On Practice
Four Somatic Explorations for Experiencing Your Own Power
From Tarka Vol. 9: On Power, by Bex Naj
“Power” is a powerful word, suffused with load-bearing and often polarizing meaning. I observe some folks around me wanting more of it, pursuing its accumulation, while others vilify it, pushing it away. But whether we like it or not, power seems to collect, almost of its own volition, channeled through us whether we seek it out or avoid it. Power finds the low spots, the attractor basins, and settles there, knocking things out of balance as it aggregates. It collects and stagnates if we don’t enact strategies to keep it flowing. This could seem daunting on even a local community scale, so let’s start with our bodies. Sensing, feeling, and experiencing power in your own body, allowing it not only to exist, but to also flow freely, underlies the potential reimagining of the new power structures we want to see in our communities, local and global. And in our bodies, we are doing this all the time if we are alive. What we can create as a species is more powerful when borne of the power of coordination, power with, rather than power over.
My somatic proposal is this: can you disentangle the word “power” from any social, moral, ethical, or political assumptions you may have, and feel your own power as an aspect of your aliveness? Can you recall a time when you felt powerful? Not in a social or political way, or by comparison to someone else, though that may have been part of the context, but in the felt sense of your body? How would you describe what power feels like in your body, and does seeking the experience of your own embodied power feel familiar? Does it feel new? Comforting? Challenging? Scary? Taboo, even?
