Standing in Your Light: Sovereignty
I would ask you to close your eyes. The only reason for that is just to facilitate your ability to focus inward on what is happening within your own internal nature, within yourself. But you can do any of these exercises eyes wide open and you can do them anytime and anywhere – there’s no reason you can't suddenly stop wherever you are and mentally do the Standing exercise. You don't even have to be standing to do it. But, so often during the day, we do sit down and then we get up again, we stand and in that moment of standing, I can think to myself, this is what the standing means. This is what it puts me into resonance with – it is an affirmation of my sovereignty.
But for now, let's close our eyes and relax and enter into our inner theater of the heart and mind, a place of imagination, a place of possibility, a place of emergence.
I would like you to imagine yourself standing up. You can, of course, physically stand up if you wish to, but for the purposes of this exercise right now, this is not a necessity, but imagine what is involved in standing. Imagine your muscles at work, rising you up against the pull of gravity. Feel the presence of will in that action. The gravity of the world pulls you down – it’s so much easier to sit. It’s even easier to lie down. But when we stand we physically say “I am going to move in a different direction, I am going to follow the gravity of my own will and agency and my muscles will rise me up into an upright position. There I will find balance and strength, and I will physically differentiate myself from all that simply surrenders to the agency of gravity and its pull.” Just in my physical body I am making a statement, an affirmation of purpose, of will, and of self-governance.
Standing, I am like a staff. Feel the power of being upright and how standing singles you out. It affirms your individuality and sovereignty, it singles you out from the crowd. When you believe in something, when you feel something deeply, you stand up for it. You marshal your energy behind it and around it and under it. You give it your support. You let the world know “I am here and this is what I'm supporting. This is what I stand for.”
In standing, you enter into that position in which you can give to the world what you uniquely have to offer. When you stand, celebrate your humaneness. You are an upright being; we no longer move about on all fours as ancient ancestors may have done. We have learned to think and act for ourselves. We have freed our hands and now they’ve become instruments of expression: we can communicate with them; we can create with them; we can build with them; we can offer our gifts with them.
Our sovereignty frees us to be the unique incarnation of spirit and soul and sacredness that we are and to be in a position to offer our contribution to the world out of that uniqueness.
When you stand, your spine becomes like a magical staff. Like the staff of the wizard, it links heaven with Earth, and energies can flow along the spine, along this magical staff – energies that flow from the highest – from the trans-incarnational–and energies that rise from the heart and depths of the world and the support on which we stand. Symbolically, we link the stars and the earth together and their energy meets in our standing.
When we stand, we recognize the sovereignty that we have, a sovereignty born of being an expression of the soul in physical form. But all around us, metaphorically speaking, everything is standing. The rocks stand in their uniqueness. The trees stand in their uniqueness. Even the cells of our bodies stand in their unique identities. There is nothing that does not possess sovereignty. To honor our sovereignty is to honor it in the world. To honor it in the world is to honor it in ourselves.
We are a refuge for the experience of sovereignty – not only for ourselves, but for all life. We take into ourselves through our sovereignty the mantle of being a refuge and a support for the sovereignty of all who come into our presence. How may we honor their uniqueness different from our own? How may we perceive their boundaries that preserve that uniqueness and honor and collaborate with those boundaries?
To step into our sovereignty is to step into sovereignty itself as a gift from and an expression of the sacred. Let's take a moment to feel into that. It means not only to be sovereign, but to be an agent of sovereignty for our world. As we go through our world, through our day, we will encounter all manner of expressions around this idea of sovereignty. We will encounter those who have doubts about their own sovereignty, whose boundaries have been weakened for one reason or another. We will encounter those who seek to weaken the boundaries of others in order to enhance their own sense of power. We will encounter difference all around us and difference itself can be a challenge to boundaries and to sovereignty.
When we stand in our sovereignty, when we expand the standing exercise, let us tap into our strength and our ability to meet all these different manifestations and to discover how the sovereignty of others and the sovereignty of the world may be appropriately upheld through our thoughts and our feelings and our actions. How may we stand, not only in our own sovereignty but in a way that draws forth and empowers the sacred sovereignty of the world around us and all within it? There is surely no one way to do this–different circumstances demand different accommodations and approaches. But underlying all these differences is the commitment to that deep resonance, to the agency of the sacred as it unfolds through all the many manifestations of life within creation.
When we do the standing exercise and honor our own sovereignty, let us then explore saying “and I stand in service to the sovereignty of all.”
Now, I would like you to bring your attention floating back to your own sovereignty, to your own place where you are right now, to your body. You will know that in all the exercises that we do in Incarnational Spirituality, we always begin and end with standing in sovereignty. We begin by affirming we are in that place sacred to our identity–our own temenos, our temple, and we end by returning to that place and its grounding in our world. Archimedes, the Greek philosopher, once said, “Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will move the world.” Sovereignty is our place to stand, and love is the lever.