I hope that one day you get to be someone's villain.
A few years ago, I was drinking tea with a teacher of mine, and I was telling her about an experience I'd had with a coach where I'd felt taken advantage of and manipulated.
I had felt disempowered by this woman, and in the eruption of our coaching relationship, lost a lot of self-confidence, and fell into a 6-month shame spiral.
I couldn't even let myself work with clients for a while because I was in such deep self-doubt about how I could have allowed myself to get into a situation where I wasn't in my power.
My teacher, looked at me, smiled, and said, "What a gift this woman gave you. I hope one day you'll be able to be a villain for someone else".
Her love for this woman, and desire for my own seeming defamation of character (by my own ego's standards of morality), blew my mind.
Through her words, I was able to realize how much of my power, intuition, creative impulse, and willingness to follow the spark of life, was being suppressed by my own fear of "causing harm". Of being wrong.
This is how we are taught to fear our own power.
We are taught to believe that other people are fragile beings, and that we must censor the truth that wishes to flow through us, because it might be more than another person can handle.
This doesn't mean that this gives us "permission" to intentionally cause harm or sadistically fuck with people.
If that's your thing, then go for it.
There is no right and wrong (as I mentioned), but there is vibration, like does attract like, and most likely your venom will come back around to bite you at some point in perfect timing.
What I'm instead speaking to here is that you cannot actually "do" anything to a person without their permission. Short of tying someone up, putting a gun to their head, or blackmailing them into doing your bidding...
You cannot violate someone in less they give you permission, which means, at a deeper level, they are violating themselves.
This is a time for us as a collective, AND, in many ways more importantly, as individuals to choose to embody our power.
It is a time to remember that another person's truth does not need to become our doctrine, simply because they speak it with conviction or a sparkly flair.
Whenever I enter into a new coaching container with a client, one of the first things I say to them is that I am going to let my impulse, my truth, and my power flow through me directly into you.
I am not attached to being right, but I am devoted to allowing that which feels true in the moment to flow through me, because I trust that even if my insight is "off", me being off is actually what is in service of you claiming in that moment that you know yourself better than I do!
As a result, it is *essential* that the person I’m working with is willing to advocate for them self in the moment when something doesn’t land for them. It’s part of the alchemy of the container—dismantling imbalanced power dynamics that do not longer serve their liberation and expansion.
Everything is an opportunity for growth, for deeper intimacy with self, with other, with that universal energy that connects us all.
Every interaction with every human being is a divine opportunity to step more powerfully and vulnerably into the deep remembrance of who we truly are.
So I invite you, to allow yourself to be the villain in another person's reality. Allow yourself to say the thing that may just cause a cataclysm significant enough to beckon this person into truly facing themselves.
It is a gift. And I thank you in advance, for the reminder.
With Love,
Arielle Brown
Maleficent fan art by Amanda-Kihlstrom on @DeviantArt