What is authentic power? “To be intimately engaged with the world is the experience of authentic power. It is through this universal interest (the opposite of self-interest) that authentic leaders recognize that their interests are connected to the interests of everyone and everything on the planet.”[1] Recognizing our inter-connectedness awakens within us our extraordinary consciousness, not the ordinary consciousness that abuses power, that controls and represses. In The Path of the Priestess: A Guidebook for Awakening the Divine Feminine, Sharron Rose tells us that real [authentic] power is “about flexibility and clarity in the midst of chaos. It is the ability to relax in the face of danger, so that we can perceive the situation and take appropriate action.” It is expansiveness in action.
From ancient wisdom from the East, we are instructed to not think with the head, but with the stomach. Thinking in the stomach gives you power. Neurobiologist Michael Gershon writes in The Second Brain: a Groundbreaking New Understanding of the Stomach and Intestine,
“The brain in the bowel has evolved in pace with the brain in the head. We have more nerve cells in our gut than in the entire remainder of our peripheral nervous system. The enteric nervous system is also a vast chemical warehouse within which is represented every one of the classes of neurotransmitter found in the brain.”
To think with the stomach, to bring our mental capacities down into the stomach, gives us calmness and strength. It is with these attributes that power is not possessed but productive.
[1] Zukav, Gary, 1989, Seat of the Soul. Simon & Schuster, NY, NY .