Finding our way home to our Sacred Strength.

Embodied, assertive and fully here in your selfhood. Quality #1 of The True Self Series.

Sacred Strength.

What is your relationship like with anger? With your fire, raw energy and fullness?

Do you allow these qualities in you? Or somewhere along the way were they shut down, dismissed, demonised or made wrong?

In today’s newsletter we are exploring an aspect of the True Self that very often gets buried under conditioning, fear, and suppression.

The quality of Sacred Strength.

When I speak of Sacred Strength, I’m referring to that deep place within us that knows how to stand firm.

The wise unshakeable part that knows that;

I was born with power.
I am sovereign over my life.
I am here for myself.
I can listen, choose, act, and protect.
I can say no. I can say yes. And I will.
I am allowed to want.
I create what I need.
I move with purpose and clarity.
I get to choose what serves me.
I walk in freedom, rooted in my own truth.

It is the part of us that is the source of our internal strength.

It is about being embodied, assertive and fully here in your selfhood.

It helps us say;

I exist. I matter. I can stand my ground.

It is our ability to act, to draw boundaries, to direct our energy towards what matters. It is our healthy anger, along with our inner fire. It is about rootedness. Taking action from clarity and inner alignment with confidence in our capacity.

It is the birthplace of, and directs our action in the world.

In my practice, reclaiming healthy anger and healthy aggression, is one of the pathways I most often encounter, two qualities that are deeply misunderstood and widely suppressed in our culture. Especially in women. I’ve never worked with a woman who didn’t carry stored anger or who didn’t struggle to access her healthy fire. It is by far the one emotion that is hardest for people to feel.

And this is completely understandable.

Culturally anger is not an acceptable emotion. We fear and resist it.

And because we fear it, we either suppress it and deny our strength, deny our rights and live in the story that we are not good enough, or not enough. Or it comes out in a way that is distorted - as power ‘over’ others.

Across the globe we’ve seen the shadow side of power, anger and aggression. We’ve seen the ego side of people grasping at external means to bolster their sense of strength. Finding flaws in everything, looking for weakness in others, pulling people down, elevating themselves. Be, do and have more.

We’ve seen power distorted, used to harm and control.

What we often miss is that this kind of distortion and destruction, this power ‘over’ others, is not the result of too much power as we might think, but the result of powerlessness that has been suppressed for so long that it comes out distorted, in its equal and exact opposite.

Powerlessness that arrives when our Sacred Strength is suppressed or shut down. When we learned that being strong, bold, assertive or simply being real, came with a cost.

Sacred Strength becomes suppressed if as children we were:

• Punished or shamed for speaking up

• Made to feel too much or too intense

• Conditioned to prioritise other’s needs - to fawn, appease and stay small, quiet and accommodating

• Experienced attachment ruptures (neglect, emotional, physical, sexual abuse or unpredictability)

• Felt emotionally or physically unsafe in our environment

As young people we need love, safety and belonging for our survival, so we sacrifice our boundaries, our strength, power and our truth to receive and ensure that.

But in so doing, we lose our connection to this Sacred Strength. To the ability to rest into ourselves and belong to our own being.

It gets buried, under fawning, freezing or what we might call self-abandonment, (which is actually self-preservation and an intelligent survival response).

When we are conditioned in this way, two things usually happen:

• We become passive, compliant, over-accommodating. We fawn. We shrink and silence our truth to stay safe. The anger, aggression and sacred fire we have not expressed shows up as tension patterns in our muscles. We tighten our throat, lock our jaw, constrict our shoulders. Suppressing our aliveness and impacting our emotional, psychological and physical health.

• Or we swing the other way, seeking power ‘over’, becoming overly aggressive, reactive, even controlling, trying to reclaim a sense of power we never learned to hold in a healthy way.

But when we’re connected to our Sacred Strength, there’s clarity. There’s strength. There’s a deep knowing of who we are, what we want, and what we will or won’t accept.

Think of a moment when you’ve felt that unmistakable YES or NO in your body. That’s your Sacred Strength speaking.

From this place, we don’t collapse or overextend, we act from alignment.

We protect what matters.

We direct our life force with purpose.

And that same fire that fuels healthy anger also fuels passion. It’s the same energy. The same inner flame.

Anger, aggression, fire, passion and the strength that lives in our core is not something to be feared, but rather something to be welcomed. Harnessed. Channeled. Directed. Without this quality in its pure form, we collapse, we become passive and lifeless.

It is our life force.

I invite you to reflect on your relationship to this inner fire.

To your anger.
To your power.
To your fire.
To your passion.
To your boundaries, your own knowing and your voice.

A few journal prompts to explore:

• What’s my relationship to anger? Do I allow myself to feel it? Express it?

• How did my family or culture respond to anger growing up?

• Do I tend to suppress or over-express this fire?

• What boundaries am I afraid to set, and why?

• In what situations do I feel comfortable asserting myself, and where do I retreat?

• Where in my life do I long to pour my passion, my energy, my YES?

• Where do I hold back?

And what does all of this feel like in your body?

What does it feel like to allow it. And what does it feel like to hold it back.

Is there an expansion and the equal and opposite shrinking?

When we speak of reclaiming our Sacred Strength, we’re speaking of something far more primal and alive than an idea.

It is a felt sense, rooted deep in the body.

It's the quality we see in a small child reaching, moving, expressing its likes and dislikes without hesitation. Taking what it wants, rejecting what it doesn’t. This pure, animating force lives within all of us. But through trauma and conditioning, we’ve learned to suppress it, to disconnect from our own vitality.

The path back is not through the intellect, not through an idea of strength, but through the body, and the felt sense of it. Learning to allow its presence, to feel it’s fullness in us, it’s activation and let its intelligence and knowing direct our will.

This is why we work with the body. Through somatic work, as we return to the body, we return to the ground of our being and the home of our strength. It is a full body experience. We rediscover what it feels like to trust ourselves, to feel our healthy aggression, to feel anger in our body, to take up space, and to move toward what we desire from an inner rootedness. A bodying forth into what we want.

This is the heart of the work: to reclaim that which was buried and allow it to direct us.

This Sacred Strength is our birthright.

And in reconnecting with it, we find our way home.

We part the clouds and all that is untrue, reveal what is real within, and integrate the parts of us that were lost, abandoned or hidden to stay safe, returning back to our aliveness, our enough-ness and our right to exist in our fullness, just as we are.

This is Sacred Strength. This is YOU.

Please tell me, how did this newsletter move, touch or inspire you? How is your relationship with your Sacred Strength?

With love and a slow burn of inner fire,

Maraya Rae Rodostianos

PS. Next in this series is the quality of Tenderness + Truth; The home of vulnerability, tenderness and the intimacy of being real with yourself, and others.

Want to work with me? Connect with me here for a zero obligation, super casual chat about your needs.