The Power in Nothing

Sometimes, the most powerful and productive thing we can do is nothing.

Sometimes it’s better to let a question sit in empty space, open and unanswered, rather than rushing to an answer.

Sometimes it’s more useful to allow the energy inside of us - in forms of emotion, discomfort, desire, or knowing - to just be as they are for right now.

Sometimes, it’s the right thing to let uncertainty change us rather than pushing forward to change uncertainty.

I’m someone who loves being a free agent and an active, powerful participant in my own life, and I also see the magic of waiting, sitting, and holding space for what’s present, real, unsettled, unknowable, overwhelming, and/or uncertain.

Space, emptiness, stillness, allowing, and quiet are powerful forces, and sometimes, the best medicine and most powerful catalyst for what we need in the moment.

What sort of medicine and power is your soul most yearning for right now? And what might it mean to give that to yourself?

Take up Space!

There’s a great scene in “Knock Down the House” – a Netflix documentary that follows 4 women running for Congress in 2018 – where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is preparing for a debate against her opponent, Joe Crowley, the district’s incumbent of 20 years. 

She sets down her notes and says, “I need to take up space,” as she reaches out and waves her arms.  She takes a deep breath and says, “I am experienced enough to do this; I am prepared enough, mature enough, and brave enough to do this.  And this whole time, he’s going to tell me I can’t do this – that I’m small, little, young, inexperienced,” and then she extends her arms with a sharp exhale, as though she’s pushing all of that away from her.

I love this scene because moments later in the debate, you feel only the strength of her energy and presence.  You would never guess that she felt anything other than confident and ready for the moment.

I love that we see her fear, uncertainty, and vulnerability but then also see her step through all of it to claim her place on the world stage.

Watching her process reminded me that it takes copious amounts of inner work, energy management, self-talk, and intentional practice to build a capacity to command energy and take up space like that.  It takes staring down your terror, building belief, and staying devoted to your deep reasons.

For Alex, the world benefited enormously from her willingness to take up space, but it didn’t give her that permission.  Even as others encouraged her, she had to be the one to believe she deserved to be there and then step up and forward to claim it.

All of this was a reminder, inspiration, and challenge for me.  And that’s the beautiful thing about taking up space and claiming your bigness: it inspires other people to do the same.  And that is a gift for the world. 

Power vs. Control

Power vs. Control

This was a topic that came up on a coaching call today that led to a rich discussion.

Words mean different things to different people, but to this person, control was about force, pushing, and extremes, while power was about both/and, groundedness, and capacity.

Control was about fear. Power was about love.

In a world in which we experience hard things and where there is so much beyond our control, power asks to deepen into the infinity within our own borders and reminds us that there is always possibility we can create with our own magic and within our own being.

The beautiful thing about power is that it's big enough to hold the hard stuff (whereas control seeks smallness by pushing all the bad stuff away until we too shrink into oblivion).

There is power in presence - in not abandoning ourselves when things get hard (so we won't have to experience the hard thing).

Power reminds us that there are things within us (mystery, beauty, magic, and strength) bigger than the hard experiences and emotions that are passing through.

Paradoxically, the hard stuff often reminds us of our brilliance and strength - that we can be in the both/and and find our power and aliveness in that space.

The Invitation of Creative Urgency

Creativity is urgent and insistent. Our art, our vocations, our activism, our work in the world – it all matters. It all carries weight and significance.

But I’ve often resisted this urgency, conflating it with the demands of a hyperactive dominant culture that pushes us to be productive at all costs.

What I’ve come to realize is that our creative urgency is a different thing than the urgency of panicked striving that disregards the organic cycles and processes that support our creative energies.

Creative urgency is real – and an important thing to feel, I think. It speaks to the necessity of vision, imagination, ideas, and art in our world. And we can listen and respond to this urgency without interpreting it through the lenses of oppressive systems that will always and forever tell us we’re not enough, and that we’d better push ourselves to the edge of destruction in an attempt to prove otherwise.

The urgency of my creativity is not the urgency of capitalism (which always demands I do more, produce more, and be more), and when I feel urgency, I’ve found it super important to take a moment to discern which sort I’m experiencing. The former pulls me forward, invites me into bigness, connects me with power, and inspires vision and possibility. The latter has me preoccupied with measurement, comparison, panicked striving, and external expectation. It’s an urgency that kills the best parts of my creativity.

And so while I do ask my creativity to produce for me (as some of my work in the world asks for that), I also take intentional breaks to separate creativity and production – to set aside space free from judgment and expectation: space for process, flow, and experimentation. And perhaps most importantly, I do not ask my creativity to “prove” anything about me – my enoughness, worthiness, giftedness, etc.

Our creativity is urgent because it’s a portal through which we step into and open spaces of power, aliveness, hope, and possibility. And these are all things we need, things the world needs. So when that urgency rises up in you, pay attention and follow its lead. It’s calling for something big and important.

Art as Hope

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that art reemerged in my life at this particular moment – that my impulse to begin tinkering with watercolors happened in the midst of deep grief, hard uncertainty, and painful despair.

There have been some really hard things happening in our country and world, and I realized at some point along the way that denying, minimizing, or bypassing any of it would never work. I had to accept its realness. My task is not to make the horror other than it is. My task is to find a depth of beauty that matches the depth of despair – to find a goodness that can stand its ground and hold its truth in the presence of swirling grief.

When we have been pulled into new depths of despair, it simply means we have to go deeper to find a love that can meet it.

Art helps.

When I’m tempted to believe I’m powerless, creativity reminds me that no, actually I am still in possession of immense power. Because when I’m creating, I’m using the power of my aliveness to dream up visions, put energy into form, and recognize beauty. Art – my own and others – reminds me that aliveness is thriving, as is our collective power.

In other words, art is an answer to despair and creativity is an act of hope. Because it’s hard to keep believing there is no possibility when I am literally creating it inside of me.

So please keep creating, friends. Your art matters.

The World Needs Your Art

Six months ago, I was not painting. In fact, I had not picked up a paintbrush in more than a decade.

Five months ago, I brought home some watercolor supplies and started dabbling.

Three months ago, I started painting a lot and sharing my work.

Art has been the lightning-bolt epiphany of my 2018.

I am so happy to be making art, and although I can appreciate and understand the timing of it all, I am also sad there was a decade of my life that I wasn’t.

I had two primary objections to creating art of my own: I believed it didn’t really matter (or at the least the kind of art I would make wouldn’t really matter), and I believed I was not artistically gifted enough.

The shift started when I heard Fabeku Fatunmise talk about art and how/why it matters - that art is a transmission of energy and talisman of magic. I began to see for myself how art is a portal into a language, experience, and world beyond words, how art creates a bridge into what we can access no other way.

I began to notice how art was transforming me. And then I began to imagine how I might take the energy inside of me and make it into shapes, forms, and images on paper too.

Suddenly, it didn’t really matter how much talent I had. I wasn’t trying to paint a picture that could be mistaken for a photograph; I was trying to take an energy inside of me and make a thing that transmitted that same power and frequency.

Art has created so much magic and connection in my life this year – as I’ve taken in others’ art and shared my own.

If you have your own objections to making whatever art calls to you, I hope you recognize those as the lies they are - and see that the world needs your art and will be a more magical and alive place if you create it.

Creativity, Aliveness, and Hope

This is what I’ve come to believe about creativity:

1) We do not create creativity. Our creative power just is. We support it, free it, nourish it, and channel it, but we do not make it because it already and always exists.

2) Creativity and aliveness are the same thing. Creativity is simply the energy of our life-force reaching beyond the boundaries of our selves to find expression in some tangible form – words, images, colors, objects, ideas, connections, etc.

3) Our aliveness is always pulling us forward into vision and creation. Creativity then is simply a matter of uncorking what is already alive within us.

I find this perspective incredibly hopeful. Because it means that all our visions and dreams, all we hope to create in and for the world, begins with what we already have within us. It also means that we actualize the changes and visions we want for the world with the same energy and power that animates our existence and being. And to get started, we don’t have to look any further than our own heartbeat.

Language, Art, and Possibility

When I was 15, I decided I was going to learn Spanish. I studied hard in school and lived in Peru for four months to make that happen, and learning (and more or less retaining) Spanish remains one of the life accomplishments I’m most proud of and thankful for.

Language is a dazzlingly gorgeous thing.

Held within any language is an entire universe. I quickly found that learning Spanish was not a simple acquisition of skill. It was a newfound connection to millions of people and many more throughout time. Entire lives and civilizations lived and died inside this container of words.

Language holds so much. Power. History. Culture. Connection.

As I learned, I was incrementally granted access to whole new schemas of meaning and frameworks of reality. My brain sprouted new pathways. There were also Spanish-induced changes to my embodied self. The muscle memory of my mouth, cheeks, and tongue shifted so much while I was in Peru that when I return to the states, I stuttered and stammered for awhile in the aftermath of the abrupt transition from Romantic to Germanic, as English came less easily out of my face.

We need languages, all sorts of them, including those beyond words to express, create, connect, and decipher. They are the “ways in” to what we know, feel, experience, and desire.

I’m learning that art is one of those essential languages. It conveys what is wordless but real, formless but present. It opens dimensions and perspectives words cannot.

I suddenly became fascinated with art a few months ago when I was introduced to the idea of art as talisman (h/t Fabeku Fatunmise) - an object that holds and transmits power, meaning, and possibility. Inspired, I commissioned a piece and purchased another, and then I wondered: wait, could I do this?

The answer is yes. We can all do this.

So I did, and I am, and it is changing me and my world as much as Spanish did.

Just as there is power in our words, there is power in our art. There is power in expression and creation of all kinds.

So what wants to become fluent within you? Which languages want to be spoken through you? And what bridges between self and world will you construct next?

Our Inherent Unwastability

One of the fears I’ve had to work through in my life is the anxiety-producing story that I am always in danger of “wasting” something finite and precious, like time, money, or most worrisome of all: life itself.

This is an anxiety born of a particular worldview - that the whole of reality is bound by laws of linear time and finite space and that meaning is only ever created by how much we can get done within those parameters. Put together with capitalism - a system that places us in constant and ruthless competition, mandates productivity as way of being, and asks us to get from here to there in straight, efficient lines - it’s no surprise that scarcity fears run so rampant through the collective.

In one sense, there is truth to all of this. I do have a limited amount of time and resources that are mine to manage carefully and steward wisely.

But as I’ve come to see it, this is not the whole truth, and when scarcity becomes the entire story, we are allowed no margin for error and no space to breathe.

When I get caught up in these fears, I often stay small out of terror that any mistake will propel me out of my prescribed orbit and into uncharted mystery where I might - god forbid - have to spend extra time and energy navigating the unknown and excavating the unexpected.

So what I’ve been working through for myself and with clients is finding and connecting with what is unquantifiable. What I’ve found is that there is a truth, power, and life-force within each of us that is ultimately uncontainable, and therefore, unwastable.

We are whole and vast. And from this vantage point, all the detours, question marks, and empty spaces we dismissed as losses and wasted opportunities might actually be the keys to our becoming, deepening, soul’s alchemy.

Claiming Power

In a time when we are seeing power at its most abusive, malformed, and tyrannical, I am reminding myself that at its core, power is sacred energy.

Power is our life force uncorked. It is our capacity to love, create, discover, connect, and grow. It is the aliveness and possibility that lives within each one of us.

When we filter our power through love and then allow it to transcend the borders of our being to touch the world around us, something happens. Things shift, alchemize, and revolve - often in surprising ways. I’ve seen this again and again - in my own life, in my DV work, with my coaching clients, in the collective.

It’s easy and tempting to shrink from power when we see and feel the ways oppressive power - force fueled by fear - is inflicting pain, trauma, and havoc in the world around us. It makes sense that we might want to run from our own power, fearing it may be twisted in the same way.

But I believe we must do the opposite. We need our power, and so does the world.

So let’s remember to re/claim power as a holy and necessary energy that lives within us and between us, always, and then set it loose in the world.

Resistance and Stepping Between

I stepped between two people about to fight this week. Not to convince them to stop or to force them to do anything (because I couldn’t) - just to get in the way and interrupt the momentum of the conflict.

I didn’t do it to fix the problem, resolve the conflict, or determine the outcome. I did it because it was the thing to do in that moment.

This shifted some things around how I understand our political resistance. Instead of asking, how can I fix it? I wonder if often a more helpful question is: Given what’s real, what must I do in this moment?

Because I don’t know the answer the first question. I don’t know how to fix this.

I cannot single-handedly abolish ICE, end migrant detention, open our borders, or stomp out xenophobia and racism. And while I believe we can do these things collectively, we will drive ourselves to a breaking point if we make our agency contingent upon our ability to fix this mess immediately.

But we can make things harder. We can interrupt spirals of panic and hatred. We can bring clear energies to turbulent spaces. We can surprise, scare, and disrupt authoritarianism. We can make things more difficult, complicated, and uncomfortable by inserting our bodies, voices, and energies into what is already in motion.

The two people I stepped between may have still been able to get at each other, but it certainly would have been more cumbersome and complicated with (6 ft, 180 lbs) me in the middle. Suddenly they both had new questions to consider: can I get around this person? Do I want to try? Am I willing to harm a third-party? Even if the answers were all yes, having to consider them at all slowed it down, if only by fractions.

What spaces of pause, dilemma, and interruption can we create?

Resistance invites us to get creative with our power and agency. It asks us to use our power to derail, connect, refuse, dissent, create, dream, transgress, step in, stand up, and speak out. It asks us to find new and inventive ways to become radiant beacons of our truth and power.

So even when it’s hard and feels impossible, I’m remembering: All of it counts. All of it matters. And all of it’s essential.

The Power in Transformation

To me, one of the most beautiful things about being human is our ability to change - that we have the power to expand into otherness, shift our ways of thinking, and step into previously unconsidered possibility. It takes effort and willingness on our part, and sometimes hard and scary stuff gets in the way, but our capacity for transformation is one of our human superpowers.

Earlier this week, at the end of our conversation, one of my coaching clients said: “I’m always amazed how I can feel one way coming into these calls and feel completely different an hour later.” I was amazed too (I always am) but not surprised. Because this was simply a reflection of her ability to change her mind, move energy, and open herself to new possibilities - which are powers we all have.

I also think of a DV client I ran into one day at the airport, long after we finished our work together. After a decade in a toxic, abusive relationship, she was now safe, happy, and working for the airline I was flying. She had help and support, but ultimately, she was the one who did the work of taking the risk, changing her mind, and transforming her life.

In moments that feel impossible, I need to remember stories like these. I need to remember the times I’ve seen change happen in myself, in others, and in the world.

Life is hard. Trauma is real. Injustice exists. Not all of us make it out. If we’re awake, we see evidence of this everyday.

And this is also true: there is a power and a magic within us that creates worlds. We are truly remarkable creatures. Let’s not forget this, okay?