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The Secret to Stop Giving Away Your Power · Spiritual Sense: Practical wisdom to quiet an overthinking mind and recharge your soul

• 0:01
  Speaker A: Many blessings and welcome to this wonderful session on how to stop giving away your power. There are so many things in life that can drain our power, drain our energy. People, situations, illnesses, financial problems, the temperature, the weather, you know, the economy, the government. It just goes on and on, doesn't it? And we can continuously have our energy being pulled out of us and we can end up feeling depressed and confused and lost and stressed out and low energy, terrified, freaked out. So you're going to learn how to claim back your power, how to retain your spiritual energy so that you can enjoy life more, be in a higher state of consciousness and also manage all of the crazy things that come up in our life. So thank you for being here and hello, Shereen. Welcome, welcome.
• 0:58
  Speaker B: Hello, michael.
• 1:00
  Speaker A: Yay.
• 1:01
  Speaker B: Feels like a long time.
• 1:03
  Speaker A: It's been far too long. Look at that.
• 1:06
  Speaker B: How have you been?
• 1:07
  Speaker A: Been doing great. I'm here in Hawaii and I've been practicing. My intention is for a week just to have 8 hours of meditation a day.
• 1:20
  Speaker B: Fabulous.
• 1:22
  Speaker A: Can't say I've managed eight yet, but I'm certainly doing my best.
• 1:26
  Speaker B: That's wonderful. Wonderful, wonderful.
• 1:30
  Speaker A: Yeah. So it feels, we know from our.
• 1:34
  Speaker B: Spirit what a divine celebration, isn't it? To be able to have 8 hours.
• 1:38
  Speaker A: That's in itself a huge celebration, isn't it? We hear this again and again in advanced spiritual teachings. To have 8 hours remembrance or 8 hours of higher consciousness a day, that's the end result. And, and then we normally think, well, I can't do that because I'm so busy with all this stuff and I have like so many projects. Oh, you know, I'd like to but, but, but I said, you know, I can easily take one week out of like my whole life to just focus on one thing shortly. I mean, come on, I can't make excuses indefinitely. So. So here we are.
• 2:15
  Speaker B: That's good. This is one time you can't say, hey, the dog ate my homework.
• 2:19
  Speaker A: The dog ate my homework. There is a cat where I am though. So the cat could eat my homework but not the dog.
• 2:25
  Speaker B: So my other cat could definitely eat your homework.
• 2:29
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. The cat actually came up to me in my morning meditation and demanded being fed. It came right, sat right there and grabbing my thing. I'm like, all right, so I had to stop and go and feed the cow. 04:00 in the morning. So this is a fascinating topic. How to not give away your power. Why is this so important?
• 2:54
  Speaker B: Because unconsciously we are giving away power. Actually, there are two things happening. Unconsciously we are giving away power. And we are not aware, we are unconscious about the power we actually have. So those two things are happening. So it's really important to understand the power we have and how to get power and how to unconsciously not give away our power.
• 3:22
  Speaker A: Huge, hugely important. And we have endless opportunities where something comes up in our life and it can rattle us, you know, in different ways. So the first thing we wanted to share about this, how to stop giving away the power, is just to consider the nature of life itself for a moment. Because from our spiritual teachings, we understand that we're spiritual beings. We're separate from our body. And what is life? What is this thing here? Right? From our teachings, we understand that this is the drama. The drama or the movie. The movie of life. Like a cartoon? Like a movie. And that's, you know, we can understand that theoretically quite easily. Okay, life is like a game. It's like a movie. And we say, okay, sure, that's fine. Yes, but I've got to take care of this thing. It's really important. Right? So, but if we take it, really take this bit more seriously, then we have a different feeling about things, because fundamentally, we are spiritual beings, which means that we can't die. And that also means that if we really experience that, then all the things that we're stressed out about, they are, in one way or the other related to fear of death, when you trace it back. So, for example, let's say there's a financial challenge, right? Why is that really a problem? It's really a problem because if we don't have money, then we think we might get kicked out of our house. We might not be able to get food. We might die of being cold or hot and hungry, and then that's the end of our life, right? So money issues really come back down to, I might die if I don't have money. A lot of things they come back down to, I need to do all this stuff. Cause I'm not okay otherwise. That's the feeling I feel. I want it to be like this and this and this and this and this. And if it isn't, then I'm somehow unable to handle it, basically. And so we're giving power away to all these things, like even the weather, right? So in Hawaii, the weather is almost perfect most of the year. So it's like around 78 degrees, and there's a nice breeze and everything's fine. Then it starts creeping up to, like, the high eighties with the humility and humidity, and everyone's like, oh, my God. And then when it drops down to 50 degrees every 59 degrees, everyone has, like, a panic attack, and they're all phoning each other up. Oh, how did you make it through the night? Oh, my God. I had to, like, find blankets from underneath something. I nearly. I nearly didn't make it. And we're like, this is 59 degrees. So, you know, that's kind of. Life is constantly changing. We wanted to keep it at a certain level. And when it goes outside of the bounds, then we give our power away and we freak out about it.
• 6:33
  Speaker B: I feel freaking out is giving power away. Right. But I was thinking about what you're saying about fear of endings. So let's say it's a relationship, and I have fear of ending of the relationship. It's not necessarily death, but I do have fear of ending of relationships or, you know, in relationships, right. It's fear of endings. And it could be death also in relationships, which I think are harder. One of the things I was thinking about it is when is it that we are giving away power in this situation? Like, what is the awareness that is getting me into giving away power? So the awareness is that I'm a body and. Or I'm this Persona or this, you know, this character, Shireen, and I'm a particular role or I have a particular part, you know, I have particular prestige in society or all of those things, right? And so when I am in that mode of identifying with the. With the body, not only with the body, but all of the accoutrements that come with the body, all of the paraphernalia that come with the body, that actually, when I identify with those things, I do give away a lot of power, right?
• 7:58
  Speaker A: Because it's all external, isn't it? And all of these things are going to change. So one of the most important things in our spiritual awareness is to understand who we are, who God is, and what life is. The three points, there's soul, God, and the drama of life, the game of life and the life. It's not what we think it is. It's something else. And we understand that it's. It's a drama. This is a very. The word drama. From what I understand in Hindi, they use the word drama with movie interchangeably. Is that right? In old English?
• 8:36
  Speaker B: No. At that time, when they did it, maybe, but now, no, not anymore.
• 8:40
  Speaker A: But at that time.
• 8:41
  Speaker B: So not anymore.
• 8:43
  Speaker A: So if we understand that life is like a movie, like, if I watch a movie, right, and someone has a million dollars, then they lose $50,000. They haven't really lost any money, have they? Because it's in a movie like this, the person in the audience hasn't lost any money because someone on the screen lost the money, have they?
• 9:02
  Speaker B: Or you could even say the actor.
• 9:04
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 9:05
  Speaker B: So let's say there is a movie, and let's say Tom Cruise is playing a character, wherever he is, losing a lot of money in the movie. And he totally, at the end of the movie also, he ends up bankrupt. We know in real life, Tom Cruise is very wealthy. And so only in the movie he lost the money. In reality, he didn't lose the money. And so if this is a movie, if we are all in a movie, we are all actors in a movie, then whatever happens, right? This is not reality. There is a higher consciousness, there is a higher world, which we call the spiritual world, where it's actually real. You as a soul, are real. And in the spiritual world, you, the soul, have abundantly of everything. But here in this movie, it could be a crying part, it could be a part of a beggar, it could be whatever, right? That part only affects us if I connect with it. So let's say. And the way, why do we connect with it? We connect with it because we are body conscious. Because I think I'm Shireen. Or let's take, even take simple things like female, right? Indian female. In the movie. In this movie. In the movie here, there's a lot of baggage associated with indian females. So in this movie, if I, Shireen, think I'm indian female, what happens then? All of the limitations of being indian female come to me because I'm associating with it. And the reason I'm associating with it is because of the body. The soul doesn't have a gender, the soul doesn't have a nationality. The soul doesn't have any of those things. So let's say I identify with it and then. And then I lose power because I'm identifying with what's happening in the movie. Like if, like, let's say Superman or Batman or anyone, right? Those amazing superhero costumes they wear. So in the movie, they're wearing the costume and they go out of the movie and then they still wear the costume. And if they're still wearing the costume and they're still acting like Batman or Superman, people will think they're crazy because they're totally aware that in the movie, that is Superman. In the movie, I'm Batman. But outside of the movie, whoever, I'm Christopher Reeves or whoever, right? And so I am this person. So we need to understand ourselves outside the movie. If we understand ourselves outside the movie, then I understand the power I have. I understand how much power I have. If I'm identifying with the movie and with everything that's going on in the movie, then I lose power, right?
• 12:11
  Speaker A: Yeah. This is, this is the key thing, to be aware. And we do this without meaning to. We, we, we're watching a movie. It even happens in movies on purpose, right? So we watch a movie and we get caught up in the movie. That's what they're for, and they're designed to do that. So you sit there and you identify with the characters. You can go to a movie with where the main character is different gender than you and you can still identify with it. You can even identify cartoons, right? There are movies where they're not even real. They might be like these SpongeBob or these strange blobs, and they have little faces on. You can still identify with them. So we have the capacity to identify with pretty much anything. Like, if I was to get this cup and draw a little smiley face, Smiley Smith under some eyes and start talking, and I, if you were to watch me, this cup, talking long enough, you'd start thinking, oh, how's the cup? And then if the cup smashed, loads of people would get upset about it. If this had, like, millions of followers. So we can identify with, with anything, pretty much. And, and the more we all invest in the movie, then when it, when it oscillates or it ends or something changes or whatever happens, we get deeply disturbed about it. And then we all, our power comes out from our soul, from our self out into this thing, and then we have these major problems emotionally. Whereas, you know, it's like, interesting example of this is when, let's say, someone I know personally died, right? I might have a reaction to that personally because I know them and I miss them, right? They're not there. If someone else doesn't know the person and they're like, oh, you know, my uncle died. They're like, it doesn't have any emotional effect on them at all. So they don't even know who I'm talking about. Right. So how come they're not upset? Right? Why are they not upset? Because they don't identify with the person. That's the reason that there's no, there's no connection there. So that's something to be aware of. If we didn't identify with things, we wouldn't have that emotional reaction to anything in our own life, you know?
• 14:22
  Speaker B: You know, it's interesting, you bringing about death and all of that. However spiritual you are, right? If someone close to you dies, you do miss them.
• 14:32
  Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, because you miss the soul.
• 14:33
  Speaker B: Because I don't care how many years of practice you're doing, how many years, whatever, right? You do miss them. And. But of course, you move on and you get over it and everything. The thing I feel about power, right? It's not just the movie, it's other body conscious things. Body consciousness is not that the body has consciousness. Body consciousness is the soul thinks it's the body or one of the labels of the body. And so how do I give away power is when I'm in body consciousness, whether I'm thinking I'm the body or one of the labels, like labels could be I'm beautiful or I'm ugly or I'm young or I'm old or I'm female or indian or american or, you know, Biden supporter, Trump supporter, whatever, right? Democrat, Republican, whatever, right? So all of these body conscious, RFK. So all of these body conscious things have certain weight. When I am identifying with them, there's a certain weight to it. So what happens is, let's say if I'm body conscious and if I think I am really smart, right? I think I am a smart person. I'm intelligent, fabulously intelligent. And Michael comes along and says, sherene, you're an idiot. What happens then is him saying I'm an idiot is not a bad thing in the nets of, in of itself, right? Me taking that and taking it very personally and wanting to retaliate, that is when I'm giving away power. Because Michael could say, you're an idiot to, let's say, someone who's very spiritual, like Dadi Janki, right? She's not going to take it. She'll be like, whatever. But let's say I take it personally. Then obviously the person who's saying it is not the problem. The person taking it decides what happens. The person is being said to decides what happens. If something is happening to me, I can decide what happens. I have a choice. And that choice, giving away my choice, not knowing that I have choices and giving away my choices. Choice on how I respond, what I do, what I think afterwards, what I say afterwards, everything that is giving away your power. Because I'm not using my choices.
• 17:18
  Speaker A: Absolutely.
• 17:20
  Speaker B: We all have a choice. In every situation. We have a choice. What we are going to think, how soon, in any situation. My number one question to myself is how soon can I stop thinking about this? That is my number one question. If I can stop thinking about it in a second. I have absolute amazing power. If I keep thinking, if I keep obsessing, the more I obsess, the more I'm giving away my power.
• 17:48
  Speaker A: That's right. So the more we obsess about things, the more we invest in the drama, the more upset we get and the.
• 18:03
  Speaker B: More we are giving away our power.
• 18:05
  Speaker A: Happens all the time.
• 18:06
  Speaker B: Unconsciously, it happens all the time. You want to know who's the most powerful person in the room? When you walk into a room, who's the most powerful person you think, the one who is the quietest, the one who's the most still, one who's not reacting. Whatever is going on, there's no reaction. And people might think, oh, but that's boring. But no, it's not. Did we try it? Before we say it's boring, we should try this state of mind, this awareness of being completely still, because that's where the power is.
• 18:44
  Speaker A: The one who doesn't need anything is where the power is, isn't it? They're not like, oh, I need to make this person like me and this person like me, and I need to get this thing, I need to get that thing, you know? I mean, I've noticed in myself that whenever I feel I need to do something, I have to do this, have to do this, have to finish this, have to check, then I'm giving away power. And it also feels terrible, doesn't it? It feels emotionally disturbing, what I'm basically saying internally. I did actually a group before this session, and I said to everyone, write down what are all the things that you think you have to change in your life in order to be happy. Right. And like, you know, the usual list. I need to do more exercise, move to a different place, you know, be in a different relationship, blah, blah, make a certain amount of money, blah, blah, blah. So we often have this list in the back of our head that we haven't really thought about. Only when I this, this and this and this and this and this and this and this changes can I finally be happy. And what that means is I'm suppressing my joy now because I'm not letting myself be happy until everything has changed. And it might not happen. That's the thing. Or it might happen in ten years. So what am I doing? I'm just putting off enjoying my, the now for something that may never occur. And even if it does, who say it's going to make me happy anyway?
• 20:17
  Speaker B: So do you think our desires, having all of these desires, is giving away power.
• 20:22
  Speaker A: I think if we need. If we need them desperately, it's definitely giving away power. If we hold an intention, if I say I intend to do this thing for the highest good, but I don't need it, that's different. But if I'm like, I have to, I have to, I have to, then it's just a disaster.
• 20:43
  Speaker B: Right? I was thinking also of all of the different ways that I can receive power. Yes, we can give away power with all of these things. But how can I receive power? One way is. It might sound simple, but it's very powerful. Practice is you separate. The soul separates from the body. Separation. Spiritually separating yourself from physical things. Right? It's not actually the soul leaves the body, but with awareness. Right? With awareness, you separate from the body. You see yourself distinct from the body. You see yourself animating the body. You see yourself moving the body. You see yourself doing all of those things. But you're not the body. You see yourself separate from the body. That gives a lot of power to the soul. Another thing that gives a lot of power is what you were talking about. This awareness of the character. This separation of the character. That when I separate the soul from character, Persona. Shireen. Right. That gives a lot of power. It's amazing how much power you feel. Even for five minutes. You see yourself as an eternal soul and not this Persona. There's so much power. The soul feels.
• 22:10
  Speaker A: Yes. Massive power. Because what we're doing is we're retrieving power that was lost. Because it's like we have a certain amount of energy and it's being sucked out of us into this drama of life. So when we detach from the body, we're bringing a lot of it back and then detach from the character. We're bringing more of it back. And then it all comes back into the light, doesn't it?
• 22:32
  Speaker B: There is a hindi phrase which says Smriti and Samarti. Smriti is awareness and Samarti is power. So when there is the right awareness, there is power. And this is spiritual power. And so first is you separate yourself from the body. You separate yourself from the character. Then you receive a lot of power. But even having the right awareness. Right. The first awareness you were talking about is the awareness that this is a drama. This is a movie. There's a movie going on. And I'm an actor in the movie. And whatever happens in the movie is not real. I have to go home because this is just a costume. And I'm just an actor in this movie. But my real home is somewhere else, right? And I have to go home. That awareness. Right? Just that awareness. My real home is somewhere else. I'm a soul. I'm just visiting this planet. I'm a guest in this planet. That awareness gives so much power. Smriti and Samarthi, that awareness is amazingly powerful.
• 23:39
  Speaker A: It's. It really is. It's so. It's a huge relief as well, because it's. If we think we're these people in these bodies, you know, like, stuck here on this planet, we're basically teetering on the edge of, you know, death and, you know, and terrible things potentially all the time, even though. Even though it doesn't happen in our life, but, like, the potential for someone to say something we don't like or something that's happened we don't like or things to go wrong, there's always that possibility of something being destabilized. But if we're a guest, then it feels completely different, doesn't it? Completely. Like, I'm a guest in this house physically. So I don't. I have a different feeling about being here than I do my. My own house, which isn't really my house anyway, but it's like a very light feeling, isn't it, when you go somewhere temporarily and you leave, and we.
• 24:42
  Speaker B: Can bring so much power, you can.
• 24:43
  Speaker A: Bring that feeling in our regular day, that feeling of being. And the practice is to go beyond and then to come back. You know, this is to go into the light. Imagine leaving everything behind, going into that infinite light with the guard up there in this beyond, and then come back and then go beyond and then come back. Like a drill. You leave and you come back. Leave, and you come back. This is one of the advanced practices that we learn in Raj yoga meditation. Go beyond, come back, go beyond, come back. Because then it kind of unsticks us from the movie.
• 25:25
  Speaker B: Absolutely. I was thinking, you know, this might sound counterintuitive, but in my own life, I found just to remember, I'm light, I'm weightless, I'm eternal. I do that practice enough times, right? I just see myself as light, a being of light. I see myself as weightless. I see myself as eternal. I feel so much power. I remember a time I was at work one time, and I was having such a hard time. Everything that could go wrong in relationships and work, they were going wrong, right? There were deadlines. My boss wasn't happy with me. Things were happening in the center, which I had to take care of, and I was just so stressed out, so stressed. Out, right? And then. And I had, like, so many things to do. So that morning, I went into. Into work, and I thought, you know, it can all wait. Let me just do this practice. And so I started typing this sentence. I did several of these practices several times, but this time, this sentence. So I'm soul, I'm light, I'm weightless, I'm eternal. Right? Soul, light, weightless, eternal. I just started typing, and every time I typed the sentence, I would remember, I'm a soul, I'm weightless, I'm light, I'm eternal. Right? By the time I got to about 25 or 30 of those practices, like, the repetition practice, it was amazing. Amazing how powerful I felt. How I felt. You know what the power came in in the form of, I can do this. I can manage. I can take care of this. It'll all work out. I don't need to worry about all of these things right now. Even though it felt like that immediately, right. These were. Things were happening. I really felt I could do it.
• 27:34
  Speaker A: That's beautiful. What a great story. So that's something that everyone listening can practice as well. How so you just tell us a little bit more what you did. You just wrote it down. And how did you practice it?
• 27:46
  Speaker B: Wrote it down and practiced it. Right. Interesting, because I was really practicing being light and weightless, and you would associate power with, let's say, like, really abs, a lot of weightlifting, and, you know, a lot of muscles and all of that. Right. Just by remembering I'm light and weightless and eternal, it was so much power, and it's a different kind of a power. It's a different. It's a power that you feel you can do things, you can handle things. I can manage everything. Be fine. Right? You're not stressed. You feel that this is okay. It'll all be fine. That kind of power came over me.
• 28:29
  Speaker A: Yeah. Because you experienced yourself separate from it. Like, you're this being beyond with light and energy. And this drama is something that it's like you don't have to. What it comes down to is our need to feel good isn't based on the drama. That that's the. The essence of what we're trying to say here is that we experience a state of internal satisfaction and freedom from a source that isn't the movie. It's beyond the movie. So we're all right anyway. And then we think, well, this is. Let me just do this stuff, but I don't need it in order to feel good. That's. That's the big shift, isn't it?
• 29:13
  Speaker B: Right, right. You know, that's the whole worldview, right? About inside out and outside in. Inside out is I'm really feeling wonderful inside. I practice this, I'm waitless, I'm light, I'm eternal, and I'm just great. Right. And then you see all kinds of things shift. Outside. That's inside out. Outside in is my relationship is okay, then I'm fine. If my health is okay, I'm fine. The soul is fine. If my job is okay, either soul is fine. If this is okay, you know, if I have chai, latte, mocha, whatever, whatever, right. Then I'm fine. And if they don't have it, then I'm not fine. So that is outside in instead of inside out. And so if everything outside is okay, then I'll be fine inside. And then if it's not, let me rearrange it. Exactly. So. Right. And that is when we really give away power. This outside in worldview takes so much of our power away.
• 30:22
  Speaker A: Yeah. And the problem is, it can't be sustained. I was talking about this earlier today, that in America, I mean, I love America. I think it's a fascinating country. So in America, the chances of you getting everything the way you like it is fairly high, actually, because there's so many ways of getting. Do you know what I mean? Because there's every product, every product you can imagine at your fingertips, you know, as long as you got money, you can just like. So we can sort of arrange our life in America within a certain threshold fairly well, but even still, it can't be sustained. Like, Covid came along, and everyone was completely freaked out because they. All the stuff that everyone's used to is just taken out all of a sudden. You know, we can say everything's fine and we can maintain it to a certain point, but we can't control everything, and then it starts to fall apart. So we need to go. We need to get on nourishment from this soul and from receiving divine power, God's power, spiritual energy. Otherwise, we're going to be upset. So there it is. Shereen's put her glasses on, so it looks like we're looking for a blessing. There we go.
• 31:37
  Speaker B: Harmony. I will keep harmony by keeping a bead in my mouth. Harmony. You want to hear harmony?
• 31:46
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 31:49
  Speaker B: You see each person's place in the melody of life, weaving together a harmonious song. Stress fades away, and unity takes hold. Your heart brims with love. You forgive without hesitation, and compassion guides all judgment.
• 32:12
  Speaker A: That's beautiful. Thank you. So this is a very deep topic. It's easier said than done, of course, especially if we sick or something happens physically and we're in pain then this is harder to practice. But, but we have this opportunity every day, don't we? To how much power am I giving away to my desires and how much can we bring it back to myself, to ourselves? That's the, that's the daily choice again and again and again. Yay. Thank you. Shereen, any final thoughts?
• 32:53
  Speaker B: Thank you Michael. Always a pleasure being here with you.
• 32:57
  Speaker A: Thank you and thank you everyone for watching. If you know anyone else who would benefit from this feel free to share it with them. And we have free courses and trainings that you can get completely free. No upsells, just we want to help you out so you can check them out in the description and see you in the next session. Lots of love. Thank you.
• 33:25
  Speaker B: Am Shanti.