Reclaim the Sovereignty of Your Soul

A friend reintroduced me to this word sovereignty recently, something I hadn’t really associated with much aside of the Royal Family as I was growing up. However she was using it in the context of our self-rule, our freedom to make our own choices.
I really like this because for too long I gave away my choices to others, making the necessary choices I had to make as a young child dependent on the adults around me for support and survival, instead of honoring the choices that felt right for me. This, as it does for most of us, become the way I operated in the world. Rules became something I automatically adhered to; deference to authority was a mark of respect.

Even those around me that I saw rebel in many ways, still carried far more deference to the power outside themselves than the power within than they recognised. Those early years of punishment and reward for desirable and undesirable behaviour leave their marks subconsciously on our sense of self acceptance.

As I commented to someone yesterday, we all swim in a soup of early trauma, whether consciously or unconsciously. There are very few people in this world who operate in clear line of sight and complete connection to their authentic selves. 

However, that decision to clear the clutter from the path, to regain sight of who we truly are, is completely within our control and it’s been my driving mission now for a good few years. When I birthed my children, I thought about what kind of parent I wanted to be and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I passionately want them to be free to be who they are.

Note that passion does not translate to being free to run amok and do as they like. I’m talking about freedom of expression, and freedom to become consciously aware of the authentic self, rather than one swathed in the shroud of everyone else’s beliefs and desires.

That passion was something I recognised when I was listening to a podcast of Tami Simon interviewing Dr Tererai Trent last week. Dr Trent has an amazing story, having been born into an oppressive colonial society in rural Zimbabwe only a few years before I was born. The oppression that she endured in her circumstances separated us by more than just distance, but the passion she felt united us.

Tererai came from generations of women silenced because of their gender. Held back from even the most basic education, which was her greatest desire, she was instead married off young in exchange for a cow. Yet her remarkable story about how she chased (and claimed) her dream is among the most moving I have heard in a while.

In the process of pursuing her dreams there were desperate times, times when she wasn’t even able to feed her children, times when she wanted to give up and go home. When asked why she didn’t she said simply “I didn’t want to pass on the baton (of women silenced because of their gender) to my daughters.” It brought tears to my eyes.

Her journey and her baton are quite different to mine, but the burning desire for oppression to end is the same.My journey is also one of liberation, reclaiming the sovereignty of my true self and preserving that of my children, at least within their own home.  The baton is painful to hold onto because, having embarked on the journey to authenticity, I can attest that all the while the same neurons still fire as they learned to in childhood, so the same thought patterns play out.

The anxiety we feel as parents in response to our children’s negative reactions, is the same anxiety we felt as a result our own parent’s reactions. We therefore feel a pull to react as our parent’s reacted “obey me or else”. But I will keep a hold of that baton until it turns to dust as each fragmented part of me becomes integrated.

It’s a challenge being confronted by children who have all these big feelings and are learning to express them in a world that is still controlled by the adults around them. Like last weekend my daughter was asked to sit up at the kitchen bench to eat her cornflakes. But it was the straw that broke the camel’s back after a tiring week at school, her reaction was nothing short of instant and unadulterated rage.

She screamed, roared and yelled so sincerely any passerby would be forgiven for thinking this was a life and death play for the sovereignty of her soul, which she obviously felt it was, rather than a request to sit at the kitchen bench while eating. Any attempt at saying anything was like adding fuel to the raging inferno, her rational mind gone as she looked around for things to destroy, including the source of her throttle, me.

As I stood there in that impossible moment between past and future, every fibre within me wanting to react strongly to this little girl’s fury, matching fire with fire, I did not. Instead I let out the energy of my frustration with a guttural scream and withdrew.In that instant, Dr Gabor Maté’s words were never so true. “It is often not our children’s behaviour, but our inability to tolerate their negative responses that creates difficulties. The only thing the parent needs to gain control over is our own anxiety and lack of self control.”

In frustration I inwardly wished I had never embarked on this journey with my kids, I wished the kids just did as they were darn well told. The thoughts that accompanied it were the same thoughts I heard my own mother express, a jabbering chunter about ungrateful kids who were acting maliciously.

Then Dr Tererai Trent came to my mind “I did not want to pass on the baton to my daughters” and gave me the strength and clarity I needed in that moment to not react to fire with fire, instead I held still and observed as that fire, bereft of fuel, burned out.My purpose in life could not be clearer. Just as Dr Trent is now building schools in Zimbabwe that allow all the local children to attend, giving girls access to education, I am on a mission to reclaim the sovereignty of my soul, and my children’s and help others do the same.

Regardless of the constraints we find upon us, allow them to fuel your passion towards your own authenticity,
the reclaiming of your true self. For it is that person who came to live in this world, and that person we need to create a more authentic world to live in.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Looking Back to See the Clues to Your Destiny and  Build a Healthy Self Concept. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.