Tap into Your Power
deep peace of the new strawberry moon to you
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June 14, 2026
Is power good, bad, or neither?
Several years ago, my friend Lauren* and I co-wrote a handbook for addressing spiritual leader misconduct. In the writing process, she introduced me to a very helpful metaphor for power:
Power is like fire. It’s neither good nor bad. It’s a tool that can be used to support life, or it can be destructive. Fire provides warmth and allows us to cook food. Some indigenous groups use fire to manage their local forest ecology. All good things. But fire also destroys. It can maim or kill us. It can take out a whole house, whole towns, millions of acres of forest.
Like fire, power can be many things. It is necessary for survival—if you denied having any power, you would have no agency in your own life and would essentially cease to be a self. And when it’s not tended well, it can burn out of control.
And our practice for this new strawberry moon, and particularly in the week leading up to the summer solstice here in the northern hemisphere, is to tap into our power and steward it well.
*Coincidentally, Lauren has since published a book on the purity movement that I highly recommend. And it’s relevant to today’s topic of owning your power. How fun!
The danger of minimizing our power
Some of us—and let me know if this resonates with you—want to overcorrect by downplaying our power because we’ve seen people misuse their power. We may have even been on the receiving end of that misuse of power, be that in schools, faith communities, workplaces, relationships, families, systemically, or a combination of the above. And without healthy examples of how to use power for warmth, nourishment, and collaborative ecosystem management, we may deflect and say, “oh, I’m just little old me, minding my own business! I don’t have any power, and I don’t even want it. I’m good. Nothing to see here.”
But owning our power means practicing standing on our own two feet. Holding clear boundaries and inviting others to respect them. Much of the interpersonal conflict I’ve experienced and witnessed in the people I work with stems from not having a solid foundation and a well developed center from which to relate to others.
And for me, that’s what our internal power is: a well developed center from which to relate to others.
I just shared in the Wild Maven book club the other night about a former workplace conflict I had. For three years, from my first day of employment until my last, I butted heads with my director. And there’s an inherent imbalance of power in this scenario, where this person was several rungs above me, decided my salary, had hiring/firing power, etc. And that’s a whole thing.
But what I want to focus on for this illustration is that, as much as her behavior was harmful, I can look back and say that, even though I didn’t have the most power, I was not in any way powerless.
And I can acknowledge how not being grounded in my own power impacted the behaviors that I chose. At various times, I:
Said snarky things to and about her in meetings
Shut down and refused to participate
Cried in front of her and others
Talked shit about her behind her back
Fawned (aka went into people-pleasing mode) and thanked her for her leadership
And really the only problem I have with any of these behaviors is that there were times that I didn’t feel good about how I was showing up. There were plenty of times that, either in the moment or afterwards, I felt inauthentic and frankly, icky. None of that excuses her behaviors and abuses of power. But I want to feel good about showing up in a way that feels aligned for me. And often, I didn’t.
When fear takes over
When we don’t feel secure in our power, we may become anxious and fearful and worry that:
I won’t be heard
I won’t be safe
I’ll lose my job
This person will take advantage of me
I’ll lose respect
I’ll lose connection and belonging
And these fears may lead us to engage in relationships, workplaces, and communities by:
Speaking over other people
Policing other people’s behavior
Throwing a colleague under the bus and not taking accountability for our own contributions to an issue
Undermining negotiations to make a deal unbalanced in our own favor
Trying to control the narrative around a break-up
Lying about what we really want, need, or expect
On a large scale, we see this throughout the history of our country in countless ways. Just a few examples are:
Landowners deciding only landowners can vote.
White women excluding women of color from participating in our suffrage and liberation movements.
Patriarchal lobbies, legislators, and justices controlling women’s bodies through denying access to healthcare.
White supremacist movements like the January 6 insurrection.
The current explosion of gerrymandering happening across the country.
These are all examples of groups of people saying, “I’m afraid I might not have enough power, so I better preemptively take power from them, just in case.” And we see it over and over again from the interpersonal to the global.
Owning our power
So this leads us to our practice for this new moon and next week’s summer solstice. Find a quiet, comfortable position sitting or laying down and listen to this nine-minute guided meditation. Then keep reading for the rest of the practice.
Enough for Everyone
Get one, two, ten, or fifty friends and either do the full meditation together, or just the last part, striking a power pose. Start by each person listening to their intuition and taking their own power stance. You can do this either in-person, standing in a circle, or you can do this over video.
Then when everyone knows what their pose is, one person does theirs, and the group mirrors their pose back to them. Go around the group, each person modeling their pose and the group mirroring them. See if you can hold each one for 15 seconds or so. For an added challenge, see if you can do it without speaking.
Once you’re done, discuss what that experience was like for each of you.
One thing I hope you’ll feel is that no one’s power diminishes anyone else’s. You standing tall, being grounded, does not in any way detract from your neighbor’s ability to stand tall and be grounded. The belief that there is not enough power to go around, that whole groups need to be controlled so that others can thrive, is a lie.
I hope you find that tending to your own center with loving kindness helps you encourage others to do the same.
Join me
Sunday, June 14, 2026, at The Space Within in Baltimore. Together, we’ll explore the solar plexus chakra as a center of power, do this practice together, and make our own essential oil blends. I hope to see you there!
Photo by ROMAN ODINTSOV on Pexels.