Subject: I am empowered by everything you say and do.I am empowered by everything you say From: InaRuth@aol.com Date: Thu, 16 Jul 1998 22:19:42 EDT

Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit
X-Mailer: AOL 2.7 for Mac sub 3
Status: O
X-Status: 

Ina here:

I've been ruminating over the thought "I am empowered by everything you say
and do."  It's a toughie.  Kathy's email got me going on it last night and
today while I was driving to customers etc.  I promise you there are a lot of
things that people have been doing and saying since Sunday that don't look
like empowerment to me.  So now, I say, either the quote is bull or there's
somewhere else to look.

So here's where I'm looking.  Everyone in my life is a teacher here to teach
me my lessons in this life.  Now if this Princess Brat had her way, all my
lessons would be sweet and gentle like a summer's ocean breeze.
Unfortunately, it's not necessarily the way the universe works.  And not
necessarily the way to have your lessons learned.

So what if everything you do or say empowers me is literally a stand.  Then
"hard" lessons, like abuse, or pain, also empowers me.  Why?  Because I said
so.  It's like learning to embrace what's present.  The example that came to
mind today was pain.  Either emotional or physical, but the one I'll talk
about is physical.  I don't like pain.  It ain't my preference.  But after the
car accident I was in chronic pain for 7 years.  And you learn to live with
it, like learning to live with "being cute" or brown eyes or the ilk.  And in
the learning to live with it (whatever "it" happens to be), you grow.  And
you're empowered.

Physical pain is something we avoid like the plague.  And I suspect we all
avoid anything that looks like any kind of pain.  Like rejection.  Especially
rejection.  We fail to communicate to avoid rejection, and of course the irony
is that the act of avoiding communication usually causes more pain than the
original communication would havae caused.

So there may be lessons which come out of pain.  And you are empowered (and
maybe don't like it!)  But you are empowered -  if you surrender to your
lessons - if you take on your lessons like a practice.  If it's in front of
me, then it's there for me to learn.  The longer I resist the lesson, the
longer it persists.  Once I surrender to the lesson, learn it, then the
appearance of similar incidents don't carry the same whomp of the original.  I
am not as devastated or upset by the presence of the affect of the lesson.
It's simply "Oh, there it is again.  Interesting.  What more is there to
learn?"

So I'm looking at empowerment more from the vantage point of a zen master in
the process of mastery.  Standing in the sacred witness, what we see is what's
there to learn, to master.  For me, it's been physical pain and the
debilitation of being handicapped.  And also relationship - but that's another
story.

I'm uncertain if this has communicated what I want to say.  It's a circuitous
route at best (sorry Steve).  What I'm trying to do is take learnings and
apply them to the Partnership Exploration.

So, I guess, the empowerment by everything you say and do lives in the sacred
witness observing life and then magically turning the lessons, the "what you
say and do" into empowerment.

love,
i
PS
What language do I speak?  Sharing and caring.
For what?  The Adventure life is
To whom:  Fellow Adventurers

My accountability:  I am accountable for bringing light to the shadows and
illuminating them. I am accountable for love.

From sawins@netonecom.net Thu Jul 16 23:17:23 1998
>From sawins@netonecom.net  Thu Jul 16 23:17:20 1998
Received: from mx04.netaddress.usa.net (mx04.netaddress.usa.net [204.68.24.141])
	by pony-2.mail.digex.net (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id XAA28608
	for ; Thu, 16 Jul 1998 23:17:17 -0400 (EDT)
Received: (qmail 13397 invoked by uid 0); 17 Jul 1998 03:17:13 -0000
Received: from netone.netonecom.net [207.142.160.4] by mx04 via mtad (2.6) 
	with ESMTP id mx04-cgqDRg0117; Fri, 17 Jul 1998 03:17:06 GMT
Received: from xox (tcn-39.netonecom.net [207.142.162.39]) by netone.netonecom.net (8.8.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id XAA05137; Thu, 16 Jul 1998 23:11:12 -0400 (EDT)
Message-ID: <001f01bdb130$6eecc840$27a28ecf@xox>