Card #56 – Inner Independence

Grounding yourself by finding your center.

According to the I Ching, you have only one obligation in life — to get your relationship with yourself right. Do that, and your relations to others, sex, time, money, power, food, body, career, society, the cosmos, etc., will all be as good as outer conditions allow. Omit, distort, or neglect any part of your relationship with yourself, and all those other relationships are accordingly skewed, diminished, or lost. Working toward the empowered stance of inner independence and androgynous inner wholeness makes you as effective as possible in the outer world. For example, suppose you are a martial artist trying to survive an attack by multiple assailants. In that case, your primary responsibility is managing your relationship with your body and its movement through space and time. Mastering your relationship with your body gives you the maximum chance of defending yourself from the attackers’ bodies. Any flaws in your relationship with your body diminish your chances of surviving the attack.

Yes, we are all interdependent in many ways, and it can be fascinating and fulfilling to be with others, but we must also be inwardly independent and disentangle our emotional/psychological/spiritual equilibria from the instabilities of the outer world.

Find the peace and power of staying inside your circle of influence. The center of your circle of influence is you, especially your psyche, the one sovereign domain where you can be sure of having influence. Unless you are paralyzed, the movements of your body are also within your circle of influence. But even if you are a gifted athlete, the movements of your body must operate within relatively narrow parameters of biomechanical possibility. For example, no matter how much you focus your will, you cannot run a two-minute mile. Your mind, however, has far broader parameters of possibility and is an incredibly powerful force inside your circle of influence.

According to Steven Covey, outside your circle of influence is your circle of concern. The circle of concern is everything you worry about. But much of what you worry about is outside your ability to take direct action. The circle of influence is what you can take direct action on or affect right now. The most effective people put their energy into their circle of influence and not so much into the circle of concern where they cannot take direct action.

The empowered stance of inner independence means that you recognize your inner wholeness and focus on life-affirming engagement within your circle of influence.

For more on the centrality of your relationship to yourself:
Casting Precious into the Cracks of Doom — Androgyny, Alchemy, Evolution and the One Ring

If romantic desires are compromising your inner independence read:

Lessons for an Entity Incarnating as a Mammal

See: Stop the Hottie!