What Is Your Relationship To Power?
In our upcoming course, Embodied Ethics, we will spend time exploring the terrain of personal and institutional power with care and candor. We do this because it is just as likely that we cause harm from a belief that we have no power as from a blatant misuse of it.
But this terrain is complex. For understandable reasons, most of us have a fraught relationship with our personal power. To name just two predominant themes, some of us believe we are entitled to a power we have not earned (and we wield it in a power-over way) while some of us cannot see the power we have (because we are wed to an identity that requires us to see ourselves as power-under). It’s no wonder this is true. As it is modeled and taught in Western Industrial Cultures, power is removed from its ecological embeddedness. It is a thing that is taken rather than given. It is a thing we use and often end up misusing. And contrary to the fundamentally erotic nature of power, we believe it moves in a linear fashion, which is as ecologically bankrupt and damaging a concept as ‘trickle down economics. Across the globe in dominant cultures of all kinds, power is a thing that is bought, inherited or forcefully taken rather than earned. We are modeled that some people are inherently power-full, while others are power-less.
As practitioners, teachers, parents, clergy – all of us who are in a position to guide others – it is our responsibility to be clear about the nature of power and more specifically the nature of our power. If we do not attend to this aspect of our leadership our ethical compass is untrustworthy. But how would we develop a clear and intelligent relationship with power, and specifically our power, amidst such mistaken and harmful representations of it?
Please join us for an essential journey through this terrain. Beginning in January we will leave the shores of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ requiring that we develop ethical compasses far more sophisticated than simply Do No Harm. Together, in fierce, curious, and compassionate community, we will explore the intimate relationships we each have with power, both as a concept, and a deeply personal, inherited and inter-generational experience. We do this work so we are more capable of participating in the necessary unraveling of all that is broken as we simultaneously sow the seeds of a more generative and just future.
If you’re eager to dive in, please join us for two free webinars, Wednesday December 8th and Wednesday January 5th. I hope to see you there.