Empowerment

A few years back I had a real soul searching time period. I looked at the validity of my dreams, the possibilities of the present time we live in and looked deeply at my purpose. I spent most of my life studying yoga, Ayurveda and astrology. I could have easily been a good doctor or lawyer, and had a very abundant reality. In my soul searching, I needed to understand what my role was and why I was doing what I was doing. In clarity, I understood that who I am is the possibility of empowering health and success while living in alignment with spirit. The key word was "empowerment". Here are some words on empowerment from someone I greatly respect:

"If you are empowered, you suddenly have a lot of work to do because you have the power to do it. If you are unempowered, you are less dominated by the opportunities in front of you. In other words, you have an excuse to not do the work. You have a way out. You have the security of being able to do what you have always done and get away. If you are empowered, suddenly you must step out, innovate and create. The cost, however, of being unempowered is people’s self-expression. They always have the feeling that they have something in them that they never really gave, never really expressed. By simply revealing the payoffs and costs of being unempowered, people have a choice. They can begin to see that it is possible to make the choice to be empowered rather than to function without awareness. Empowerment requires a breakthrough and in part that breakthrough is a kind of shift from looking for a leader to a sense of personal responsibility. The problems we now have in communities and societies are going to be resolved only when we are brought together by a common sense that each of us is visionary. Each of us must come to the realization that we can function and live at the level of vision rather than following some great leader’s vision. Instead of looking for a great leader, we are in an era where each of us needs to find the great leader in ourselves." -- Werner Erhard

"Leaders do not act from a plan, but plan from their action. The planning is really a conversation which gives other people access to the possibility to which you are committed."
-- Werner Erhard

"At all times and under all circumstances we have the power to transform the quality of our lives."
— Werner Erhard