True Power Requires the Ego to Have Been Humbled
In certain tribes in Africa, when an individual is being assessed by tribal elders as to whether they are destined to become a sangoma - a traditional healer and leader to their community - they are first asked to show their scars.
They must be able to demonstrate that they have been touched by the fierceness of life, and that they still stand present, empowered, anchored in their heart, and open.
***
One truth of our being is that as souls we are invincible light – beings of essential love and innocence who are on a journey of awakening to who we truly are and serving the collective from that place.
Another truth of our being is that we are intimately, inevitably vulnerable. In the flesh and folds of our animal bodies and human hearts, we all feel, suffer, cry, laugh, and grieve. All of our bodies move through sickness and health as do those of the people we love. All of us will die. We have lost and/or will lose those we love. On a somatic level, our animal intelligence knows life is temporary and finite, each moment totally unique, precious, and never to be repeated. In the vulnerability of our embodiment, the amour of our separation is taken off and we feel how connected we are in all the glory and heartbreak of this fragile human journey.
***
The leaders our global crisis is calling forth today must have moved through both of these initiations to access True Power. Their egos must have been humbled by both the eternal light they have come to find in their soul, and the vulnerability and vitality of their body.
They must have been dedicated enough to shift beyond egoic identification with their personality’s agendas, ambitions, and aspirations into the love of who they are and have always been in soul. They must have been vulnerable enough to take off the mask of personality, reveal the tenderness and clarity of the soul underneath, and then descend as that love into the most broken parts of themselves.
And, they must have learned to lead from a place that recognises our fragile and sacred interdependence and interconnection with the web of life. They must have come home to the innocent life force of their body, and its knowing of where on the earth it chooses to take its stand. And their hearts must have been broken and purified enough to resonate in empathy for the struggles, joys and heartbreaks of all those they seek to serve.
***
When these two aspects of a leader have been brought into union, what is revealed behind them is the electric current of pure spirit - the dark light at the core of our being where there is no self and no other. This is the source of True Power.
This is where we remember ourselves as the eternal, invincible One, vibrating and knowing itself in the exhilaration of the life force through everything. Here, we are a fire that cannot be touched, harmed, or extinguished.
This power asks only one thing of a leader: everything.
It asks for full dedication and full surrender.
For the soul, now at-one with the body, to offer itself as a space through which True Power can pour through and ignite their being into even fuller service.
True Power requires the ego to have been humbled. It requires its agendas to have been broken and purified with love in order for us to be trustable – by our community, those we are to lead, and by Life itself.