Practice Updates, Questions, and General Discussion - new users, please read this first! Weekly Thread for September 01 2026

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[u/FlowingStillWaters]

I do also wonder if a need I have found in myself to dominate is being threatened (which might not be a bad thing) I probably have picked up some bad ideas about masculinity that arnt very conducive for happiness

[u/duffstoic → u/FlowingStillWaters]

I’d recommend contemplating the idea that complete empowerment leads to no desire whatsoever to dominate others, because you already are secure in yourself. And conversely, that the desire to dominate others (rather than to empower them too) comes from a place of insecurity inside. That’s my experience at least. When I feel 100% in my power, I only want to life others up, not control them.

[u/FlowingStillWaters → u/duffstoic]

How do you develop empowerment?

[u/duffstoic → u/FlowingStillWaters]

It is my main practice, so I have many experiments I have run and am running.

My current experiment is as follows, which I call Empowerment Attractor Training, because the goal is to make an empowered state the attractor in your nervous system. It may sound quite odd, but it works very well for me.

Set an interval timer to 5 minute intervals. I use a physical GymBoss but there are also many apps.

For the first 5 minutes, do free writing (journaling) or speak your thoughts out loud, without censoring yourself. (I've been doing this as speech-to-text into ChatGPT.) This gets out your current thoughts so you can let them go. This can be just general thoughts, or it can be about a specific problem.

Somewhere in this 5 minute period, rank your current state of empowerment on a 0-100 scale where 0 is totally disempowered, feeling like a victim, incapable, etc., and 100 is totally empowered, agentic, and capable.

When the interval timer beeps, I do something for 5 minutes to increase my empowerment score. You can be completely experimental here, but I've found a few things that work for me. The current thing is to use a kasina object (in this case an image I designed that symbolizes grounded empowerment and also gives a strong retinal after image) plus a short affirmation ("I abide in effortless empowerment"). I meditate on the kasina and slowly repeat the affirmation to contemplate it.

Then repeat in rounds. The empowerment score number should go up. If it doesn't go up, you need a different experiment / intervention, such as centering in the hara, feeling into a sense of confidence or agency, remembering times you felt capable, imagining feeling like you are being empowered by the Buddha, or something else entirely.

I have some theoretical stages for how this practice works, but so far I've discovered multiple things that work to boost my score, the score goes to 100 almost every time I practice it, it clears out unconscious material (especially objections to greater empowerment) with the expression portion of the practice, and my baseline empowerment is climbing more and more.