THE HEART OF POWER

I’ve spoken this before in recent months, but it bears repeating—because for many, it remains the hardest thing of all:

To stand tall within your own truth.

To speak—not with anger, or if you are to speak in anger, do it with love, with clarity—to the face of behavior that is out of alignment with the integrity of your own heart……….. how else will you ever be free?

There is a phrase that circles through the world like a chant—speaking truth to power.

And yet I have come to wonder: what is power, truly? And what truth do we think we’re speaking, if it has not passed through the long silence of the heart?

There is fear around this, always. The fear that in speaking truth, someone vital will be lost. That love will shatter. That belonging will vanish.

That we ourselves will dissolve into the consequence of the words we have dared to utter. But here is the deeper question— What are we actually preserving in our silence?

If it is fear… If it is false peace stitched from self-erasure… If it is the illusion that love requires our obedience to what wounds us— then we are not preserving life. We are preserving exile.

True power does not dominate, diminish, or deceive. It does not posture or punish. To hurt, to withhold, to manipulate—that is not power. That is a soul in hiding, a heart curled in upon itself. Power—real power—is the full extension of compassion into the world.

It is the slow unfolding of love in action. It moves through thought, through word, through deed, not as force, but as presence.

And so I say this:

You cannot speak truth to power if your words have not passed through the fire of the heart. If they have not been softened by grief, tempered by humility, baptized in silence— then they are not truth. They are noise.

Truth is not a weapon. It is a lamp. And it must be lit from within. The truth we are meant to speak does not rise from the mind’s argument, but from the soul’s remembering.

It is not something we construct—it is something we surrender to. To speak it is not to shout over others. It is to become still enough that the voice of the Heart can speak through us. Not to destroy, but to awaken. Not to defeat, but to reveal.

Yes, we may be misunderstood. Yes, we may be cast out from circles that prefer the comfort of silence. But we will know—oh, we will know—that we were faithful to the truth that lives in the marrow of the soul.

And that is all that will ever be asked of us: To become vessels of love so unshakable, so inwardly aligned, that even our trembling becomes a holy offering.

This is power.

This is truth.

And this—always—begins in the heart.