The Tao of Influence. Karen McGregor

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СКАЧАТЬ dictionary definition of power is: “The ability to influence a course of events or the behavior of others”—for better or for worse.

      Throughout the many years of working with powerful people, I’ve come to recognize that the most significant outcome of power is the ability to influence. Yet influence can be fleeting and damaging if power is fueled by personal fear and egoic needs. We need not look far to see how that has played out. Greed, corruption, manipulation, and deceit are rampant among those who are driven by a need for power. They are constantly strategizing their next move to get something from someone or something. While many might consider these actions powerful, they are not an expression of true power because their influence is temporary. As the Tao Te Ching says in Verse 55, “Whatever is not Tao comes to an early end.”

      True power doesn’t come from the mind or the ego. We cannot think our way to being powerful. True power originates in the love we are born with—the only energy form that creates true lasting influence. I call it love-power because of its infinite capacity to influence. Love-power cannot be contained by the ego or the mind. In fact, the mind has no capacity to contain even the smallest grain of infinite love. The job of the mind is to be our personal computer and collector of facts; it was never meant to be the source of our true power.

      Yet Western civilization sees the mind as the source of power, confusing power with intellect. But the intellect is often intertwined with the ego, so love-based power often morphs into fear-based power, which I call distorted power. This is where destructive actions come from.

      While popular self-help books refer to the term “losing your power,” I don’t believe we can ever lose it. However, we can distort the power we are born with and close off our access to our love-power. In other words, most of us begin life with our love-power quite active—we are happy, curious, in an unending state of awe, quick to forgive, and wide open to other people and to new opportunities. But, after a few years, we inevitably experience the fear or suspicion that we are not enough as we are. This suspicion leads to thoughts and emotions that become a set pattern of behaviors, which in turn become our state of being, taking us out of our inherent pure love-power and into fear-based, distorted power.

      These patterns are so commonplace that many misinterpret negative power as “normal.” Other than condemned, premeditated acts of violence, we often perceive control, domination and force as acceptable everyday behavior—behavior that has become normalized as “who we are,” or worse yet, “who they are.” For example, if we are quick to react to a text that we consider undesirable, we don’t think of it as a misuse of our power, but as a justified tendency to be “hot-headed.” When our natural power of love becomes distorted, we turn to trying to exert power—but as we do, we end up diminishing our own power just a little more. Each time we lower the energy of love, we close ourselves off to the only true source of true positive, influential power.

      The field of quantum physics has now made speculations about energy a reality. In terms of measuring energy, our power vibrates fast or slow, depending on whether we have distorted our power or remain in our love-power. This is why we often feel that we are “losing our power.” We feel less energy physically. We feel emotions that make us tired and weak, because we do the opposite of what we have come to the planet to express. This distortion of power is still a form of power, but it is a power that, over time, will lead to poor relationships, lack of health, and even lack of abundance in life.

      In his ground-breaking book, Power vs. Force, David Hawkins calibrates the energy of each of the levels of human consciousness, on a scale ranging from one to a thousand, where one is mere existence, and one thousand is enlightenment. The calibration is based on a clinical science that emerged in the 1970s called kinesiology, which uses the body’s muscles to indicate truth or falsehood (the body is strong with truth and weak with falsehood). Shame, guilt, apathy, grief, and fear all calibrate at one hundred or less because they are part of the falsehood or illusion that humans exist in. Love, joy, and peace calibrate between five and six hundred, as they represent the eternal Truth of who we are as Divine Beings in a human body. We begin to see the level of enlightened beings like Jesus and Buddha in the range of seven hundred. All levels of consciousness below two hundred are destructive, and all levels above two hundred are constructive. This gives us great insight into our relationship with power, because as we begin the journey to stay in our love-power, we are more and more attuned to the way in which our actions and thoughts impact our energy and the energy of those around us.

      When we are in pure love-power, those around us are influenced merely by being in our presence. On the other hand, distorted power can bring many people down with us, or we can feel down when someone begins to turn from love-power to fear-based power. Have you ever experienced a meeting with several fearful people and felt exhausted later? Have you ever spent an afternoon with a complaining friend and ended up going straight to bed or decided against doing that productive task you intended to do when you got home? If so, you’ve experienced the energetic consequences of distorted power.

      When distorted power meets love-power, it is outmatched. Hawkins says that one person living in the highest vibrations of consciousness is enough to counteract seventy million individuals living in the lowest vibrations. That is, the power of one person living in pure, unconditional love (calibrating at approximately five hundred) can counteract 750,000 individuals living below level two hundred, the borderline of destructive consciousness. The greatest form of influence—the most impactful, positive effect—comes from living in heightened states of consciousness, where your being tangibly impacts the consciousness of the world.

      Distorted power can be so ingrained in our everyday way of being that we don’t recognize it in our words and actions. Acting as a victim or martyr is an expression of distorted power; engaging in passive-aggressive behavior is a use of distorted power; insisting that your way is the only way is distorted power at work. Distorted power can also take the form of careless behavior, risking everything to feel special and noticed, and demanding the universe and its inhabitants take notice. Not following through on your word, showing up late for events, sharing unkind words about another being—all of these are expressions of distorted power. All of it can bring you down in an instant.

      The Laws of Nature

      But how do we shift from culturally condoned patterns of expressing distorted power to expressing our true love-power? To overcome our habit of being stuck in an energetically low level of power and free ourselves to activate the radiant love-power within, we can look to Mother Nature for simple teachings that can be helpful to this kind of personal evolution.

      True power is ruled by the laws of nature, so understanding them lays the groundwork for us to experience a pure relationship with power. The laws of nature are impersonal; they exist whether any person or life form wants them to or not. They are also universal—they apply to one and all—the natural world as well as humanity.

      When we are aware of the laws of nature but still violate them, we distort our power, reduce our vital energy, and lose track of happiness. After all, disagreeing with the laws of nature—irrefutable as they are—cannot produce fulfillment, joy, peace, or sustainable relationships. Yet, most of us fall into the trap of expressing distorted power every day. Except maybe the Dalai Lama. (There’s always an exception!)

      The three laws of nature that have the greatest impact on our relationship with power and our growth as an influencer are the Law of Change, the Law of Letting Go, and the Law of the Impersonal.

      The three laws of nature

      • Law of Change

      • Law of Letting Go

      • Law of the Impersonal

      The Law of Change

      Accept difficulty as opportunity.

      —Tao СКАЧАТЬ