Sovereignty

Sovereign.

This word came to me as I wrote one morning on the shores of a beautiful lake, overlooking a serene volcano in Guatemala. I have returned to a place where I was a little over a year ago and I feel radically different in my bones. The best way to describe what I feel is this word I’ve rarely used in my life; sovereign.

To be sovereign is to possess supreme or ultimate power. To act independently and without outside interference. At its essence, sovereignty means to be fully autonomous. In a world that discourages autonomy in so many explicit and implicit ways, to stand within myself, feeling fully sovereign, feels like a monumental win.

When I first arrived in Guatemala in 2024, I felt like a stranger, to myself and everyone around me. I was ending my year of self proclaimed sabbatical by living in an intentional community on the shores of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. I cannot tell you why I was there or how I ended up there, but it was exactly where I needed to be for many reasons. After a year of diving inward, searching for a home, externally and internally, I was finally ready for a wildly different type of challenge and boy did I get it!

It was difficult to know how to exist in a community of people who understood sovereignty far better than I did at the time. I thought I knew myself well. I thought I knew who I was. I thought a lot of things then but many of them were constrained by my own limited reality. My time here a year ago began a process of unraveling that I didn’t know I needed.

I truly didn’t know how much had unraveled until I returned. Stepping back onto the shores of this magical lake, feeling so different this time, was eye opening. It has been a little over two weeks and finally this word arrived in my conscious. Sovereign. It feels raw and vulnerable to write this as my understanding is actively evolving but it also feels necessary.

From the outside looking in, it may appear that I have lived much of my life in a sovereign way. Feeling in control and having the ability to move independently through the world. But the truth is, I have always felt as though the external world had a vice grip around me. I have existed nearly my entire life by being able to read the world around me and slip into the safest corners of every room. My existence relied heavily on my awareness of everything and everyone around me. This way of existing pulled my awareness away from my self constantly.

If you have any people pleasing tendencies, you understand this underlying lack of sovereignty that has followed me for my entire life. When I feel safest by figuring out ways to make others feel safe and regulated around me, it often leads to self abandonment. I fully know that this coping mechanism served me well. I also fully know that people pleasing, at its root, is about control. Controlling perceptions of me, controlling feelings of others and controlling the energy around me.

When I am constantly in a state of hyper vigilance, monitoring everyone and everything around me, it leaves so little space for me to tune into what I actually need. Again, I will return to the definition of sovereign from above; To act independently and without outside interference. People pleasers rarely experience this. Or at least in my experience of living this way, I have always acted in a way that was heavily dependent on the outside world.

It is quite difficult to be sovereign, in my own power, fully autonomous, if the way I moved through the world was always influenced by what I perceived the world needed of me. It was so ingrained in me to exist this way that it has taken me up until this point in my life to occasionally be able to differentiate between what I, myself, need vs what I believe the environment needs of me. And I still stumble and confuse these two things more often than not. It’s a constant learning process.

Returning to a place is often a beautiful measure of growth. It can be difficult to notice small changes, tiny fractions of a degree shifts, when we are always with ourselves. I have found this many times in my life. Upon returning to a place after some time away, I can clearly see the changes that have happened in my own life.

Coming home to this quirky little place in Guatemala, has been a beautiful measure of my own growth over the past 14ish months of life. I landed here and instead of acting as a thermostat for the temperature in every room I walked into, I only monitored my own internal state. It felt strange and quite frankly, rude at times. I felt a bit of shame or guilt well up because I was not jumping in to regulate all the people around me. But after a week of staying with myself, I realized how wildly different this way of being was for me. I also realized how much more energy I had, as if I plugged up every leak in my system.

I am not sure if I have often entered a space without my first instinct being self abandonment. It felt odd to check in with myself more often than those around me. It felt even odder to see people dysregulated and not immediately use my superpower of regulation to make them feel safe. It felt the most odd to not care how I was perceived by others. It feels shocking to write each of those sentences but also fully true.

Instead of feeling so drained by the shift in environment and all the new things, I felt my capacity grow. I felt this novel sense of ease and choice for where my energy flowed. Taking up space in this way made me realize how leaky my cup has always been. I lived so much of my life trying to keep my own cup full but ignoring the fact that this very cup was riddled with holes. Every time my cup filled, it immediately spilled and leaked in every direction without discernment.

These past two weeks have felt as if I finally patched up my cup. The holes have been covered and now I get to choose where I pour my energy. And shockingly, my capacity has remained more elevated than ever before. It has been a beautiful experience to comprehend the fact that I actually do have a choice in where my energy flows. But this choice requires me to be sovereign. It requires me to stop people pleasing and indiscriminately pouring my energy every which way whenever I walk into a room. It requires me to let go of being influenced by external forces.

This is not an easy choice. Again, my safety for so long felt dependent on my hyper vigilance. My leaky cup, covered in holes, felt like the only way I could survive. If I curated everyone’s perceptions around me, kept everyone feeling safe in my presence, then they wouldn’t abandon me. Self abandonment felt like the necessary cost for community and belonging.

But something shocking happened when I set that all down. This belief has been challenged in a beautiful way. Not abandoning myself has led to more genuine belonging. Staying sovereign in my own being has allowed me to connect with more compassion and love.

I learned that most people do not want you to abandon yourself for their sake. Because when one person is in their power, it gives everyone around them permission to find their own sense of sovereignty. What a beautiful gift and reminder, that I need more often than I care to admit.

So if nobody has told you lately, remember, when you take gentle care of yourself, respecting your own needs first and foremost, you will have a greater capacity to do life well. Even if it feels odd and uncomfortable, with time and patience, sovereignty will improve every aspect of your life.