I Almost Walked Out of My First Meditation

Dearest Sovereigns:I was at a personal growth workshop when the teacher asked us to sit in silence for twenty minutes.My mind turned hostile immediately, screaming, “This will not work!” As my resistance grew, my mind shouted, “I cannot sit here doing nothing!” I looked around to see if anyone else was having difficulty. All the women around me were sitting quietly, their hands open on their laps, breathing in rhythm.Was I the only one who couldn’t do this simple thing?I was close enough to the door that leaving would have been easy, and the only thing that kept me in the chair was not wanting to be the one who failed.So I stayed for entirely the wrong reason, which is how a great many good things have started for me.I settled in my chair and resolved to get through it. My eyes closed and I focused on my breathing. The instructor said to inhale deeply for the count of five, then exhale slowly to the count of eight. I completed three rounds when I noticed my body relaxing. My shoulders came down from where they had been living for years. The arguing in my head thinned out, and underneath it was a quiet I had forgotten was still there.I described that afternoon for a long time as learning how to relax.That is not what happened. Instead, for twenty minutes, no one outside of me was telling me what I was worth. And in the absence of all that noise, something older and steadier was still present, waiting, entirely unbothered by how long I had ignored it.Thanks for reading Empowered Way: Where Women Remember Their Sovereignty. Please subscribe to receive new posts and support my work.What I carried into that roomI had spent years believing I would be successful if I pushed harder, stayed later, and moved through the world the way the men around me moved through it.I came to see eventually that I had joined a system built by men for men, and that a woman who wanted into the inner rooms of it was tolerated rather than welcomed. I took the courses. I collected the degrees and certifications. I kept not arriving, and I kept concluding that the shortfall was mine.There was real grief in that, and I want to name it rather than move past it quickly. It is tiring to spend decades proving yourself to people whose standard you could never meet. It is lonelier still to do it while believing the exhaustion means you are not enough.I was living entirely on the outside of myself. Every measure of whether I was doing well came from somewhere beyond my own skin, which meant I could never rest, because the verdict was always being revised by someone else.Sovereignty, as I understand it now, is simply the end of that arrangement. It is the unbroken line between your soul and Divine Intelligence, with nobody standing in the middle deciding whether the connection is permitted. It is quieter than it sounds. Mostly it feels like being at home in yourself.You do not have to earn what you already areWhen I finally looked in the mirror without the outside world propped up beside me as a measuring stick, I saw someone with more possibility in her than I had allowed myself to consider.The possibility had been there the entire time. So was the abundance. Not waiting on a certification or a better year, simply being present, the way a room is still furnished when you have been away from it.Your essence is your wealth. - RumiRumi isn’t describing something you are on your way toward. He is reminding you what you are made of, without having to earn it.This was the hardest part for me, because I had been trained to treat every good thing as something earned. I approached my own soul the way I had approached success at a law firm, with effort and evidence and patience while somebody else deliberated.Sovereignty is not built that way. It isn’t earned - it’s remembered. The tenderness in that is worth sitting with, because it means nothing about you has to change before Love can reach you. You are not repairing a broken thing. You are clearing the room enough to see what has been in it all along.What happens when someone truly sees youImagine the two of us standing together, facing one another.You look away, because a wave of doubt or old shame moves through you and being looked at is difficult in that moment. I put my hand on your arm, gently, and you come back. We look into each other’s eyes, without an agenda, other than to see each other.What you see in my eyes will loosen something in you.You will see yourself reflected in my eyes, and it will not be the version you have been carrying around and apologizing for. You will see the plain fact of your belonging, not as a conclusion you reasoned your way to but as something your body already knew and had been waiting for permission to remember.I am not giving you anything in that moment. I am not fixing you or filling you or making you whole. I am seeing what was already true, and being seen is often all it takes for a woman to come back into her own presence.This is why sovereignty has never meant standing alone. A sovereign woman is not a woman who is solitary. She is a woman who can be loved without disappearing into it, and who can look at another woman without needing to rescue her. A Sovereign Woman has room for you because she is no longer scrambling for her own footing.How It Shows UpYou have met someone like this, because you knew before she said anything. Something in the way she occupied the room told you she was drawing from an inner source that most of us have ignored.That is what an interior life looks like from the outside. I call it moving from Divine essence to individual presence, and it is not charisma or personality. Presence is felt by others, when the woman has stopped asking the world to tell her who she is.Mine came through daily meditation and daily journaling, fifteen or twenty minutes each morning of letting my body and mind and emotions settle. I have not missed a morning since 2017. Some mornings the gratitude is so full I find myself moving around the kitchen while the sun comes up. Other mornings it is quieter than that, and I sit with whatever is there and let it be enough.I lose the peace regularly. Someone says the thing, or the news does its work on me, and I am contracted before I notice. What sovereignty has actually given me is not immunity or protection. I know how to find my way back to peace, compassion, and Love. I have noticed the way back gets shorter every year.You find peace, not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.- Eckhart TolleRearranging circumstances is endless work, and I did it for years. Knowing who you are at the deepest level asks something different of you. It asks you to sit still long enough to meet what is already waiting.Now is a fine time to become presentYou are the only one who can step into your own presence, and I have come to find that more comforting than daunting. Nobody is withholding it. There is no room you have not been admitted to.There is only twenty minutes of quiet, and a chair you might want to leave, and the thing on the other side of it that has been patiently waiting for you to sit down.Many blessings on your journey,KathrynP.S. Please join me on Insight Timer, listen to one of the meditations that speaks to you, and then come back here to share.Thanks for reading Empowered Way: Where Women Remember Their Sovereignty. Please share this post with another woman who may need to be reminded of her sovereignty. This is a public episode. 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