Joe leads a meditation exercise where listeners alternate between feeling unconditional love and feeling deep empowerment — then asks them to notice how different the two actually are. Most people discover they’re flavors of the same feeling, incomplete without each other.
You can’t reach full empowerment without unconditional love, and you can’t reach full unconditional love without empowerment. The paragons of unconditional love — Gandhi, Martin Luther King — never look disempowered. Yet most people have been trained to push empowerment down because it feels dangerously close to arrogance.
“That feeling can’t actually really happen unless there’s a lot of love and not very much fear happening.”
The emptiness behind true empowerment is the humility itself. When there’s no identity to defend, the experience is “you are everything” — and that is deeply empowering. Disempowerment only arises when there’s a “you” that could get hurt.