Powerful Living - The Victim

This is the first in a three part series on how I came to live powerfully...or at least what I consider powerfully for me. Karen, over at Live The Power is having her Blog Birthday and having fun celebrations for it. Go check it out along with the rest of her blog as she's always got some sweet, gentle wisdom to share.

Karen asked what living powerfully means to us. The more I pondered it, the more I was able to identify three specific areas where once I shifted my understandings of them, my life completely changed.

One was when I finally understood my Victim Voice.

Another was when I truly faced Death.

And the final one was when I learned to Unconditionally Love All Of Me.

These are all intimately intertwined for me. As this was starting to be a book, I decided to break it down into a series of posts so as to be more suitable for BlogLand.
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Victim is the most powerful Voice in the psyche and the most influential in our lives. Think about it- what else keeps us back from living all we are meant to be? It's power lies in the insidious ways it influences us...hiding it's covert power from us by pretending to be small with it's little voice of fear:

"I'm wounded... I can't do that. What if I fail? What if I'm harmed? What if someone out there will criticize me? What if I succeed...what will be expected of me then? What about my early life and how I was treated...how can I expect to be someone whole and healthy and successful because of it? What if it happens again? I've been hurt...take care of me...how can I shine with all my problems?"

Victim has all sorts of imaginary scenarios and excuses to hold us back, keep us small. And one really sneaky aspect of it? The minute you heed its siren voice and feel "sorry for it," it's won and will continue to keep you spiralling down forever. It's one of the Voices that I refuse to let wiggle even one inch because I know the trap of its seductive nature. I am lovingly brutal with it.

When I dive into the deeper energy of Victim, what I feel is lack of Trust in the Path. At its core, it's about being disconnected from our Source that trusts that everything in front of us is a piece of the whole, that all is well and that I am Loved.

When I learned the tricksy nature of Victim, I finally understood the Truth (for me), the power and the extent to which I created my world. (these days known as Law Of Attraction or LOA.) I'm kind of a cut and dry sort of mystic in this arena...and this arena only. I don't waffle here with this, don't find relativity here--except in that my whole worldview is just one more piece in a huge world of relativity. But within this subset of Relativity, this law is constant. It's the only thing that Is and from which all experience stems. I create my world. All of it. Period.

I never understand why it is that people somehow discount LOA by pointing to the inhumanity of the concept when applied to genocide, whether it's the Jewish Holocaust or the current one in Darfur. Or Cancer, or rape. What about the victims there, is the cry. How heartless it is to imply that they created this for themselves.

I don't get it. The available alternatives I see are either a random chaotic universe in which there is absolutely no meaning at all....or....there is some divine omnipotent something out there that has created certain people who are destined to be suffering victims. Are these people being punished for something? What? Are they not believing in the right god? Have they not made it to the energetic upper class getting to be one of "the chosen?" Are they, after being created by this god, now found to be arbitrarily unworthy only to be given no opportunity to amend whatever random thing they've "done?" To me, this is incredible arrogance...like somehow because I didn't arbitrarily end up over in Darfur, I was somehow "better" and "got" to be here and not in their pain? How is not creating my world supposed to be a heartfelt, loving, compassionate perspective? Huge disconnect for me.

No...to me, it's much more logical, humane, compassionate and poweful to see that Spirit sees no good or bad, no right or wrong. That all is just a Dance and that some souls choose to come back and experience that negative "contrast" (what Abraham calls it) for the expansion of the All. That from contrast comes new creation...the Dance. That this particular life is small in the scope of The All and its extension, this everlasting soul. And just as when something fails in a smaller way in everyday life, then opens to much bigger and better things, that same energy also applies here. That no, it isn't comfortable or fun or easy for anyone to understand why we would create pain and suffering for ourselves. And that what Victim labels pain, Source sees as Pure Experience, no judgement, no happy or sad: Just. Experience. Even Death is not a bad thing to an eternal soul, so why would any of the rest of it be?

What happens when we take responsibility for our lives but stop blaming? I've touched on this before here, but want to talk more about it, in more grounded mystical terms.

While I live in a world where I take responsibility for everything in my life, the trick is to not label it with judgement and therefore blame. I'll take that I created a rape to spiritually learn something rather than be a Victim in a world where I have been damned to a life of suffering by a God for some stupid arbitrary chance event. Victim thrives off blame. Someone/something out there is stopping me from being me. Someone has hurt me, therefore I am now not responsible and don't have to look at myself again, don't have to learn, grow, add to the All because I hurt. It ensures that we don't have to ever again operate from a position of unconditional love because we are justified in our position of being "wronged against." (a saying of the Hendricks).

Another criticism of LOA is that people are outraged at the concept because now the Victim starts blaming themselves for their stuff...and aren't we bad LOA people for making them be that way. Please, people..please see this is Victim speaking and hooking into other people's Victims.

When we create our world, there is no hierarchy, nothing to blame. Hierarchy is required by Victim...it says there's me down here, and you up there. Therefore, since I am weakly down here, I am not responsible...you are higher than me, you are in charge/the cause of whatever happens therefore you are to blame when something goes "wrong." An evolutionary transition in moving from Victimhood to taking responsibility is a temporary rest stop in this dynamic where instead of blaming someone outside us for our pain, we blame ourselves. Tricksy, yes? These Voices are really really good.

What's powerfully tricksy about this is that it takes so long to discern when we're doing this to ourselves. Hierarchy and the need to blame are so ingrained that we miss them. We think that because we no longer blame something outside ourselves we've now taken responsibility. But really all we've done is shifted blaming an outwardly imperfect, victimizing world to blaming our own victimizing imperfections. "Why did I create this? What's WRONG with me that I would DO this to myself? What part of me needs fixing to make myself not create this again?" It's so subtle, so insidious.

So what happens when we get outside our normal responses and look dispassionately for just one minute and imagine seeing things differently? What happens when we take the pain of having had something "happen" to us and reframe it by dispassionately saying "...Hm...that's interesting....what are the gifts here?" What happens when things are reframed into seeing it as the Dance, not personal, not that we've done wrong or been wronged against, not that we're damned but that we chose to gently and lovingly learn something here that will bring us back to Source?

Which feels better? To consider that I have such strong energy that something big had to happen to learn that I wanted to create the drive and commitment to something equally powerful? Or that I'm a victim and have no control over my life, on any level, much less an energetic creative one? I'm liking option one, thank you very much.

Not all may agree with me. No one has to. They can embrace Victim, holding it tightly in their justification as to why they cannot be all they want to be. While I might want them to be empowered, feel sad they don't want to, understand this isn't easy....in the end, it's their choice. I honor that in them.

My first step to living powerfully, then, was to see and take responsibility for everything in my life without judging it or blaming myself for it. There is no: I didn't create this mess and am now empowering myself to not be a victim in the future. It's: I did all this...hm...must be something wonderfully powerful here or I wouldn't have done this. Hm....let's see what it is.

Am I able to maintain this all the time? Hell, NO! I get seduced by Victim all the time. I call it "The Suck," where I feel like I'm on the edge of a black hole, then falling into it big time. I've made no bones about these past two years and my re-emergence. I felt lost, out of control, wronged against, all of it. It was intense.

But the pain I created around it wasn't nearly as intense of what it would have been before. If I had gone through that stuff twenty years ago, I might just be in a psychiatric ward (some will argue that I belong in one now, hehehehe.) Instead, I feel kinda like Persephone, actually. But rather than the more well known version where Persephone is kidnapped, raped, and destined to return in Hades because she innocently ate six pomogranate seeds (random or what?), I prefer to embrace the more Feminist based version.

In this telling of the story, she goes down to the UnderWorld unconsciously at first. But once she's gone there, and re-emerges back to her Mother, she continues to return out of Choice. Why the Choose to return to the Dark? When she met all the Souls who feel stuck in the darkness, she wanted to shed her light so returned to keep them company and remind them of who they are. This is the archetypal shift I choose to embrace- that of transforming My Victim into a Woman Of Power.

Art:

For this piece I've chosen pictures of Gaia as a symbol of power in the face of seeming victimhood and the power she holds in self healing and rebirthing. We may end up not OK, but she will endure, heal herself, and do so with grace and power.

Mother Earth by Susan Seddon-Boulet
Awakening of Gaia by Staldren
Gaia Protects Earth from the Folly of Man from here
Momearth from here
Gaia's Party Dress by Francene Hart