Empowerment & Posture & Why I Do This Work.

Foreword.

Dear Reader, Dear Listener — There is a thing you may have come to know about me, but if this is your first listen or read, I will highlight it. The sharing of so much raw emotion and such vulnerable story can feel edgy because it is at times. It is an offering I make knowing that parts of it will illuminate hidden spaces in others. By the time the words find their way here, I have long since reconciled my own feelings with my healing, sat with them and grew to understand them. Served them tea and became allies. Indeed often years have passed. Within such a partnership, courage has grown and compassion for myself and all those who felt like offenders in their ignorance (including myself). I do not share anything that I am not already at peace with. I share the beauty of traversing the shadowy and overarching stories of childhood — and that luminous space that they can deliver us to if we indeed do the work. Not out of pride and ego swell, but out of humbleness and holding space for all of us. May our lives be artful tapestries within which we all find some modicum of belonging and relatability.

I am just realizing that I have always been powerful. 

This realization is sobering. Even shocking. I’ve spent hours with it in the span of moments, for days now. The web of my life lights up and connects in ways that I was blinded to prior to this dawning.

I thought that I had learned to be powerful in my years earthside. That I had amassed much knowledge and practiced enough, to hone this craft in ways I envisioned. When in truth, I was always finding my way back to what was mine from birth. To my own soul’s power. The honing was more like the chipping away at the marble to reveal a statue within, to remember the artwork that I already am. 

This is what it feels like to be reunited with a soul part. Soul retrieval, it is called in the shamanic work that I do. I am welcoming myself home and feeling more authentically “me” than I perhaps ever have. ¹

Photo by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash

I learned as a child to be small. 

I was labeled too much, inappropriate, too <all-the-things>. For survival, as a little kid – which meant belonging at all costs, and being accepted in my tribe, I had to “tone it down”, “learn discernment” — which was a thinly veiled threat to be controlled. Apologize, be normal, fit in. It wasn’t on the schoolyard that I was bullied², it was in my own family. Sure, they actually meant the very best, they wanted the very best for me, they did not know another way, but they worked that angle hard. 

And it took a while to crack me. My mother would say that rhyme about “the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead, and when she was good she was very very good”, all of this so sweetly, then “and when she was bad she was rotten”. That rhyme haunts me still as a lullaby gone wrong and now as a true indication of how my social surroundings viewed unbridled power. 

I was stubborn and obstinate. 

So much so, that I bound myself, once I realized I had to. 

There is a scene in A Discovery of Witches³ (yes, spoiler alert) where Diana learns that her parents bound her magic for her own protection. ← Like that, I bound myself. 

Did you know that was a thing you can do? Well it is. And we often do it unwittingly. Because what we need more than anything as a young one, is to belong, to be accepted — so we shapeshift rather permanently, at least until we realize it by its discomfort later in life and begin to remove the fetters.

Photo by Theodor Vasile on Unsplash

I have vivid memories of counseling myself, maybe around age 7 or 8, telling myself that I needed to do better, to be better, so I would be liked and loved. So no one would be angry with me anymore. So I could be safe. Listen – my family was nonviolent too, a very loving family actually. But they just didn’t know and if this can happen with such a docile family, I know the effects are multiplied when more traumas are present too.

I was a kid who tantrumed, a lot. In hindsight, it is easy to see that I was overwhelmed with big emotions and lots of powerful gifts and I did not know what to do with them. I could cry and scream and then vomit just from the amount of emotion I felt. Babysitters were told to bring a change of clothes when they came to sit me, because this would happen like clockwork if my mother left.

A few more years in and I would be overcome so much sometimes that I would bite myself and draw blood on my own arm – but then I was afraid of getting in trouble so I’d blame my sister. Poor girl, I mean I am sure she deserved being sent to the corner for some other reason, but she really didn’t bite me. 

Being sent to my room because I was too much was a regular occurrence. I can still easily feel that desperate and abandoned feeling that came with being sent away, to settle myself down, alone, into an appropriate manner, and then to apologize.

The shame was big. That little part of me still needs love and tenderness today, and thankfully I am here to give it to her and to hold her hands.

Did you know that ^ was a thing you can do? It is such a beautiful part of the shamanic work I have been so fortunate to learn over the years. Weaving it into my own healing and into that of my clients. 

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

So what happens when you grow up, into a full adult, with your power bound? Well – one way this manifests is that you do your best to fit in for a good long while, to people please. Until the day when this really breaks your heart, when it is betraying your own soul and then you try to reconcile this with all sorts of growth and learning.

One of my teachers says that power is not distributed equally. I find this to be really true and for one reason or another. In truth, often for no understandable reason at all through mundane eyes. 

When you have great power capacity, and you try to snuff it, you bind it, you curb it to please or fit in. When you don’t learn to use it safely and with integrity — turns out a lot happens.

First, it actually can bleed through the dam that you placed in yourself, and in really awkward ways, because it cannot really be contained. So you have these irreconcilable moments of blurting things out or having big feelings surge and you also have this huge shame that makes you examine how you acted to see if you’ll soon be rejected and outcast. 

And – if you don’t use your power as intended, it burns you from the inside. It turns on you, not maliciously but again because it cannot really be contained. It is actually a force that you are meant to use, in the course of your life and purpose. A flame covered and veiled by the hand, will burn the flesh. 

The realization that I have been stinging myself in the name of not being offensive, for-almost-ever — is sobering. 

Where do you sting yourself?

And – equally so is the realization that I am allowed to be powerful. Actually, it is what I was born to be. We are all born perfect and with our power intact and as assuredly as I am meant to be filled up with my power, so are you.

It is the only way to our true purposes in life. Our power encourages the way forward. 

^What I like to refer to as ‘my balance beam at the top of the world’.

People will be scared of me and you, people won’t like us, people might be envious, and even may try and latch on – meanwhile, it isn’t really our problem. This is symptomatic of a culture that has long sought to curb power, keeping things in line, mischief managed. This is the wounding that such teachings in exchange for belonging have inflicted. 

And again, it served a purpose in a time where maybe people were lost and looking for the way – until the culture became hungry and lustful for power itself and the beliefs became so strong that one must tithe their power for assurances, that we lost touch with our own strength. 

Our charge is staying in our power and in integrity with kindness in this world. Being our truth boldly to serve, not others or a need to belong, but to serve our own highest selves, proudly individuating and differentiating. 

I mean, I have integrity and a deep desire to spread love and kindness in this world and I am a truth teller — so these two roles will naturally come into conflict with other people’s hidden shame, with other people’s limiting belief about power and what it means to wield it, with other people’s “shoulds and should nots”. You might find this too, but what if we didn’t let it deter us but just held such space for ourselves and our truth that we were able to hold space for other people’s triggers and traumas and processes — compassionately and neutrally. 

“You do you”. 

So yeah – it feels funny to people around me for me to say “Oh hey, I just realized I am powerful” because it seems obvious to them. Maybe you are one of those people too, and maybe you are one of those people who yourself is known as powerful but you have been out of touch with just how you still choked out your full capacity.

I cannot speak for you, but I know that for me, here is the shift.

I get to have more confidence in how I show up boldly because I can now see that I was born this way, so I am reclaiming this fullness, reintegrating it. And in the world, as I show up — I can trust that so long as I know my compassionate and kind heart, whatever I do, no matter how audacious, serves the greater good with the waves it creates, and regardless of how many waves it creates.

Hi, I am Melissa — a Spirit Medicine Coach, Healing Practitioner & Alchemist. But at the heart of it all, I am Mystic & Mage.

More about my work can be found at spiritmedicine-lifecoaching.com

Hope you enjoy the short shares, podcast style here. They sort of dance around life, experiences throughout my time here on this planet, and the work I do.

1. Soul Retrieval can feel in many different ways. There is no right way to feel. I simply offer one perspective of how it felt on one occasion. To shed light on something that can feel hard to describe from the perspective of receiving.

2. “Bullied” describes the experience as it felt, but it might be descried as misguided once the healing is reached in the story. I choose to keep this word though as it is an accurate portrayal of what it feels like to be cajoled into a different form to fit in.

3. A Discovery Of Witches, directed by Kate Brooke, on AMC+