Gary Zukav describes authentic power as aligning your personality with your soul. He identifies gratitude, appreciation, and caring as constructive energies, fear as destructive, and says the path forward is feeling your negative emotions fully while choosing to act from love.
Chapters
Everyone's got gifts to give. You've got gifts to give too. Well, people say, well, I don't think I could do that. I know I couldn't. But you can, because you are unique and you have gifts to give, and you're giving them. Meaning is your inner compass. As you feel meaning in your life, you are beginning to align yourself with your soul. You're beginning to move in the direction that your soul wants to move. And as your as meaning empties from your life, you're moving in an opposite direction. Everything goes wrong in your life. Nothing seems to go right. Authentic power is aligning your personality with your soul, with those intentions of your soul. As you create real power in your life, you learn to distinguish between those energy currents that create destructively when you follow them and those energy currents that create constructively when you follow them. For example, gratitude, appreciation, caring, patience, contentment, awe of the universe. When you follow those energy currents, they feel good, not painful. And the consequences that you create are constructive, not destructive. And you start to move toward your soul. And as you learn to recognize these destructive energy currents, and we'll call them fear, just to give the basket a shorthand label, as you start to challenge them, which means when you feel them, you decide you can't just stop feeling them. That would be nice. I've tried. Doesn't work for me. If jealousy comes or pain comes or grief comes, it comes. But I can feel it and you can too, fully. That's what emotional awareness is really about. And then choose, even while you're feeling that, not to act on it. To reach for the healthiest, most grounded, sane, loving part of your personality. Not sentimentally loving, healthy loving. And act from that, even while you're feeling the pain of fear, you act with love. And as you do that again and again and again and again and again, and then you add a lot of agains to that, you begin to recognize these painful, fearful experiences. They still come, but they don't control you as much. It's like water running off the feathers of a duck. And at the same time, you begin to cultivate the loving aspects of your personality. For example, if you challenge your impatience by not acting on it, you're cultivating your patience. And your awareness begins to include more and more loving experiences. And you move in that direction. That's the direction that your soul wants to move. As you begin to create and bring with those intentions and bring those intentions into your life, you begin to align your personality with your soul. And that is the definition of creating real power. Authentic power. You have gifts to give. You are unique. What keeps you from giving them? Fear. Don't let anyone tell you, oh, you can't do that. But I can. Because that person's not coming from love. They're coming from fear.
