The Powers

Many times, throughout the last 10 years I have practiced my craft of energy medicine by performing healings on my friend who taught me the ropes. I do this to express gratitude and pay the karma forward but also because it is an incredible way to learn and develop. When working on someone whose energy body is very developed you and your senses tend to be supercharged. Steel sharpens steel as my father would say. It was during one of my sessions with my friend that I first saw the Powers manifest in the way I depicted.

I started the session like any other. I invoke in a descending fashion from the Supreme Being down through the divine, celestial, spiritual, and causal choirs. Then including my personal lineage and that of the person I’m working on. By its nature, this means there are many beings present in a session. Some have become like old friends while others I still haven't met face to face yet. After invocation I observe the energy body of the person I’m working on, and start the general cleansing protocol, this can be very telling and helpful, but the good stuff is when we get into deeper work and soul development. That is usually when I meet the most curious forces.

So, who or what are the Powers? They are one of the rare and few classes of angels. These angelic hierarchies were first postulated by 5th-century Syrian mystic theologian Pseudo-Dionysius and have since then been adopted and adapted by various streams and schools of western spirituality. The Powers, Dynameis in Greek, Potestates in Latin, are the angelic beings of the planetary sphere of Mars. Referred to as the Lords of Individuality by Max Heindel and Spirits of Movement/Motion by Rudolf Steiner. When these beings came to me, they presented much as I have shown them: a strong dynamic presence with culturally mixed beaded regalia, and crowns of feathers. In the healing, they came to minister to a part of my client they had protected since childhood. I often meet beings like this, my soul recognizes them but my mind may be oblivious. They have presence and reason and speak to me on a soul level but sometimes I need time to assimilate the experience logically.

The Powers are considered warrior angels, hence their planetary sphere is Mars. Their main characteristic is a protective one, preserving not only the cosmos but also humanity as much as we allow it. They are called the Powers because they have power that spans the entire moral spectrum in a way that cannot be simplistically reduced to good or bad. Therefore, I would not represent their purpose in the same way that religion or spiritual tradition usually does, simply defining them as spirits that defend against evil. It is important to consider that on the various planes of nature, events and forces may not translate the same way. We as humans may judge something as good or bad but cosmically speaking it may be the very opposite. “Nothing is in itself good or bad but thinking makes it so.” -  Shakespeare

Take, for example, earthquakes that may devastate a landscape and kill innocent people but create mountains and valleys and a richer ecology, allowing for greater proliferation of life in the natural world. Or how in the later winter of 2021 a polar vortex devastated most of central North America, freezing everything and causing many people to suffer, but at an impersonal level it’s just the natural regulation of the earth’s climate finding new balance because of how we have affected it. Yes, these events can be tragic but the view of their being good or bad is subjective. “The Powers express consciousness of harmony and order so far beyond human conception that we can only wonder at how reality appears from their perspective.” – Anthony Cowan

I found it fascinating to meet these beings, the Powers, resembling something like tribal shamanic warriors. I did not assume they were angels right away as the discernment of spirits is crucial. The way to perceive beings of a non-physical nature is not always what we have grown accustomed to through conventional religious depictions. Perhaps this is because religion becomes as much a culture as it was a religion but, in the contemporary world where more and more people are multi-ethnic our perception is informed by so much more. As a multi-ethnic queer person, informed and studied in different religions and esoteric schools of thought, I believe what my inner senses see and that is a more inclusive representation of divinity than what is normally shown.

I was always a healer at heart, but with little inner work and no protocol to perform energy medicine my effectiveness lay dormant. The wonderful thing about practice is, the more you do it earnestly - and that part is key - the better you get. My clairvoyance, accuracy, and effectiveness have increased with every session, but to be honest it’s not a consistent experience for anyone. Clarity of vision and feeling ebb and flow just as much as everything else in life. The key is to maintain constancy of aim and effort and balance. If you see less, invoke more, soften your heart, and stick to the protocol. If you see more, fill your heart with gratitude and sail the divine sea of healing energy with the beings of the higher worlds. Balance comes with practice and personal development. There is no such thing as a spiritual path that only makes life easy and bright. On the contrary, a real spiritual practice brings up more of what your ego is hoping to avoid and you are met with opposition that offers the opportunity to break cycles, and that’s where the growth happens. So, if your spiritual practice, whatever it may be, never challenges you to grow and unfold through both great and small death-like experiences of your ego, find a better one.

I will say briefly, the efforts I have made to move through the difficult situations in my own life are the only reason I share an opinion like this. I have found that the character you develop through this sort of growth may not always seem like the trendiest, bubbliest personality, but it is the deepest, fiercest, and most enduring. I have learned that a person sees in others what they are themselves and a healer often only heals to the depth that they themselves have reached.