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Empress Energy:
Extending Our Influence Out Into the World
by ©Donna Henes |
The
Queen is a mature woman who has conquered the challenges in
Her life and claimed Her own royal power. She cuts through
fear and ambivalence, takes charge, and establishes Herself
as the sole ruler of Her Self. She has struggled for Her transformation
and has achieved it. Her proud potency is palpable, Her authenticity
uncontested. Her life now takes on a new ease, a grace, a
certain lightness of being born of Her Self-knowing, Self-respecting,
Self-directing, Self-projecting passion and purpose. She sails
ahead on Her own steam, cutting efficiently through seas that
are sometimes smooth as glass, sometimes choppy and fraught
with danger. Her age and vast experience is Her ballast. She
keeps Her center, come what may.
But something else remarkable takes places once the Queen
has stepped into Her sovereignty. Now that Her situations
and systems are established, Her life in working order and
running more smoothly, the Queen can afford to enlarge the
territory and expand the horizons of Her interests and influence
and extend the parameters of Her physical, mental, emotional,
and spiritual domain. Now that She is firmly rooted in Her
best Self and acting for Her own benefit, She is free to reach
out in ever increasing concentric circles and offer Her compassion,
expertise, time, and money to people and causes that call
to Her sense of response-ability.
Maturity brings with it the understanding that everything
is not about us, that the world does not revolve around our
personal story, that we do not exist in a vacuum, and that
all those other people out there actually have lives of their
own and are not simply extras in our movie. Life and living
have shown the Queen the value of community, cooperation,
concern, care, and communion. "Life is the only real counselor,"
Edith Wharton suggested, "wisdom unfiltered through personal
experience does not become a part of the moral tissue." Knowing
Herself to be an inextricable, integral part of a greater
whole, Her ministrations multiply to include the welfare of
the entire world around her.
When the Queen assumes Her authority in the ever-greater realms
of responsibility and takes it upon Herself to right the wrongs
of the world, She ascends to a higher plateau of power. The
Empress is the Queen writ large, the level of intensity of
Her royal engagement exponentially expanded. Model monarch
that She is, the Queen-become-Empress, operates from the deep
and mighty reserves of Her own personal power and wisdom,
wrought through Her dedicated willingness and ability to change,
to always, always, change. She is committed to exploring,
confronting, and enriching the undeveloped and underutilized
parts of her body, mind, heart, and soul. By working to connect
all of the constituent dots of Her many parts, the Queen is
constantly becoming ever more of Whom She truly is —
Her Highest Self, Her Extreme Royal Highness, the Empress.
Today, just as the cumulative damage to our Earth is reaching
a perilous point of no return and our entire natural and cultural
environment is in the throes of dangerous disconnection and
dis-ease, we wise, mature, accomplished women are called upon
to step up to the challenge and ascend the throne of conscious,
conscientious leadership. It is incumbent upon us to use our
considerable Queenly power in whatever way seems appropriate
to our individual skills and involvements, to stem the tide
of unthinking aggression that can drown us all. In the same
way that it was up to us, and only us, to redeem and transform
our own lives, our own Selves, we need to grab the reigns
and redirect and correct the negative and harmful conditions
that exist in our community, our society, and our planet.
Rachel Carson, an Empress of the highest order, warned us,
"We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads
in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair.
The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy,
a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed,
but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road —
the one "less traveled by" — offers our last, our only
chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation
of the earth."
In the same way we Queen Empresses strive to create change
for our selves, we can work to effect positive, sane, humane,
and sustainable change for the greater good of all. The future
we envision starts now, today. And the buck stops here, too,
with each of us. To paraphrase Gandhi, we must be the future
we wish to see. What we seed is what we get. Positive change
need not be earth shaking or dramatic. It can be quite personal,
subtle, and quiet, yet it does need to be rooted in positive
intention and grown organically with great care and attention
to the purity of the process. The ends do not — cannot
— justify the means, because the means have a nasty
way of becoming the end in the end. All we mortals ever have,
from moment to moment, is the means. It is our ways and means
of thinking and acting that justify our lives.
The chief dispenser of order, measure, justice, and right
relationship in all realms, the Queen's rule is informed by
Her keen holistic perspective, as well as the promptings of
Her own intuitions. She holds the vision of a world community
that is more inclusive, creative, joyful, respectful, and
reverential. As She seeks to use the full force of Her personal
power as an agent for positive change, the Empress does not
turn away from imperfection, nor avert Her gaze from the gruesome
details of life. She opens Her eyes as well as Her ears —
even wider in order to witness, to learn, to help, and to
heal. Her heart, too, is now open, secure in the knowledge
that She can rely safely upon Her instincts and abilities.
Her past losses and pain have taught the Empress Queen to
recognize the signs of pain and loss in others — a language
She speaks thoroughly. Comprehending their need, She reaches
out to them in sympathy, empathy, advocacy, succor, and support.
Nor does She shrink from Her responsibilities to protect and
preserve the very forces of life. The Empress opens Her mouth,
as well, and speaks boldly Her truth with conviction and compassion
that commands respect and response.
It is a big world out there and the plights and problems of
humankind can seem insurmountable, impossible to change, but
the Empress Queen knows all about change. Has She not been
through the rapids of menopause, The Change, and come out
the other side, altered forever, stronger and smarter by far?
A Queen of Her own making, She has certainly changed and is
still changing, is committed to continually change, and therefore,
She knows that through effort, patience, and persistence,
things can and do improve, that all things are possible. She
is the living proof. The Empress does not bite Her tongue
nor does She withhold Her views. She makes Her beliefs perfectly
clear, assumes full response-ability for them, and then takes
action to effect change for the betterment of all.
Personally, I do not think that it is a coincidence that just
as the earth teeters on the very brink of destruction, there
comes along a generation of fiery, accomplished, clever, ambitious
women at the height of our supremacy to whip it back into
shape. And the sheer enormity of our numbers means that we
can actually be the critical mass necessary to make a real
and lasting difference. Let us harness our impressive Empress
Energy: our purity of purpose, our passion, our heartfelt
compassion, and our enormous power, and let us direct it toward
creating a safe, sublime, and peaceful world for us all. The
future is in our very capable hands.
If the first woman God ever made
was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone,
together women ought to be able to turn it rightside up
again.
—Sojourner Truth
American abolitionist and U.S. General
(1797-1883)
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