In May 2018, I started a series of blog posts on “Power.”  This post lists all the posts on power in sequential order.

I invite you to continue with me on a pilgrimage on exploring and discovering how power is showing up in our lives. In this series, we began with the invitation to begin a pilgrimage on power. Click on the live links below to access the previous articles.

We first addressed the power of identity and how it is fluid. We addressed how it relates to your social location. Although we come to the planet with a unique imprint, nature, or our core personality, we are shaped and influenced by nurture – they family we grew up in and our social location. For instance, an African American woman and her realities living here in the US are very different from those of an Aborigine woman from Australia, or a member of a European royal family, although there may be some overlap.

Then we addressed how our socialization addresses how we take in our social location. With our primary socialization of family, teachers and people we love and trust, we are informed on the expectations, norms, values, roles, and rules of society. These are based on core foundational attributes of “self-love, hope, self-esteem, balance, joy, support, security, spiritual base and authentic love of others” (Harro, 1982, The Cycle of Liberation). Our secondary socialization is reinforced by our institutions such as churches, schools, tv, the legal system, medicine, businesses.

We then addressed the power of culture. Our cultures shape us by mesmerizing us into a lull and we can end up living in a very small bubble and we end up numbing out on a “cultural treadmill” of life. We become unaware of things that are programming us like a computer. We end up not questioning the unconscious and conscious effect of cultural conditioning and we end up exerting dominance over others to get them to conform to our culture or show them our cultural superiority.

Then we moved into the power of naming and how it helps us temper the effects of our social location, socialization, and culture.

We then addressed the power of belonging and how it is a fundamental human need. There is an aspect of this word that speaks to equality and fitting in. Another way to think of this word is: “Where I find my equals.”