Stop Asking Permission to Be Loved

Dear Sovereign Sisters:There are two ways to be allowed into a room, and we spend most of our lives confusing them.The first is permission. Someone with authority looks at you, weighs you, and decides you may enter. You followed the rules. You earned the seat. You proved you belonged, and the proof was accepted.The second is presence. The door is simply open. No one weighs your value. No one decides. You are welcomed before you have proven anything, and there is nothing you could do to be turned away, because your belonging was never the question.They can look identical from outside the room. Two women, both seated, both apparently included.But the woman who was given permission is still being measured. She knows it in her body. The woman who knows her value as presence stopped being measured the moment she walked in.What Permission CostsPermission has a price most of us stopped noticing we were paying.It is conditional, which means it can be revoked. And anything that can be revoked must be maintained. So you manage, and perform. You stay pleasant well past the point of self-respect, because the warmth is currency and the verdict is never final.I was trained as an attorney. I know how to build a case.For most of my life, the case I was building was for myself. I presented it nightly to whatever authority I had appointed to judge me, arguing that I was good enough, kind enough, spiritual enough to be allowed to stay.The Approved Experience and the Real OneI learned the difference in Chartres, France.I was on a sacred pilgrimage I had crossed an ocean to attend. Toward the end of the retreat, several women got COVID, including me. And a woman who called herself a spiritual leader announced to the group that those of us who were sick were not spiritual enough to be present.I wrote about that night already, the hours I spent arguing my own adequacy to a woman who had no standing to judge it. You can read it here: What I want to show you now is the part I have not talked about.While the approved pilgrims walked the labyrinth inside the Cathedral, in a ceremony reserved for the people who were healthy, the sick women were in a hotel room. One of them, a Reiki Master, spent the very hour she was barred from the ceremony giving healing treatments to the women who had been barred alongside her.That was permission and presence, in two rooms, at the same hour.The sanctioned experience required you to be well enough, good enough, spiritual enough. To pay thousands of dollars and spend several weeks leading to that space. The real experience asked nothing, other than to be open to healing.Sit with that distinction for a moment.The next day, my friend and I walked to the Chartres Cathedral and we found an unmarked door on the outside. Several people were walking through the door, down the thousand-year-old stone steps into the crypt that is the oldest part of the Cathedral. We decided to follow at a distance and what we found was extraordinary.A mass said in French. Rows of pews and people worshiping. We quietly took a seat in the last row, away from those seated at the front. No one knew our names. No one approved our belonging. We didn’t ask permission and we didn’t seek approval.In those moments of worship, Love arrived anyway. As I breathed the smell of incense and opened my heart, Love flowed through me. Not after I proved I deserved it. Before. Without condition or limitation.Love waits on your opening. That is the only way it has ever come.The Decision That Is YoursBetween the permission you keep chasing and the presence already offered, there is a choice. It is the only one that was ever truly yours to make.Sovereignty is the decision to listen to the Voice of Divine Love.Not to win the case. Not to argue with the authority that judged you. Not even to leave the room. Only to turn away from the verdict and toward the Love that waits patiently underneath your performance.The woman seeking permission listens for the ruling.The sovereign woman listens to the Voice of Love.It begins in the body. In the breath that returns the moment you stop straining to hear something that was never going to set you free.Why It Matters Which One You Are ChasingHere is the distinction that changes a life.Permission keeps you auditioning. The people granting it have not decided about you. That is the entire nature of permission: a verdict perpetually pending. So, you keep performing for a ruling that never arrives, and you call the performance belonging.Presence has already decided. There is no audition, because there was never a question about your value. You feel it in your breath, which deepens. In your shoulders, which drop. In the thing behind your ribs that finally stops bracing.The tragedy is not that we are denied presence.The tragedy is that we are offered it, often, by people and places that ask nothing of us, and we do not recognize it. We are too busy trying to earn the permission we have mistaken for the real thing.The QuestionI want to ask you something, and I want it to be specific.Where in your life are you working to earn a seat at a table, when there is an open door you keep walking past?Whose permission are you still seeking, managing, charming, performing for, when their approval was never the thing that was going to let you breathe?You do not need permission to be admitted.Notice where you are already welcome and then make the one sovereign choice that is yours: to stop listening for the verdict, and listen to the Voice of Love.* * *I have been writing toward these truths in a trilogy called, “Sovereign Women.”The Sovereign Women trilogy rests on a single conviction: that women deserve presence rather than permission in their hardest moments. When women are given time and space to grieve, to choose, to come home, their decisions are made from Love, not fear. Sovereignty, as I have come to understand it, is the decision to listen to the presence of Divine Love. The women in these books spend years listening for permission. The story is what happens when they finally turn, and listen to the Voice of Love instead.If that is the door you have been walking past, the first book is here. The second book is still in the drafting phase, and will be released this summer. To your presence,Kathryn This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit empoweredway.substack.com