How To Empower Your Life

Empowerment is a big word, covering a host of subjects. You can empower yourself in your health, becoming vitally, energetically alive and radiantly healthy. You can also dis-empower yourself, unconsciously fostering your own pain and disease, even while you consciously wish for health. You can empower yourself in your relationships, creating harmonious, loving and synergistic relationships. You can also dis-empower yourself, unwittingly contributing to conflict, dissension, disappointment and pain. You can empower your professional and vocational goals, and build a thriving career in which you are recognized for your important service. You can also experience defeat, frustration, and failed expectations. You can thrive financially or you can live on financial fear. Finally, you can come to deeply love and appreciate your own inner spirit and wisdom, and to feel a profound sense of fulfillment. Or you can come to the end of your life questioning your value, integrity and purpose. All these things, both positive and negative, are within your power.

How can you become fully empowered in your life? There is one simple rule that leads you to this goal. That rule is to learn to live more effortlessly.

Let’s give a simple definition of effortlessness, and hope that this inspires in you new insights and possibilities.

To live effortlessly is to release anything that inhibits your natural self-expression and self-enhancement. As soon as you release what blocks you, you automatically move in the right direction. So what blocks you, and what blocks all of us?

On a physical level, we experience our blocks in the form of tension and stress. All tension and stress are forms of physical contraction and withholding of energy that express self-doubt, fear, and a victim stance in the face of life (Over time, this will produce disease.). That’s why training yourself to relax physically moment by moment can profoundly empower you physically, emotionally and mentally.

The problem is that we tend to think that we can only relax once we meet life’s challenges successfully. We tell ourselves that first we need to get things done, and only then can we let go, once the stress is past. But thinking this way not only is not true. It’s dangerous. If we think this way we spend a lifetime tensing up and hoping that once we have finished what we need to deal with, we can finally relax. But this never happens, both because life never stops challenging us and because over time, we develop such a tension habit that we don’t know how to be any other way, to really let go into the flow. The truth is that we have to learn to relax physically in the midst of life’s challenges. When we do that, we guarantee our own success.

On an emotional level, living effortlessly means releasing any tendency to make others accountable for our lives. We have to release our addictions to judgment, disappointment, jealousy, envy, anger, fear, and other negative emotions in our relationships. These emotions are heavy; they depress us, limit our vision, and eat up our energy. They focus us on what we think is wrong rather than on how we can create what we want. When we indulge in these emotions, we attract precisely what we don’t want to have. By judging others, we develop contentious relationships; by feeling and acting disappointed, we guarantee that others keep their distance. The irony is that the more we act as if we have everything we want and need, and act joyful, trusting and loving in our relationships, the more we can both let go of what really doesn’t work in our lives and find love and friendship in abundance.

Now it is true that we are all wounded, and we all carry negative emotions, both in relationship to ourselves, and in our relationships with others. We cannot just wish those emotions away, or stuff them under the carpet. In fact, releasing our all-too-human addiction to effort in all aspects of our lives takes dedication, persistence, and commitment. Nonetheless, our deeper quest and purpose in life is to free ourselves deeply and completely. Nothing else will satisfy us, and nothing else will bring us what we want.

The beauty of following the path of effortless living is that the more we do it, the more we discover true community with one another, and we begin to work together on healing our planet. Just look around, and you will see we really have no other choice. It is time now for all of us to travel the high road together.