Coming from the tough love school of spiritual counseling as I do, I feel that it is only fair to warn you, there are no 10 easy steps to sovereignty.

The roads leading to Queendom are diverse and many. The way to Self-esteem can be complicated and long. Each woman must take her own path, make her own trail, clear a passage for herself through the thick brambles that reach up to trip her. What roads do exist are unmapped, bumpy, and full of potholes, tumbleweed, and road-kill. There are no shortcuts along the Queen's Highway, no services, no shoulders, no signage, but many detours and cul-du-sacs. And the fare can be exorbitant.

As Dear Abby, Abigail Van Buren, once noted, "If we could sell our experiences for what they cost us, we'd be millionaires." Like any grand journey, the trip toward self-dominion requires stamina, determination, and the passionate desire to travel. But if we pack properly, check our tires frequently, and take time for picnics, the adventure is incomparable. And the destination of Self- empowerment is majestic.

The Queen chooses to engage Her Self despite difficulties.

Our Queenly assignment, should we choose to accept it, is to identify, understand, and connect all the component parts of our Selves, to attempt to develop and balance them equally, and to maintain them all in good working order. The Self is like a jigsaw puzzle or a quilt that promises to become a beautiful whole if we spend the necessary time and concentration to assemble it. It is at once the puzzle, the parts of the puzzle, and also, most importantly, the process of piecing them together. The ideal of the Queen inspires us to design the artful patchwork of our own lives designed from the wild and wonderful patterns of our own personality and experiences, and crafted from our individual inner authority. Once we do, we are able to shift into a new stage of life, a new state of being,
a renaissance rebirth, ready to rule.

The Self is the seat of sovereignty of the Queen. It is Her throne and Her domain, at once Her base of power and Her field of operation. Stepping into our sovereignty involves an almost alchemical process of adding, extracting, refining, combining, and recombining the myriad elements that make up all of our parts in the constantly evolving effort of perfecting the power of our best Selves. The holy elixir that we seek is the transformation of the painful, rejected, neglected, wounded, unsatisfied, unsatisfactory parts of the Self, into the unified, organized, energized, golden glory and grace of the fulfilled Queen. It is through our sincere and complete participation in this process that we learn how to recognize, claim, and proclaim our own true power. The power of the fully engaged Self.

There are no rules, no recipes, no prescriptions, no instruction manuals, no precise formulas to follow when it comes to pursuing the daunting process of Stepping into Sovereignty. This does not, however, mean that anything goes. Just as in life, itself everything counts. Every single solitary thing that we do or don't do, think or don't think, matters. This is the bottom line of our responsibility — to ourselves and to others. Our intentions have to be perfectly pure and our attention to the details of our process has to be focused and disciplined, and in exact alignment with our intentions. The quality of our engagement needs to be really right, not according to the standards of anyone else, but only according to our own inner truth.

Clearly, the purity of our Intention and Attention assures that there can be no cheating or cutting of corners in our search for inner wisdom and power. What would be the point? We would only be short-changing ourselves. When we commit to engaging in the process of our own transformation, the search for our inner wisdom, the development of our self-esteem, the elevation of our status and standing, we are consciously choosing to accept total cause and effect accountability for our own lives and living. And since the decision to pursue our personal sovereignty is ours and ours alone, made with clear Intention and without outside direction or duress, we must own our process. Our Attention, our outlook, our approach, and our procedure must be unimpeachable, our attitude positively impeccable.