There is a growing movement of awakening exploding on the planet. This rise in consciousness is catalyzing a new prototype of leaders who are poised to express a wholehearted and integrative approach through every aspect of their lives. In this article, we’ll explore how power is one of our most influential energy sources. We’ll delve into two paradigms of power: power-over and power-with.

To be human is to traverse a lifetime of micro and macro initiations. Each one of us is a hero or heroine on a mysterious journey of pleasure, love, and connection, as well as states of fear, anxiety, separation, darkness, loss and heartbreak. Initiations are the path of evolution. They crack us open, break us down, leave us breathless and eventually, through their alchemy and transmutation, present us with our personal light and power.

As more conscious leaders find one another, networks of change agents and heart warriors expand. Together, we are birthing a new world. And given the chaotic and destabilizing times, we’re in globally, this revolutionary movement is imperative. In this article, we will review power as a form of energy and unpack the paradigm shift of power-over to power-with in more detail.

Your brain is the mapmaker of your belief system. While our subconscious beliefs serve us to an extent, they also leave us with blind spots, such as outdated protection mechanisms. Becoming an integrated human being isn’t about erasing our adaptive strategies, but about expanding and updating responses that reflect who we are now.

Embracing your adult relationship patterns is a journey of power reclamation. You have the power to interrupt what no longer serves you and to make conscious relationship choices that fulfill, heal, and uplift you into greater levels of growth and intimacy.

Our attachment template, our internal map related to safety, connection, and bonding, is constructed during our early life experiences. There are four windows of development that carve and curate our attachment template, ranging from in utero to eighteen years of age. As adults, we continue to draw from this template in our relationship to ourselves, others, and all of life.

We all share a universal need to feel secure and to know that we belong in order for us to thrive and be in our authentic power. Attachment wounds are areas of deep vulnerability for each of us. Being educated about why we do what we do to bond builds awareness, self-compassion, and a greater perspective into our relationship triggers.

As global disruption and chaos increase, most of us feel the impact through spikes of anxiety, fear, and overwhelm. The information age has placed us in a unique time. During previous decades, national news and media platforms had the ability to conceal any information deemed unfit for public consumption. They had the power to leave us in the dark.

Most of us don’t realize, that intimate relationships (lovers, partners, friends, and even colleagues) will reveal aspects of our attachment template. If we want to integrate and embody more of ourselves then it’s a worthy endeavor to study the behaviors that arise when we feel threatened, vulnerable, and fear abandonment or rejection in all types of relationships.

Our greatest challenges are the medicine we are here to transmute from bitter into sweet healing for ourselves and others. The way to heal abusive cycles born from our past is to find safe, loving, and attuned support to help unravel the trauma of misunderstanding ourselves as bad or wrong because of other people’s projections, fears, and defended hearts. We need new and more accurate mirrors.

Boundaries are a form of power. They empower us to express our needs in relationship, whether that’s in our relationship to ourselves or others. Boundaries also offer us a forum to negotiate, using our authentic voice to stand in solidarity with our inner value system.

The courage to approach these delicate situations with compassion and care requires dedication, humility and vulnerability for each person involved. When it comes to sexuality, it’s important we understand that much of our patterned sexual behavior is based on our first and earliest sexual experiences.

The book “The Five Love Languages” by Dr. Gary Chapman, is one of many avenues to begin this exploration. He suggests there are five areas in which emotional intimacy is built. Emotional intimacy also deepens when there is a rupture, which is inevitable in authentic relationships, but we stay in the care and connection between us to repair.

When couples begin to domesticate often the erotic charge can shift and sequence through diminishing cycles. And what can also happen is that differences in communication, attachment styles, and emotional availability can fog our sexual desire channel too.

To be fully in touch with our “self” is a dynamic and ever-evolving journey. There is no end point to self-discovery and embodiment. The system in which we create and operate in with our partners, and all the people in our lives, is a manifestation of how we operate within ourselves.

Have you ever stayed in a relationship (romantic, work-related or friendship) that didn’t match what you desire in partnership, hoping that it would change because you saw the potential? What happens when we fall in love with the ‘potential’ of someone and forget to pay attention to the reality of the relationship dynamic?

As primal creatures, we are bound to be reactive. So how can we develop presence, leadership, and deeply fulfilling intimate relationships when we’re innately equipped with animalistic wiring?

When we embrace the view that our shadows are as significant as our joy and passion we are on a different journey than the traditional one of ‘avoid feeling and exploring your fear, create illusions of control, and pretend to be what you think is acceptable’. Opening into and witnessing what is present in our experience is the entry point to a path of deepening into an authentic relationship with ourselves and all of life.

How often do we sense a longing from deep within and find ourselves gently holding it like an exquisite hummingbird that startles us with her beauty as swiftly as she disappears? How often does it crack us open to something bigger that we sense, but don’t yet know as intimately as we would like to?

We are entering a time when acknowledging the pain of how the ‘lone wolf’ archetype plays out individually and collectively is an imperative catalyst to mobilizing a new world and a new way of treating ourselves and every living system on earth and beyond.