Part 5 Pulling your own strings and surrender
Last week we spoke about trying to shake off your fetters by standing up for yourself. By saying what you want to say, you have taken the first steps of trying to change the situation yourself. You have taken responsibility. The message you send out is that you care about yourself, even if the others don’t care about you.
This empowers you. From now on, each time you need to make a stand for yourself, you will do so with increased self power, with more confidence. Gone will be the old fear cycle, replaced by a healthy self esteem cycle!!
Your self esteem will start to show in your relationships. There are three consequences to this:
- The ones who dominate you will realize their role and regret it. Their behavior towards you will change for the better. They will no longer treat you like a push over.
- They will not like your guts and may even feel threatened because they see how strong you are. They will not dominate you most of the time, but once in a way, just to assure them-selves that ‘they are still the boss’, they will exhibit their controlling behavior. But the new empowered you will be able to handle this by shrugging it away as ‘his/her habit’. You will not let it affect you negatively.
- It might make no difference to them at all whether you do or do not stand up for yourself. They continue with their controlling behavior. In this case, you have to be even stronger and resist the urge to slip back into being the doormat. Continue expressing your feelings, don’t take things lying down. If the situation does not change in any way, then, in this case, it helps to remember the Law of Karma and know that all of us have lessons to learn from every situation in life. Consider your life as a learning school and try to pick out the lesson in what you are going through, but at the same time, keep your self-respect. This too will be noticed by the controller. He/she will know that although he dominates you, your spirit is your own over which he will never have control.
But in all cases, do not allow your assertion to grow into aggression, for then there will be no difference between you and the controller.
The more spiritually, emotionally, mentally mature among us may rise above the situation and feel no anger or resentment towards the dominator. We may be able to accept the others as they are. We may even be grateful to them for the lessons they are teaching us, whether we know or understand these lessons or not.
When all is said and done, reclaiming our power is about unconditional acceptance, both of yourself and others, your weaknesses and theirs. It is living our lives free of power, neither giving away our power nor exerting it over others.