Exploring the innate human qualities: a talk and exploration of the quality of Power
So today we're going to be talking about the quality of power, which is one of the five innate human qualities: power, gender, love, voice, and understanding.
Judith Blackstone has recently written a book entitled “The Embodiment Workbook for Women,” and in it she gives a richly detailed explanation of how to attune to each one of these innate human qualities within nonduality. When you look at Judith amongst nondual teachers, her description of the five qualities is a radical contribution to the understanding and embodiment of nonduality.
There are many nondual teachers, but she's the person that identified and named that we can not only attune to ourselves as the ground of being, the ground of fundamental consciousness, but we can also attune to these qualities within the body as the human aspects of the Ground. We're not attuning to them as matter, we're attuning to them as aspects of Fundamental Consciousness.
Individuality Within Nondual Consciousness
We access our unique individuality through the qualities, we're able to attune to our individuality at the same time as our nondual identity as Consciousness. It's really quite amazing.
It’s why Realization Process gives us a unique way to do psychological and spiritual work simultaneously. *It’s really what you want to be able to articulate and explain to anyone interested in nonduality, and psychological healing. In other words, you can attune to yourself as fundamental consciousness and attune to your own quality of power at the same time. It belongs to you.
A Teaching Story: Attuning to Love Without Merging
I was watching Judith at a retreat where she was inviting the whole group to attune to love in their chest. This one woman raised her hand and she said, “I'm not feeling it. I can't attune to love inside my chest.”
So Judith started walking towards her and said, “okay, find love inside your chest. Actually, you do that quite well.” Then standing in front of her she said, “Now let yourself find love inside my chest. Oh, oh, oh, no, you're coming towards me.” She said, “that love, that love is just for you in your chest. Find that.” So this permission is the being-to-being contact, not being merged, or abandoning yourself to be with the other.
That love is for you.
When you more fully inhabit your own love, you can actually, in an undistorted way, attune to someone else's love. The being-to-being contact, not merged, not disembodied, contact. It’s the true relational distance.
Embodying the Qualities as an RP Therapist
As a Realization Process therapist, I am empowered to demonstrate these qualities as part of our unconstructed being. They're already there.
When we open to these qualities, inhabit them, and then bring breath to them, we are enlivening contact with our own being. Interestingly, when we open to one quality, others tend to open as well. They're not separate from one another. They all work in harmony, kind of like music.
So what we're going to be doing now is attuning to the quality of power. We find the quality of power quite distorted in the world today—used as aggression and reason to dominate and separate, where it’s undistorted purpose is to give us agency, and to enable us to co exist, and more.
Attunement Exercise
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Let’s begin with an attunement exercise.
Close your eyes, and just breathing. Let your breath become even and steady.
Use your breath as a to make deep contact with yourself and with the internal space of your whole body.
Bring your attention down to your feet and feel that you're inside your feet.
Making contact inside your feet.
Feel that your feet are a foundation that you can rest on, and attune to the quality of self inside your feet.
Feel that you're your ankles and your lower legs.
Letting yourself feel the continuity between your ankles and lower legs.
Attune to the quality inside your ankles and lower legs.
Feel that you're inside your knees, and balance your awareness of the space inside both knees.
Experience the stillness of balance.
Feel that you're inside your thighs, making deep contact there.
Feel the full depth of your thighs and attune to the quality of self inside your thighs.
Feel that you're living in the transition between your thighs and your torso.
And let yourself settle into your pelvic floor, resting there as a foundation. Inhabit your sitz bones, your tailbone, your sacrum, and your hips.
Let yourself feel that whole foundation.
You can rest in your pelvis.
Attune to the quality of self inside your pelvis.
Feel that you're inside your hip sockets.
Let yourself really settle and rest there.Balance your awareness of the space inside both hip sockets.
Experience the stillness of the balanced mind.
And let yourself be in this stillness.
Again, feel that you're inside your whole pelvis and attuned to the quality of your gender.
Feel that you're in and attuned to the quality of your power.
Feel that you're in inside your chest and settle within your chest.
Resting on the respiratory diaphragm.
Letting your whole emotional life rest on the respiratory diaphragm and attune to the quality of your love.
Feel that you're inside your shoulders, living in the transition between your arms and your torso.
Find the space inside both shoulder sockets and balance your awareness of the space inside both shoulder sockets.
Experience the stillness of the balanced mind and let yourself be immersed in this stillness.
Feel how the breath moves through the stillness without changing. The stillness.
Feel that you're inside your arms, your wrists, and your hands all the way to the tip and attune to the quality of self inside your arms, wrists, and hands.
Feel that you're inside your whole neck and attune to the quality of your voice.
Let your neck and head rest on your collarbones.
Feel that your inside whole spine, from the tailbone all the way up to the occiput, including your whole skull, and then gently Settling the crown of your head.
Feel the continuity inside your body.
Now feel that you're letting all the bones of your skull and face soften. Let your forehead soften.
Your temples soften
your cheeks, your jaw, and your chin, soften
Let your eyes soften so that you can see clearly.
Let your nose soften and inhabit your nose so that you can smell clearly.
Let your mouth and tongue soften and inhabit your whole mouth and your tongue so that you can taste clearly.
Let your ears soften and inhabit them so that you can hear clearly.
Let your brain soften and inhabit your whole brain all the way from the front to the back so that you can think clearly and attune to the quality of your understanding inside your brain.
Now feel that you're inside your whole body all at once, so that you can feel your breath everywhere.
Experience your wholeness.
Attune to the quality of self in your whole body. Keeping your eyes closed, find the space outside your body, the space in your environment.
Experience that the space inside your body and outside your body is the same continuous space - it pervades you.
And now slowly open your eyes to let yourself receive the world and experience your wholeness.
Feel that the space that pervades you also pervades your environment including all the other people here.
Experience your wholeness and your oneness with your environment. You're embodying fundamental consciousness.
And relax.
Exploring the Quality of Power
Power is more than agency. It's a quality that's just there in the space of fundamental consciousness, not separate from it. We attune to it in our midsection, in the space of the body. And it's just there. It's an amazing resource that never goes away. It's just there.
A Clinical Example: Power and Trauma Recovery
I was working with a client around an incident where he was held captive for a period of time. In the course of working with him, he was able to disentangle from the freeze in his head, in his chest, in his diaphragm, but he was still caught in self-blame. In letting go of the freeze, he could then feel the quality of power, he could bring breath through the body. But for some reason, he still kept getting caught. Spontaneously, as we sat in fundamental consciousness, we finally got to an event immediately following the trauma where people were aggressively blaming him in order to serve their own self interest.
It wasn't his fault. But he had taken in that aggressive blame while he was vulnerable. When he was able to actually see that and come up with it through his own quality of understanding in his whole body, he was then able to inhabit the quality of power and release the charge that was on that event that kept getting him caught in the blame.
A very positive outcome.
Misplaced Power and Fragmentation
We often misplace power in some other part of our body. We can harden our forehead to speak forcefully, to feel power in our forehead rather than letting power rest in our midsection. Doing that fragments our intelligence, and it comes at quite a cost to us. We can armor our chest to feel powerful in our chest, but we break contact with ourselves and with others when we do that. The solution is to release the gripping wherever the gripping is, and to inhabit the midsection with power.
We start with power because it impacts all of the other qualities so much. We can speak with constriction in our throat and diaphragm, but we lose our grounding. By connecting power with voice, you can then speak with power. Voice and throat flow together and become one with the quality of power, and grounded in the ground of being.
Power as Survival Intelligence
Sometimes if you're around an abusive parent, being small or being still or quiet is what saves you in that experience.
And I would say that's the quality of power saving you in that circumstance, knowing to be small. The question is, can we register that we're safe now, not caught or trapped in the past? We're not in danger, and can let ourselves be fluid in the quality of power. In therapeutic moments with my clients, I have the opportunity to help them recognize that they're now safe, they're no longer in danger, that the quality of power actually preserved them in that situation and now it can be opened up and fully inhabited.
Attuning to Power Through Breath and Tone
We can use breath and sound into the qualities to help enliven and inhabit them more fully. Next is an exercise for attuning to the quality of power and toning through it.
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Let yourself attune to the quality of power within your midsection, under your ribs, all the way around to the backside of your body. Quality of power all the way and now let your breath move through the quality of power, letting your breath enliven it.
Attune to power in your whole body. Power everywhere.
Even letting your arms move a little bit so that as you're attuning to power in your whole body, you can feel it in your arms and hands.
And let your whole body breathe with the quality of power. Power everywhere in your body. You're made of the quality of power.
Okay, and now letting yourself repeat the chakra tone, Rung. We're going to repeat rung three times in the midsection, three times in the core, and three times in the body. So here we go, three times in the midsection.
Rung
Three times in the core.
Three times in the body.
Now silently, at your own pace, three times in the midsection, three times in the core, three times in the body.
And when you're done, open your eyes.
Opening the Midsection: The HUH Tone
The quality of power can be challenging to feel for many people.
Judith taught us another method for opening the center of the body physically. There's often a clutching in the stomach.
So there's a tone, HUH, and it's said forcefully with the breath. It opens the physical space in the midsection and we're trying to address a feeling of powerlessness that might be rooted in the belly. It might feel like being punched in the belly, or the gripping that happens in the solar plexus and under the ribs, where there's often bound fear and terror or bound anger and rage. So this sound can be something you can do to help open that.
Do that three times. It's a loud, sharp intonation.
And just feel how the space around you feels enlivened by that.
Let yourself play with the quality of power.
Are you stable in the quality of power or do you contract at being in front of another person? Let yourself continue to play with the quality of power. Move your breath through it so that you're enlivening it. You know, Judith was teaching us that we could enliven the quality fundamental consciousness by bringing breath through it. We can enliven these qualities. We can enliven power by bringing the breath into it.
See if you can even amplify it a bit. Really let it feel like a robust power.
And then even as you're doing that, see if you can find the stillness beneath the quality.
You can perhaps attune to power and the stillness at the same time.
Attune to power and stillness in the whole body.
Attune to stillness and the quality of self in the whole body.
Attune to stillness inside and outside your body at the same time.
See if you can relax into the experience.