A newborn baby has tremendous personal power. You might protest: How can this be? A newborn is the epitome of helplessness and dependency. If it’s not fed, sheltered and nurtured, it will die. That’s not personal power!

I would ask you to look beyond the illusion. We are all dependent in some way on the planet and on each other. The food we eat is usually grown by others and often prepared by others. Others build the houses we live in. Without the plant and animal kingdoms to sustain us we wouldn’t last long. Does this mean personal power doesn’t exist? I feel it does, but it has little relationship to needing others to fulfill our basic needs.

I remember looking into the eyes of my newborn children. I could feel the wisdom and consciousness there. I was aware that the power emanating from those tiny beings contrasted sharply with the seeming helplessness of their physical forms. Looking back I realize now that what I was seeing was an authentically empowered being.

Unfortunately, in my ignorance, I eroded some of that authentic power in the process of raising them. As I learned, I worked hard to help them re-empower themselves. Like all parents, I wish I’d known then what I know now.

The newborn baby has something most of us have lost: the ability to be completely spontaneous and authentic in the moment. It can express its needs and emotions without being encumbered by guilt or fear.

The newborn has the power to love unconditionally and I would suggest it has not yet lost touch with its spiritual roots. Although the infant has no way of expressing this verbally, I believe its connection with the other side of the veil is still strong. When looked at in this light, the infant and the master are not so very different!

So what happened? Where, why and how did we lose that personal power we started our incarnations with? It was gradually eroded as we adapted to our families and our culture. Some call the process of disempowerment socialization, though I prefer the word programming.

To suggest that we are programmed may seem harsh, but to me it is an accurate description of what happens to us as children. Some of the programming is useful in that it enables us to survive, but much of it is designed to get us to ‘fit in’ to an existing social structure.

That structure depends on a hierarchy of externally imposed power and so much of the early socialization is geared to eroding the child’s personal power as much as possible. Those children who stubbornly refuse to give up their power are seen as difficult or incorrigible.

By the time children reach school age, much of the programming is already in place. The structure of the programming is a direct manifestation of the parents’ beliefs and the parents’ beliefs to a greater or lesser extent reflect the cultural beliefs. School success correlates with the how much the parents have adopted the cultural beliefs and implemented them in the home. Let us take the example of respect for one’s elders.

Most children in our culture are taught that adults, especially those in positions of power, are to be respected. Usually that respect is conveyed with language. Thus children are often taught to address their elders by prefix and last name (Mrs. Smith, Mr. Jones, Dr. Adams).

No adult addresses children by other than first name. The subliminal message is clear: adults, especially powerful adults, are more worthy of respect than children. Power and respect become synonymous in the child’s mind.

Children are not stupid. In the first few years of life, when children are first learning the language, they usually speak their thoughts freely. They discern quite readily which adults are respectful of them as individuals and which are not. Yet their perceptions are often invalidated by authority figures.

Having one’s perceptions invalidated by people one loves or holds in esteem results in disempowerment. The child has to make a choice between denying his or her own experience, and conflicting with significant others. Whenever we deny our own experience to please another we have given that other some of our personal power.

In school, the connection between power and respect is continually reinforced. Respect for authority is actually a thinly disguised concept meaning fear of power. When I went to school, children who didn’t ‘respect authority’ were given the strap! Talking back to a teacher (asserting one’s personal power) was considered disrespectful and punished accordingly.

Although most schools have now abolished corporal punishment, other forms of coercion are used to maintain the balance of power in the teachers’ favor. Only in the most extreme cases (proven abuse) is the lack of respect for children by adults called into question.

Minor disrespect, for example talking down to children or denying their perceptions, is considered acceptable behavior by most people. Many adults would not tolerate another adult speaking to them the way they routinely speak to a child.

Most of us have come to take the equation of respect with power for granted and we don’t even question the basic beliefs that have been instilled in us. Respect is an important concept. Respect for life, respect for others, respect for the environment are all values that I believe are important for our peaceful cohabitation on this planet.

The underlying concept is that all life is valuable and worthy of respect. All humans have equal worth and therefore are equally worthy of respect. When we teach children that respect is dependent on power, we are actually denying the very important value that all are worthy of respect, regardless of age, gender, race, creed, or achieved status in society.

When we were taught as children that respect equals power, most of us bought into it. Ok, we said, if getting the respect we intrinsically know we are worth means having power, let’s go for it! Let’s strive to please the authorities so we can get the rewards that will eventually earn us a place among them. We worked hard to get good marks in school so we could someday become the teachers (or lawyers, or doctors, or police people) ourselves. Then we’d regain the power we gave up to please others while we were young.

We didn’t realize that the power we gained in exchange for releasing our authentic self-empowerment was an external power that would never give the same satisfaction. The pursuit of external power is a never-ending process, which always contains as a component the fear of losing the power gained.

We may breathe a sigh of relief and say: Thank God I’m not in school anymore! I no longer have to give my power away to the authoritarian teachers! Not so fast, my friends…how do you address your employers? How do they address you? And when is the last time you consulted with a doctor who introduced him or herself as Dr. so and so while calling you by your first name? I’m still looking for a doctor who will walk into the examining room and greet me with the statement: Hi, Tys! I’m your GP (dentist, chiropractor, psychiatrist or whatever)…just call me Jim/Jane! (I’ve always found it rather ironic that we pay the doctors, yet they seem to have all the power. Shouldn’t it be the other way around, given the way our society equates payment with power? Just another example of how we give our power away.)

The energy of the planet is changing and self-empowerment is going to be important for our survival in the future. Most of the children being born in this time period seem to have an added resistance to the disempowerment process. We call them ‘indigo children’ or ‘new children’ because their energy is different from that of most children in the past. They are stronger yet at the same time more vulnerable as they struggle to hang on to their authentic power in the face of a world that seems determined to wipe it out.

We are either part of the problem or part of the solution. The more self-empowered we become, the more we will feel comfortable allowing others their self-empowerment. Therefore working on our personal power, far from being selfish, is one of the most humanitarian things we can do. The first step is to become aware of how we were programmed to give our power to others. The second is to start taking it back. Think about how you could do those things. We will look at some possibilities in the next article.