I always tell the truth and tell it quickly.
I always ask for what I want when I want it.
I always take complete responsibility for my experience.
I always keep my agreements.
“If you practice these for one year, they will transform your life,” said Edwene Gaines, one of my spiritual teachers. She shared these 5 Points of Power at a workshop, telling us she had received them from one of her spiritual teachers, firewalk instructor Tolly Burkan.
“Bring it on,” something inside me said. I wanted to be a powerful person in the world. A person who made a difference, got things done, contributed to world peace. If committing to a daily practice of the 5 Points of Power for a year would move me in that direction, I would take them on. And I did. I typed them up, printed them out on lavender cardstock and posted them next to my desk on the wall of my real estate office.
Simple, but not easy. Some were easier than others. Paying attention was relatively easy, but confronting my office manager for opening my mail? Speaking up to “tell the truth and tell it quickly?” To “ask for what I want when I want it?” Three times? Then, finally to call to his attention that not only was it a violation of my boundaries and completely unacceptable to me to have him opening my mail, it was also a felony offense. That’s where the rubber hits the road – in personal relationships - in applying spiritual principles on a daily basis in everyday life situations. I hated confrontation. So, of course, I got it in spades. “What you resist persists!!” I began gently in our first discussion by explaining how I had been raised and why respect for individual privacy was so important to me. My mother taught us never to open another person’s mail or to go into her purse without her permission. I requested that my mail not be opened, that my privacy be respected. With each subsequent violation, the tone of the request ratcheted up until the words “felony offense” were uttered. Then I changed the mailing address - how to own your power in spite of the circumstances. Simple, but not easy.
There was no shortage of opportunities for me to speak up, tell the truth and take complete responsibility for my experience. I didn’t always like it, or what I saw about myself, but I did it. And, Edwene was right about the practice, it transformed my life.
A group of ten women, from our real estate office, with some of their friends, began meeting to practice the 5 Points of Power together. We called ourselves “Women of Power.” A French woman who had been a homemaker for twenty-five years found the courage to leave a marriage, return to school, commit to a real estate career. Another franchised her bagel stores. Yet another took her skin care line international. We met for a year, checking in weekly, holding ourselves accountable in one another’s presence, setting new intentions, sharing how the points were working in our lives, which ones were challenging for us, our successes and failures. Our gatherings kept us focused on the principles, committed to the practice.
When I realized the value of applying the 5 Points of Power, I didn’t want to stop. I actively continued the practice for a year and a half. To this day, I can write or recite the five points from memory. Somewhere along the way, around nine months into the practice, I had the profound realization that the 5 Points of Power not only applied externally to my relationships with others, but could also apply internally in my relationship with myself. Do I always “pay attention” to myself and ask myself for what I want when I want it? Do I “always keep my agreements” with myself? How many times weekly did I say I would meditate, walk, write, eat healthily, go to bed at a regular hour? I did not make a one-year commitment to internal practice of the 5 Points of Power. Hmmm……maybe that’s something I could now consider! Writing this blog post did get me up and out the door this morning to my water aerobics class (M-F, 9-10 a.m.) no small feat in Albuquerque where it’s now below freezing at night, I’ve been wearing thermal underwear for a month, and one morning, while driving to the community pool, it actually snowed, yes, really, on the hood of my car. Now, if I could only approach everything in my life that way!
“Out of this world” Blurbs from the Burque!
Expensive plane fare! More than 450 people have purchased tickets, at $200,000 each, to fly into suborbital space with Virgin Galactic from Spaceport America, the world’s first spaceport, in the New Mexico desert near Las Cruces, NM. British Billionaire, Richard Branson, signed a 20-year lease on the facility where the terminal recently opened. Flights are scheduled to begin in 2013.
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