The older I get, the more important personal sovereignty becomes.
Aren’t most lives constructed in the image of our caretakers, our society, our zeitgeist? Are we not meant to be good little girls and little boys— obedient? And to stick with the program? Personal sovereignty is discerning where your conscious values and agendas start and all other influences end.
It’s tempting, SO tempting— to believe that the world is what holds us back. That’s not to say the pressures aren’t real, the criticism isn’t real, because they are. For centuries, maybe millennia many have abandoned the Self in the name of external authorities. That’s part of the work embedded in ancestral healing.
But how much power does external authority really have over us? Can we unshackle ourselves from their impositions and expectations? Or, more accurately, our perception of their expectations? This is a lesson in shadow work, something I intend to explore more deeply in future essays. We are generally unconscious of our shadow aspects, thus we project these qualities onto others or repress and act them out in ways we don’t realize. That’s the tricky thing about the unconscious - we inherently cannot be aware of it (without effort). Jung said of individuals working to integrate their shadow, “[One] knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.”
The road to personal sovereignty is not one of perfection - it’s one of wholeness. The journey is messy, disquieting and subject to ridicule. But it’s infinitely interesting. Personal sovereignty is a serpentine path that honors the dignity of the soul and the uniqueness of that journey. It builds resilience that was yet undiscovered by the individual. “Am I capable of doing THAT [insert radical thing here]?” ... Evidently you are.
If we are pathologically beholden to forces outside of ourselves, the Self cannot bloom. Trust the quiet voice within that knows.
What does personal sovereignty look like to you? 👑