The Four Acts of Power ™

For Transforming Your Life

C. Michael Smith, Ph.D. (Mikkal) © 2010

“The Great Spirit dwells in the heart of each creature, even the tiniest ant.”

                                             –Black Elk, Lakota Sioux Medicine Man

Based on the indigenous American wisdom concerning the psychology of the heart, I have created the ‘four acts of power” to show, as clearly as I can, how to walk a path of the heart that will help you transform your life. In this indigenous American view, the Great Spirit or Great Force of Life speaks to you in and through the embodied heart, which is at first physically sensed in the chest or middle of the body—where it is speaking in a concrete way that is at first pure feeling. This is like a felt-sense, it may be unclear at first, but it unceasingly seeks to direct your daily path and entire life, and if you listen and attend to it, it will open into clear vision or direction. As a natural guidance system [ interior GPS] we can ‘feel’ it draw us toward… or repel us away from… things, –helping us find and stay on the beam of its direction. It gives us the organismic sense of rightness or wrongness about something. To live in accord with this navigational system [GPS] is at the root of the shamanic path. It is a kind of following the ‘Tao’ of the heart, or the ‘bliss’ of which Joseph Campbell speaks. It is always speaking, but we aren’t always listening. The Four Acts of Power are intended to help you find this inward directing voice, listen to it, and rigorously follow its direction and inspiration. A soul retrieval is especially solid and lasting for an individual who in some sense lives from the heart—reconnecting to the existential center in this way is a reconnecting to ‘original self,’ and is thus the most fundamental level of soul retrieval work.

****

The First Act of Power is Listening to the Heart. It involves a skillful method for finding, and listening to the voice of the Spirit speaking through your heart.

Clearing a protected and safe space to go inside and listen, consult the heart, see what it wants for you at this time. This requires turning attention downward, beneath mind to sense inwardly into the middle of the body, where the core is physically, somatically sensed, and listening for an inspiration, a bit of intuitive guidance, a stirring of insight and imagination about something specific. Often we receive inspirartion or inner guidance in this way.

The Second Act of Power is to Honor this “voice” by considering it and imaginatively exploring ways you might possibly express it in the world.

Once something comes through the heart, you honor it by exploring it further with heart and mind in close relationship. You explore it in the ‘space of imagination’, seeking out possibilities and variations that can help you manifest it, or express it, or create it. It is an act of power to honor it in this way, seeking how you can express or manifest it in life. Once you can ‘see’ that this is what is really wanted or needed, and once you can see how it looks in imagination (yin aspect) you may then honor it with the decision to enact it in manifest reality, or in your inner life and relationships concretely (yang aspect).

The Third Act of Power is the actual concrete process of Making it Happen or skillfully manifesting it in the world.

Now that you have chosen to express the heart’s invitation, you use the mind to realistically sketch out and select the best plan, the prioritized action steps—order in priority– towards embodiment of it, and the resources needed. You identify potential obstacles and develop strategies for dealing with them. With some projects this will involve an actual physical blueprint or outline (accurately representing the yin aspect). Once the ‘blueprint’ or ‘outline’ and the plan are in place, you back it with intention, and proceed to enact it in a stepwise manner, until it is accomplished, manifested outwardly in the world (yang aspect). All along the way checking back with the heart/GPS to insure you are ‘on the beam’, and to see if something else is needed (e.g., a modification)—which can be sensed via ‘organismic rightness/wrongness.’ This repeated inward checking against the heart’s direction ‘protects’ what you are birthing, which brings up the fourth act of power.

The Fourth Act of Power is Protecting, and it must be present in all three power acts that we just described, so that the new vision and work has a chance to take root, live and become established in the world.

All along the way of the first three power acts the ‘fourth’ must be present. It occurs simultaneously with, or alongside, the other three. You protect by giving the heart more space (clearing a space to listen), and by honoring it through considering it in your imagination, exploring and finally deciding on the inspiration or invitation. You must continually check the project or thing you are manifesting each step along the way, against the heart’s felt-sense of it to insure that you follow the heart’s evolving guidance. It will update things as you advance along the path of embodying your project. You must not let the criticism of others, or their intended helpful ideas prematurely influence what the Spirit speaking through your heart wants, and You must protect against your own inner critic that will say “you can’t”, or “you are not ready”, or silently plant other seeds of doubt and so on. If you don’t protect it, the new project you are trying to create (whatever it is) may not happen or become firmly established.

Consider how a painter covers the canvas until the artwork is finished, or how the potter protects the clay with cheese-cloth from drying prematurely. Every organism, every cell has protective boundaries to support its life, and we need them in protecting the heart and its purposes. Most importantly, you must protect it from the Judge in your own mind, who will tell you aren’t good enough, or that you are too selfish, or that you aren’t ready and need something more. Just trust and honor what comes from the heart, the existential center of your being, through which the Great Spirit inspires and guides you. We are not talking about your emotional center, but your spiritual center. It knows you and knows what you must do to fulfill your life-purpose.

To live your life by making these power acts, in little things and big, in your daily walk and in whole life chapters, is to transform your life into joy, and wholeness, and the leaving of a beautiful legacy. *

Note: FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THIS TOPIC:

“The Four Acts of Power” will soon be available as a book. It is part of a series called “Psychoshamanism and the Medicine of the Heart.” There is much more to the heart than the Navigational System (pathfinder function) and the way the Four Acts of Power help you live from it. For more information, see my blog, ‘SIGNS OF HEART HEALTH AND HEART SICKNESS.”