. They’ve been used with great success by the many people who have participated in our Empowerment Workshop. They will be successful for you, too, if you take the time to do them. We get out of life what we put into it. What better investment can you make than taking the time to make your life all that you want it to be?

Many of the exercises ask you to respond by writing and, occasionally, drawing something. Expressing your responses on paper will help you immeasurably in gaining insight. You can either do this right in the book or use a personal journal to record your thoughts and observations. This journal will serve as a log of your inner travels and, as you will soon discover, become a very close companion to you on your journey. Many people like to get a special journal for this use.

We hope you will find this book useful at every stage of your growth. It was written to be used a second, third, or fourth time, as an integral part of your personal growth path. Turn to it regularly and it will serve you well.

Your experience of this journey is deeply connected with the way you view the growing process. Your attitude can either nourish or encourage your growth, allowing it to be a lively adventure, or undermine and sabotage it, making it an ordeal through which you nobly suffer. As you prepare for this journey of self-growth, it’s very important for you to orient yourself properly. The notion of the growing edge will help you here. It will serve as a spiritual compass, aiding you in navigating the bends and turns that are part of the growing process.

The idea of the growing edge came to us as we observed the way things grow in the earth. A seed—planted in the ground, pushing up through the earth, overcoming whatever obstacles are in the way, first becoming a bud, and then bursting into full bloom—is nothing short of a miracle. The new growth that has just pushed into the light of day for the first time is the plant’s growing edge. It is that soft new edge of life that is just becoming.

This natural process contains a universal truth that applies equally well to human beings. Like nature, human beings, who are vital and alive, are always growing. Those parts of ourselves where this new growth is occurring are our growing edges. They are the places within us that are just seeing the light of day for the first time. In each of the different parts of your life, you will be discovering and cultivating your new edges.

While your growing edges may be different from those of someone else, we have many of them in common with others. The following are examples of a growing edge from each area of life. Whether or not you are working with this particular growing edge, it will give you a sense of what we mean by this term.

While these examples give you a sense of several of the more common growing edges, they are just a small sampling of the wide variety of growing edges we human beings experience. Each growing edge will be experienced with any number of emotional textures.

Sometimes you encounter fear of the unknown as you move to a new place within yourself. Just as often you find a deep sense of well-being as you learn to be more alive. Sometimes you feel pain and discomfort as you move through a stuck or difficult place. At other times, there is exhilaration as you break through a barrier. Whatever the feeling, you can be sure that if you are on your growing edge you will feel energetically engaged in life.

As the growing edge enlivens us, it simultaneously frees us of the yoke of “should” that weighs us down. We “should” be further along. We “should” be better than we are. Each of us is unique and has different growing edges. A tree doesn’t judge and condemn itself if one of its branches is not as long as those of the tree next to it. One growing edge is not better or worse than another. It is just different. Understanding that growth is a totally individual process liberates us from that all-too-pervasive human foible of judging ourselves in relation to someone else or some preconceived notion of how we should be.

To grow is to be alive, and to be on the growing edge is to experience life in its most dynamic state, that of becoming. With an understanding of the growing edge, you have a spiritual compass that will aid you well and with which you will become skilled as your journey unfolds.

Before you begin this journey, let’s have some fun dreaming about it a little. Prior to going on a trip, we love to pull out travel brochures, look at maps, and freely imagine what the journey might be like. Let’s do some of that now. This exercise will stimulate your imagination and help you think creatively about areas of possible growth. You may come up with a preliminary itinerary of some places you will want to visit during the journey.

You will need a journal to do this exercise. (Some space has been left in case you don’t have a journal or have it handy.) As you answer each of the following questions, see what comes to mind at the surface level and write that down. Then consider the question again and see if there is an answer that draws you deeper. Both the initial and subsequent responses are valid and will prove useful to you in your growth work. You may want to copy the questions into your journal so that you have them to refer to later.

Find a place to do the exercise where you will not be interrupted. Before you begin, sit quietly for a few moments so you can be in a more reflective state of mind.

EXERCISE | EXPLORING YOUR GROWING EDGES

1. What are the qualities within another that are most important to me in a relationship?

What qualities do I have to offer a relationship?

2. What is one thing I can do to create more love in my life?

More sensuality?

More passion?

3. If my body could speak to me, what would it tell me about how it’s being treated?

4. If I had as much money as I wanted, what are the first five things I would do with it?

Why would I do these things?

5. If I did not have to work for money, what kind of work would I do?

Why would I choose this kind of work?

6. Which emotion do I find most easy to express?

Why is this emotion most easy to express?

Which emotion do I find most difficult to express?

Why is this emotion most difficult to express?

7. What are three things I can do to be more in touch with the wonder and mystery of life?

Life Area	Growing Edge
Emotions	Getting in touch with true feelings and expressing them more freely
Relationships	Committing to more authentic and honest communication
Sexuality	Experiencing more caring and trust in lovemaking
Body	Learning to love and care for it
Work	Balancing the drive for success with a thriving personal life
Spirituality	Developing a personal spiritual path