More Power to Us
I've had an unusual night. Apart from being sick and down with fever, I found myself unable to sleep. The cough and the chills kept my body awake. I've always found this time i. e. being sick to be a very powerful one.
It's like being in a battlefield. The body is weak and low on energy. It struggles and fights, like an insect that has been turned upside down. But the mind is fully awake. It is fighting its own battles. When one has fever, the mind will always be somewhere else, it will hallucinate, have visions, see and know things that it generally shuns away. Because the body is shutting down, the mind takes over.
Before sleeping, I was reading about 'power' and how everyone has a place where they feel most powerful. It is usually the place where you are the most authentic version of yourself, sans your layers. It also spoke about how when we die, this is the place where our souls will visit before we give up completely. We must let our power merge with the place because we are intrisincally entertwined. The warrior is guided to visit the place in his dreams and observe it carefully.
Now I did not expect this to happen so soon. Astral projection takes time and effort. The more you try, the faster you will fail. It requires a sense of giving up control, which I'm not very good at. But because I had been to the hospital in the day, been lying in bed, tired and exhausted, my body had already given up the fight.
I kept shivering and could not sleep. It was midnight, then 1, then 2. Finally my fever broke and the fight was over. But in between that period, I travelled to my place of power. My childhood home. Now, we changed houses every 4-5 years, so it is difficult to call any one place home. I reached my home of my teenage years. My best friend used to wait down and call out my name. I would peep out of the window and tell her to wait.
This time around, I was under the window and calling out my own name. Then I floated up to the third floor and peeped inside. The walls were pink and a family was sitting at the table and eating food. If this was astral projection, the timelines didnot match. I should have technically seen people sleeping at this time.
I started crying outside the window. A Sikh lady came to me and spoke to me kindly. She asked me why I was crying. I told her I missed my home. I missed who I was when I used to live there. She said it was still my home and I could come there whenever I felt like it. Then she introduced me to her family. A boy and a girl were there. I was so happy I was home again.
Then I floated back out of the window and roamed around the area. I saw our old post office, my favourite lake where I always used to sit, other places I used to visit and finally drifted back into consciousness. I still had a fever, but my mind was beginning to get relaxed.
Three days ago, I travelled to someone's house. I entered through their balcony, saw them sleeping. The house had a lot of yellow lamps. Because I too am fond of these, I could sense the person living there was overcompensating by focussing on the beauty of the house rather than their own blocks. None of this was out of the ordinary.
Now back to the power thing. Finding your power is not like finding something that is lost. It is more like finding something you have always had. A lot of people equate power to being cold or selfish. It isn't. It is that part of you that makes you who you are without trying too hard.
Now it's daytime and I'm still lying in bed, still sick. But I feel so much better. I know where I'm supposed to go to find my power back. I have three other places where I go to relax and be with myself. None of them exist in reality, I've never seen them before in the physical dimension. One is a cliff with soft grass overlooking the sea. It is the most gorgeous place in the world. Usually, I'm alone there. But sometimes other people come there to talk to me and then go away.
The second is a beautiful Japanese zen garden with fountains, benches and a pond. This is where I go when I need spiritual guidance. An old man, probably my guide, often comes there to talk to me.
The third one was created during my therapy sessions. I was told to find my 'safe' place. No one is allowed to be here except me. It's a room that is built below the ground, but one can look up from its windows. It has green plants and creepers, a mattress for sitting down and a bowl with two goldfish in it. My therapist laughed when I told her maybe I'm meant to be alone. 'The fact that you chose two goldfish and not one means that you understand that everyone needs a companion'. Ironic, and yet expected. How could that escape the keen ears of a therapist?
I feel we often try to put ourselves in a box when someone asks us to talk about ourselves. It's the most annoying and yet most profound question. Tell us about yourself. You stutter, get boggled by all this massive dump of information you're supposed to share and then clam up. You blurt out some ridiculous labels strung together, but none of them are really you. Because you are so many things, you are changing every day, and mostly because words can't do justice to the enormous life project that is you.
Power is an energy exchange. You show me what I lack, I show you what you have. We work through ourselves till in the end we realise, that the love we felt for the other actually belonged to us. If I think you are composed, strong and analytical and that is what attracts me to you, it is because those are the qualities I already possess, but did not want to accept.
People think of tyranny and manipulation when they think of the word 'power', but that is only when you use your power against others. There is the power of good, of kindness, of benevolence, of prayer and most importantly the power of love. If you find bits and pieces of your own, and you use it to better yourself, it becomes like blood. A part of you, a part of the universe, a part of all that makes life. And real power like energy doesn't disappear. It lives on even when we are gone, in the ones who shared it with us.
boundless and bare
The lone and level sands
stretch far away."
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