During our last Embodied Awareness retreat, we spent some time exploring the ideas and concepts around Power and Empowerment.
As a group, we shared what these words mean to us personally; and then we engaged in answering a question and then posing a question.
I asked the first question, and it was…”What is Empowerment?”
Each person who volunteered to answer a question ended their answer with a new question to the group and, based on those indicating that they were interested in responding to the question, would pick someone from the group to offer an answer. That person would respond, followed by posing his or her own question.
From this, a remarkable exchange of ideas, experiences, opinions, inspirations and clarifications were shared within our group of professionals. The responses touched on everything from strength to responsibility to vulnerability. So much deep and personal knowledge in such a short period…
Here are some of the questions that we posed and answered:
- When have you felt most empowered?
- How can we support one another to be more empowered?
- How do you transform your pain?
- Where is your power coming from?
- What allows you to stay in your heart with opposing forces?
- What is the balance between nurturing our own needs & meeting the needs out there?
- How do we know the fine line between empowering others and over helping?
- We must know what something isn’t to know what it is….What is dis-empowerment?
- How do we empower ourselves (and others) to do this work with people we have shared wounds with?
Embodied Awareness 