Creativity and power

This week my heart is breaking at the suffering of so many innocent people in Palestine and Israel. I’m grateful for all the messages checking on my in-laws in Palestine. They're fine. For now.

The only way that I've found to witness atrocities without collapsing in despair is shadow work. While I can't do anything about the violence directly, I can do my part to make the world a more peaceful place by turning within to see where I might be acting out similar patterns of violence. As the alchemists (and Jung) say, "As above, so below".

For example, I notice my inner perfectionist sees my flaws and human fallibility as an existential threat to my safety and survival, and so feels justified in its harsh approach. While I'm not depriving 2.2 million people of electricity, food, water and fuel, the truth is my perfectionist is trying to starve into submission my vulnerability by withholding energy, attention, validation and compassion. That's where I can do the healing work that will build more inner peace.

So when I read the news, rather than get caught up in the us vs. them stories, I can let the pain of Palestinians and Israelis awaken me to--and take responsibility for--the suffering inside of me I may not have acknowledged before.

Also, I can have compassion for myself (and even for the aggressors on both sides of the conflict) because, as a species, we're imprisoned in a paradigm of power that is as pervasive as it is pernicious.

For the longest time, I treated power as a dirty word. As a child, there were moments when I felt disempowered. The pain of those interactions is seared into my soul. I never wanted to do that to someone else so I decided I wanted no part of power, thank you very much.

But, of course, we all have power. We don’t get to opt out of having it. In fact, if we don't use it consciously, it will only leak out in shadow forms like manipulation, passivity, gossip and withholding.

But is there another way to own our power without disempowering others?

By connecting with my creativity and through my PhD research I discovered a new way of thinking about and relating to power. 

So what is the old dominant story and what is the new emerging story?

Old paradigm: Power = power over

The “power over” story has several components:

  1. Power is about control of external resources. Land. Water. Minerals. Animals. Humans. Money. Guns. Budget. Headcount. Promotions. Decision-making authority or access to decision-makers. Status. Prestige. Awards. Friends. Attention. Likes. Views. Approval.

  2. Power is scarce. There is not enough to go around. The more you have, the less I have. So life becomes a zero sum game. A game with winners and losers. Victims and villains.

  3. The only way to avoid being a victim is to accumulate as many resources as we can. We've all experienced painful moments of someone abusing their power over us. And we're determined never to be victimized again, no matter what. So we hoard more and more and more, just to be sure.

  4. The point of power is to achieve comfort and convenience for ourselves and to prevent others from taking our power away. We use our power to exert control over the disempowered, to extract value from their resources and crush any resistance before it becomes a real threat.

We see this power dynamic play out at every level. Geopolitically, it’s the root of feudalism, colonialism, slavery, crony capitalism, fascism and patriarchy. In toxic organizations, we see leaders extracting every ounce of life energy from employees before spitting them out as burnt out shells of themselves. We see it in authoritative parenting which is convinced children need to be coerced into compliance if they are to be made into productive members of society. And we see it internally, in the tyrannical attitude of the inner slave master cracking the whip to force us to do something our soul rejects because we "should". So much unnecessary suffering!

This paradigm is a recipe for extreme power imbalances. Why do we tolerate such insane inequality? I think it’s partly because we believe the greater the gap between our power and “their” power, the safer we are. But the opposite is true. 

If your comfort comes at the cost of someone else’s suffering, the seeds of resistance are already sown. We see this cycle play out again and again throughout history. And we see it playing out today on the news. The only path to enduring peace is mutual empowerment, where the dignity of all people (and parts of our psyche) is sacrosanct.

I believe this old story is starting to crack. The suffering it causes is being brought out of shadow and into the headlines. We're also becoming increasingly aware of the cost of the "civil wars" within our own minds, highlighted in World Mental Health Day this past week.

So what is the alternative way of relating to power?

Emerging paradigm: Power = empowerment

In my research, I asked people what it meant to them to "feel creative". They said creativity is aliveness, freedom, autonomy. Pride at making something out of nothing. An expanded sense of self-efficacy, surprising themselves by what they could make. They described feeling resilient, trusting their creativity would help them come up with solutions no matter what problems arose.

Empowerment. (What academics call "psychological empowerment").

The "power as empowerment" paradigm has several components (as I see it):

  1. Power is about cultivating inner resources. Creativity is an inner resource. So are self-compassion, emotional intelligence, self-regulation, a growth mindset, love, joy, spirituality, grit, gratitude, wisdom. Our ability to respond to life’s challenges is 100% different depending on whether we have access to these inner resources or not.

  2. Inner resources are abundant. Not only are inner resources not zero sum, they are essentially unlimited. The more creativity I have says nothing about how much creativity you can have. If anything, creativity is contagious. The more I cultivate my creativity the more chance there is that I might encourage you to do the same, so it actually becomes a virtuous cycle. Amazing! As Dr. Maya Angelou said:

You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.

3. The point of power is to solve problems and empower others. When we exercise our creativity, we and others feel inspired, uplifted, enriched and expansive. We may also feel challenged and confronted, but that experience is typically in the service of our growth and evolution, i.e., the expansion of our capacity and increase in personal power. 

This "empowerment" paradigm is helping me experience a form of power that does not come at anyone else's expense. A form of power that is a win-win. And I notice that when I’m tapped into my own sense of empowerment, when I feel an abundance of inner resources, I’m less likely to need to exert power over others. I’m less likely to require others to be small for me to be big, or feel safe. 

From a place of empowerment, with access to my inner resources, I'm better positioned to wield the external resources I have--my voice, my money, my time-- to take action towards positive change without falling into the power over narrative.

I feel increasingly confident that creativity can point us to a new more generative story about what power can look like and what it is for. 

These ideas are very much evolving so I welcome any thoughts and reflections either in the comments or in direct messages.

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