Tag Archives: Empowerment Triangle

How to heal your life.

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These eight actions will heal your life. 

Three Foundations:

  • Embodiment. Your body is the only thing you have for your entire life. Know your embodied self. Honor your body. Listen to your body. Learn to love your body.
  • Awareness. Be courageously present to your life: body, mind, heart, soul, spirit.
  • Ownership. Examine your theology. Deconstruct and reconstruct as you choose. Reclaim your rightful authority over your beliefs. 

Four Healing Shifts:

  • More soul, less façade. Explore the difference between your essential self and your social self. We all have both, and we need both. Learn which one is driving your bus, and how to change drivers if you choose to.
  • More acceptance, less resistance. Explore your beliefs about the inevitable changes of being alive in a human body. To live is to change. Much of our suffering comes from misunderstanding and resisting change. 
  • More intention, less reaction. Explore how your thoughts are causing your feelings, not the other way around. This is good news, because you can learn to choose your thoughts. 
  • More creator, less victim. Explore the victim triangle and the empowerment dynamic. Create the life you want, instead of passively settling for the life you have. 

Put it all together.

  • Design a solid, personalized, do-able plan to create what you want in your life.

These eight actions are the core components of my Coaching Intensive, a culmination of everything I’ve learned in my six decades of loving, suffering, learning, and delighting in my one life.

I’d love to share them with more of you and dig deeply into them, so this space will be devoted to exploring them in depth, one each week until the end of the year.

Currently my Coaching Intensive is only available in a private coaching format. I’ll have a special announcement soon about another way you can work with me to implement these eight healing actions, starting in January. (If you just cringed because that feels salesy, I promise I’m not being coy. I’m just still working on the details.)

PS. Thank you for sticking with me as my right hand heals from its surgical intervention. I’m typing with nine fingers now! And emerging from my chrysalis full of words and ideas! 

Four healing shifts and a simple awareness practice.

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Sun shining through fingers

I’m convinced that healing happens as we make four simple shifts. These shifts aren’t rules. They’re more like touchstones. Truths. Signposts along the way of integrity. They’re not linear, but rather a spiral unfurling. They’re my attempt to “systematize Mystery.” 

  1. More soul, less façade. To orient ourselves more and more to the truths of our hearts and souls, and less to others’ expectations. 
  2. More acceptance, less resistance. To accept and celebrate the ever-changing nature of being embodied on this earth more and more often, and resist life’s inevitable changes less often.
  3. More intention, less reaction. To choose our thoughts with intention more often, and become caught in our emotions less often. 
  4. More creation, less victimhood. To actively create our lives more often, and less often behave as passive victims of other people, circumstances, or “fate.” 

Supporting my clients as they make these four shifts is the core of my coaching. These shifts are simple, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy. And we have to know where we’re starting from to get where we want to go.

Moving the dial on these shifts requires awareness of what’s happening in our bodies and our brains.

Powerful, lasting change begins with clearly seeing, acknowledging, and being with our current reality, and loving ourselves no matter what we find when we tune into ourselves.

My clients and I begin every session with a few minutes of tuning in. We stop, we feel our bodies, we breathe. This tuning in is non-negotiable. 

Here’s a simple two-minute awareness practice. You can do it anywhere, and you won’t need any special equipment. Don’t complicate it, or try to excel. Just do it.

1. Stop what you’re doing. Take three breaths, Feel your feet.
2. Scan your body for sensations.
3. Whatever you feel, simply allow it. Let the sensations be what they are.
4. Sit with yourself for two minutes. 

Do this practice as often as you remember. Set a reminder on your phone, if you want to. Journal just a few words about what you find, if you want to. Pay attention to any patterns you see, if you want to.

That’s it. That’s all. This simple awareness practice, just coming home to your body for a couple of minutes, is such a powerful place to start making important shifts. Your body is your life. Your body is a gift. Your body tells you what’s true and real and alive. 

Your body is your connection to your soul. Your soul is your connection to meaning, purpose, and deep joy. Everything starts with your body.

You might find as you do this practice regularly that you become aware of emotions and thoughts. If you do, you can jot them down if you want to.

All change, for conscious humans, begins with awareness.

I go a little deeper into one of the four shifts mentioned above in each newsletter, and suggest a practice, exercise, or journal prompt to explore it further. I value your feedback. 

I’m collecting everything I’ve written about these four touchstones into a short e-book. Your responses and questions will help me make that book clearer and more useful. Contact me here or leave a comment with your thoughts. Thank you! 

PS. I’m transitioning from a blog subscription to a newsletter, in order to serve my readers better. Please visit my website and subscribe to my newsletter to continue to receive posts. Thank you!

Photo credit: Daoudi Aissa on Unsplash

The world is my field of practice. Unfortunately.

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Moraine Lake in the Three Sisters Wilderness, Oregon

(Salty language warning)

Friends, my life is really hard right now. People are doing things that are bugging the living crap out of me.

I’m not talking about the political landscape or COVID or global climate change.

What’s really bugging me right now is the people across the street who have left their porch lights on two nights in a row and they’re really bright, shining into our bedroom, and the assholes aren’t even home. They’re never home. They won’t be home for weeks.

And it’s the jerks pitching their tents where they’re not supposed to at my favorite mountain lake.

And it’s the shitheads across the lake making so damn much noise. I come up here for silence and solitude. And then one dude decides to skin off his clothes and go for a swim buck naked, and so of course he has to holler to the others that his penis has shrunk (not the words he actually used.). Because the water is cold. In October. At 6,000 feet in the mountains. And these aren’t kids. These are men and women in their 60s. Oh my effing god.

There I sit, feet in the lakeside gravel, maroon snow-striped mountain looming over me, fuming, aware that when I get home those fucking porch lights will still be on. And they were. They still are.

I can’t seem to help it. I have a sensitive nervous system. The lights and the noise don’t deeply piss off most people like they do me, if my spouse is any indication.

So, what’s a girl to do? The world isn’t showing signs of accommodating my sensitivity any time soon.

I, swear to god, asked myself what the Buddha would do, and then I used the tools I have at my disposal. Two tools in particular have been helpful: thoughts cause feelings, and the Karpman drama triangle.

I know that it’s my thoughts causing me to suffer. (See this post for more.) I was already changing my actions by not yelling at the (probably Californians) to shut the fuck up, not unscrewing those damn lightbulbs (jury’s still out on that one), and not telling the fisherman his goddamn tent was where it wasn’t supposed to be (I’m guessing he knew). So I needed to look at my thoughts to find relief. When I did, I heard myself say things like “I hate my sensitivity.” “I wish I could be okay with this shit, like other people.” “People should be more considerate.” “People shouldn’t fuck with my peace.”

All these thoughts are victim thoughts. My frustration and outward focus, my helplessness and lack of options, all indicate that I was stuck in Karpman’s drama triangle, playing the victim role extremely well. I’m not sure how to get into the creator’s place of empowerment yet, and just noticing where I was stuck helped so much. Because it’s not going to get any easier. And giving external people and circumstances power isn’t going to help me find peace.

I feel a little better. A little more stable. A little less like I’ll flip out and hurt someone. I don’t want to overstate the state of my enlightenment. All I’m saying is that the tools are helping.

The world is our field of practice. These times are what we’ve been doing our spiritual strength-training for.

(I lifted my title from this On Being interview: Krista Tippett talks with Rev. angel Kyodo Williams. And the idea that these times are what we’ve been practicing for comes from Liz Gilbert.)

Photo credit: Barb Morris (15 October 2020)

This could change your life. I’m not kidding.

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In every situation you encounter, you choose to behave as either a victim or a creator. Which orientation you’re operating out of makes all the difference in how your life feels and looks, and the impact you have on the world around you. Once you see this difference, you can consciously choose to act from a place of empowerment. This is the basic idea of David Emerald’s TED: The Empowerment Dynamic, a cheesy yet profound book. I’m finding this concept mind-blowing and incredibly helpful.

Like many of you, I’ve known about the Drama Triangle—composed of victim, persecutor, and rescuer—for decades. But the antidote to it, the “Empowerment Triangle,” is a new idea for me.

I feel like I’ve discovered the secret of life, the Rosetta Stone, the key to personal and organizational growth and health.

Most of us, most of the time, are living as victims. This is completely understandable. Our culture is a victim culture. We’re taught victimhood from our cradles. We’re steeped in it. We swim in it like water. We’re mostly unaware that we’re approaching our life and our choices as victims. This Drama Triangle feels completely natural.

An alternative triangle, what Emerald calls the “Empowerment Dynamic,” is composed of a creator, a challenger, and a coach. To grow up is to become aware of where we’re living as victims and to choose to take on the creator role. To grow up is to see that we’re always making a choice. This is scary as hell, sure, but it’s also why we’re here.

When we behave as victims, we approach our life as a series of problems to be solved. Viewing life as a problem creates anxiety, which causes us to act in ways that reduce the anxiety but almost certainly don’t solve the problem. And the cycle starts all over again. Not much changes.

Creators, on the other hand, develop clarity on what they want to see happen in a particular area of concern. Clarity leads to passion and motivation, which creators then harness to move toward their desired outcome or vision. Creators change themselves and thereby the world, if they choose to.

When you’re feeling frustrated, stuck, and powerless, you’re in victim mode. When you blame others for your feelings and criticize yourself and them, you’re in victim mode. When nothing changes and you really wish it would, you’re in victim mode. When other people aren’t doing what they should and you’re sick and tired of it, you’re in victim mode.

Conversely, when you’re energized, focused, and open to surprise, when you’re making choices that move you toward what you want to see happen, when your boundaries are firm and you’re in charge of your time, you’re acting as a creator.

How do you make the shift from victim to creator? Realize that you’re always, always, always making a choice. Even if you’re truly a prisoner and you can’t actually make decisions about your actions, you’re still in charge of your thoughts, and thereby your feelings.

If Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl can be responsible for his attitude while imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, we can learn to be responsible for ours. Frankl famously said, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

If you’re curious about how this shift feels, you could choose to try this exercise:

  • Bring to mind an area of your life where you feel stuck, frustrated, and powerless to change the situation. This might be your marriage, your job, your aging body, COVID, or political polarization in the US. (Many of my clients feel the most frustration with their marriage.)
  • What do you see as the problem? (For many of my clients, their perceived problem is that they crave growth and change, and their husbands or wives seem to want to stay the same. This disparity causes my clients to feel afraid that if they choose to change and grow, their marriage will end.)
  • In this scenario, who’s the victim? Who’s the persecutor? Who do you expect to rescue you? Do these roles seem to change?
  • Now, ask yourself what you want to happen. What’s your vision for this area of your life? What’s the outcome you desire? Take time to get as clear as you can. Your clarity will be your motivation.
  • What’s one tiny step you can take in the direction of your desired outcome or vision? If it’s doable right now, go do it. I’ll wait. If it’s truly not, make a plan to take that step.
  • Check in with your body. How do you feel now? Do you still feel stuck and frustrated? Or do you feel more energized, compassionate, and empowered?
  • If you’re feeling more open and enthusiastic, pat yourself on the back! You’re making the shift from victim to creator.
  • If not, please know that’s okay. This work may be simple, but it’s often not easy. Celebrate your new awareness and give yourself compassion. There are many reasons, some of them very good reasons, why we choose not to change.

Questions? Want to go deeper? Contact me to schedule a free no-obligation conversation. I’d love to talk!

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons