This is Inner Work, a spiritual growth podcast, a place to explore spiritual concepts, tools, and practices to deepen your healing and awakening. I'm your host, Josephine Hartman, a certified intuitive healer and Akashik Records practitioner and teacher.

I'm honored that you're here and happy to serve as a guide and companion on your path for a little while.

To learn more about how to work with me one-on-one or through my courses, please visit josephinehartman.com.

Hello, my friend, and welcome to this episode of Awakening. Today we're posing a really important question. Are there any

ways in which you are giving your power away to others? And if yes, how can you start taking that power

back? I'm addressing this topic as a response to a listener named Sarah, who recently wrote in,

and this is what Sarah had to say in her own words.

Letting go is so simple and natural and mind-blowing every time you actually do it,

but man, it's such a trip getting there.

I think I've been hardwired to hand my power

and decision making over to others as if I'm not capable of making the right decision or maybe out

of fear without even realizing that is what I've been doing. So that's the end of her email to me. And I wanted to explore this topic

with you on the podcast because it's such a common experience, I think, to hand our power over to

others, to diminish our power, our light, our creativity, our uniqueness. I agree with Sarah that we often do this

out of fear, including the fear that if we take full ownership of our power, we will somehow

misuse it or make the wrong decisions or make some awful mistake that we won't be able to correct or get

out of. Because when you are standing fully in your power, in your truth, then you are responsible

for your life. You're responsible not only for your life choices, but also how those choices affect other people. And sometimes, you're not only for your life choices, but also how those choices affect other people.

And sometimes it feels easier and safer consciously or unconsciously to have someone else

make those decisions for you, to have someone else to blame if things go wrong, to have someone else orchestrating or creating

your life for you. I want us to have a lot of compassion and love and tenderness for ourselves

as we explore this, because truly this is a very common thing that we do as humans,

...