NO ONE HAS AUTHORITY OVER YOU.
Period. Not even the cat in this photo.
Some people are more powerful. Some people SEE more deeply.
Some people are more wise. Some people know you better than you know yourself.
Some people are stronger and can overpower you.
Some people are genuinely trying to help you to address self-sabotage.
If you don’t listen to them, maybe you will self-sabotage.
Maybe you’ll waste your life away, spending years cycling through the exact same thoughts and recycled dilemma.
And yet, none of that innately means you should do anything anyone else says.
YOU are the facilitator of your experience.
You can hire others to facilitate your self-facilitation, always with an intent for more sustainable abilities between you and yourself.
Something I have seen a lot in working with people is the fear of being taken over by a spiritual teacher or therapist who is more powerful, potentially, who is viewed as an authority figure.
They are not ACTUALLY authority figures.
The LENS which gives them authority is (hopefully) exactly what they are there to help you to dial into and address.
However, the catch is that when YOU give your authority away habitually, this creates a rebellious tendency also inside of yourself to counteract the fawning..
This may be rebelling against the things that are actually good for you when you are in the “Student” role.
However, in a student/teacher relationship, even if one is more powerful or more experienced or more knowledgeable, there is still a fundamental equality that is necessary.
This essential equality being lost and forgotten is exactly what causes abuses of power, or fawning by a student.
Fawning by a student is one way that power is abused, even though it’s more subtle.
A student abuses their own power when they fawn to a teacher and when they do not stand up as the facilitator of their own experience.
And of course, there are plenty of teachers who encourage that fawning in obvious or subtle ways.
One way that students are geared up and ready to try to protect themselves is by rebelling.
They may or may not be rebelling against a teacher encouraging a power dynamic.
Even if a teacher is NOT encouraging a power dynamic, a student may be rebelling for fear that the teacher MAY be encouraging a power dynamic, and in doing so, they are actually rebelling against their OWN power.
A really helpful and healthy teacher/student relationship is where the teacher is simply reflecting back to the student a more powerful version of themselves.
If a student rebels against this, they are rebelling against making a good decision for themselves. This tendency keeps people stuck for YEARS.
It requires a massive trust to put faith in someone else’s intentions when all you’ve ever known is being taken advantage of.
Oftentimes, this rebellion is also what brings out the power dynamic from within a teacher’s unconsciousness, because the teacher is attempting to stand up for the students well being, but is doing so in rebellion against their own well-being, unconsciously.
A student who doesn’t trust themselves to have boundaries is going to be attracted to a teacher who will co-dependently have boundaries “for” them.
This is tricky stuff because it runs so deep and needs a lot of attention and transparency to make sure that these dynamics are not happening.
A rebellious student is in a fight or flight response.
A lazy student is in a freeze response.
A student giving their authority away is in a fawn response.
All of these traps can easily be rationalized because “it just doesn’t feel right” to do something new and different.
This is because NO trauma response feels right.
Staying put in the face of such a response is the ONLY way to get through. It’s on you to ensure you surround yourself with trustworthy people in the process.
