When Your Power Remembers Itself

I've been sitting with something lately.

You know how we give our power away? Not in some dramatic, obvious way. Quietly. Like dimming a light you didn't even know was bright.

Someone's energy shifts when you speak. A conversation goes cold when you enter. Laughter stops just a beat too long.

And instead of asking "What's wrong with them?"—we ask "What's wrong with me?"

I want to tell you about what happened to me last week. Because maybe you'll recognize something in it. Maybe it'll save you some of the wandering I did in the dark.

When Everything Contracts

I went to France expecting friendship. Warmth. The familiar rhythm of shared meals and easy laughter.

What I found was something I couldn't name at first.

A field of exclusion that made my chest contract. Made my voice shrink to a whisper. Their laughter carried a frequency that said you don't belong here. Their silences were surgical. Precise erasures of my presence.

For days, I twisted myself into shapes.

Softened my voice. Dimmed my energy. Made myself smaller.

The exhaustion was bone-deep. Not from conflict—from the violence of disappearing myself to accommodate their apparent discomfort with my existence.

My body knew before my mind did. Jaw tension. Hollow chest. Shoulders curved inward, protecting something vital they couldn't see anyway.

By week's end, something shifted. My confusion crystallized into clarity. "Case closed."

When I finally wrote that message—clean boundaries without apology—I felt my spine straighten for the first time in weeks.

Pain reveals what you will no longer tolerate.

When Blame Becomes Responsibility

The relief wasn't from cutting them off.

It was from no longer cutting myself down.

But then came the emotional hangover. Exhaustion. Loss of power. The strange emptiness of reclaimed energy with nowhere to flow.

This is where most people get stuck. In resentment. In the story of what they did to you.

Something else was happening though. My language began to shift: "I forgive myself... I promise myself..."

I stopped asking why they couldn't see me. Started asking why I'd been seeking home in homeless places.

I began designing a new rhythm. Movement. Breath. Structure that didn't depend on their validation.

The antidote to humiliation is embodiment.

When Sacred Routine Becomes Sacred Return

Every morning now, when I place my body on the mat, I'm not practicing yoga.

I'm practicing the radical act of belonging to myself first.

My breath doesn't lie. My spine doesn't perform.

Here, in this sacred geometry of self-respect, I remember what their approval could never give me: the ground beneath my own feet.

I see alcohol and avoidance for what they are—energy leaks. One sacred gesture (the mat) anchoring everything else.

A practice is a daily act of self-respect, not self-improvement.

What Really Happened

Here's what I learned in that hollow space where truth lives:

Your power doesn't need permission to exist.

Your presence doesn't require validation to be real.

When someone can't hold your energy, that's information about them—not instructions for you to shrink.

Those people weren't the wound. They were the mirror showing me where I'd been giving away what was never theirs to take.

Belonging begins in Being.

When you stand in your own depth, others can no longer make you shallow.

I see now that every exclusion pushes me closer to essence.

My presence doesn't need witnesses. It needs roots.

What if the people who can't hold your energy are actually teaching you something essential? What if every attempt to dim you is just showing you how bright you actually are?

Breathe with that.

Feel the ground beneath your own feet.

Your power was never theirs to give or take.

I am / Here, now / In this.

With quiet strength, Pierre-Boris

P.S. If this touched something true in you, I'd love to hear about it. Sometimes the most healing conversations happen when we stop explaining ourselves and start existing fully instead.