Power With

A Wednesday Short Post

Hello beloved reader,

We interrupt our regular programming😎 (of the serialization of my book) for a brief dispatch from real life: a story of how I went looking for an ally and got a mirror instead. One gentle reminder—meet it with compassion—and an old pattern transformed.

I feel privileged and grateful to be part of a community that practices a different kind of power—not power over, but power with. A community that knows each of us has a shadow—our “muck,” and like the lotus, we grow because of it, not in spite of it.

When we’re identified with ego, we slip into comparison—superior or inferior—and we forget our shared humanity.

But when we gain awareness of ego, when we can observe it clearly, something loosens. We can cultivate what the Buddhist monks across the road call mudita—joy in the happiness of others. Not envy. Not competition. Joy that expands the heart instead of contracting it.

This doesn’t mean we never get triggered. We do. I do. But here’s what changed me:

One day I was venting about someone in the community. I wanted agreement—someone to take my side. Instead of piling on, the person I was speaking with reminded me to look with compassion, because every one of us is shaped by our conditioning.

That moment broke the old pattern.

No triangle.¹ No superiority. Just two humans remembering something true: we’re all doing the best we can inside the stories that made us.

This is living reciprocity—a cycle of support. Not perfection, but presence and compassion.

Maybe this is what many Indigenous cultures understood long before colonial arrogance arrived declaring the “one right way.”

Maybe harmony with each other and with the Earth isn’t something to achieve. Maybe it’s something to remember.

May we remember.
May we grow from our muck.
May we keep choosing compassion, again and again.

♥️🙏🕊️

I’d love to hear where you may have experienced power with in your life—and how did it feel in your body?

And what helped you remember compassion when ego wanted to be right?

1. drama triangle: victim–persecutor–rescuer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karpman_drama_triangle)