More Power to You!

I've been reading two classic books about power: Power vs. Force by David Hawkins, MD, PhD, and Power Through Constructive Thinking, by Emmett Fox. Both authors are master teachers with a spiritual focus; Fox, whose work saw its heyday in the early part of the 20th century, reminds me of Florence Scovel-Shinn, author of The Game of Life and How to Play It, which has helped me immeasurably on my awakening journey.

While there is much useful material in Fox's book, I wasn't finding anything particularly new at this stage of my evolution — until I came to the chapter on Reincarnation.

I've long believed that we select our birth families based on the Earth lessons we've chosen to learn this time around. This is Louise Hay's (You Can Heal Your Life) premise, and she's been one of my foremost personal growth guides for decades. But Emmett Fox brought me up short when I read, "Of course, we do not choose our parents. We go to the parent whose nature and conditions correspond with the state of the soul when it incarnates. And often that family is anything but what we would choose at that time." It's a very subtle shift, but a crucial one.

He goes on to explain how we assimilate the mannerisms and characteristics of our family members, but that there is no such thing as "heredity": instead of "inheriting" any conditions or predispositions from our ancestors, we gravitate to families where similar conditions already exist: like attracts like.

When I got this on the subtle level, it caused a primal shift in my awareness. For many years, ever since I first became conscious, I had evolved from "blaming" my parents for conditions in my life, and instead sought to see how I could heal what did not serve them, in myself first. I felt I'd taken on many of my mother's fears (e.g., deep water, dogs, public speaking) and had been overcoming them one by one in my life, reasoning that on some level, this was also healing the issue for her, since I was her daughter and had received these imprints in the womb or as a young child.

But now I understood that, far from taking on her issues, I had simply incarnated into this family because these fears mirrored my own! In a twinkling all residual feelings of holding my family in any way responsible for anything I experience, dissolved in a pool of Light. No wonder that it always seemed, when I mastered something and shared the details with my mother, that she was innately cheering me on, even as her words barely registered comprehension of the spiritual overlay.

It's challenging — even as a writer — to translate this core awareness into prose for you. If you can, pick up Fox's book and read that chapter, the most powerful (for me) in the book, and perhaps you will experience the same transmutation. It is quite literally, alchemy. I feel a step closer to living from true power.

More power to you, beloved. Blessings!