Casualties of Empowerment: Part I

So I've been back in LA now for around a week and a half, and this phrase--Casualties of Empowerment-- has been bouncing around in my psyche since before I left. 

This trip to Israel was magical in more ways than I could ever describe with mere words.  The hot tears finally melting my hardened heart and quenching the thirst of my parched spirit were absorbed by the gorgeous sand beaches of Tel Aviv, and so many other, incredible places and experiences.

I don't recognize myself in the mirror just yet, and I haven't since around the second week.  My facebook photograph, taken on my birthday at this great nightclub in Tel Aviv, with me somewhere in between my first and second vodka shows someone I know is me, but someone so incredibly happy, so at home and fully filling out her skin--with a stunning tan---that I have to look twice sometimes to make sure it's my profile page. It's not a Yael I am used to, at least not in LA.  It's the Yael that now thinks of herself as Israeli, not American Jew.  I've been searching for home my entire life, and now that I've found home, home now inhabits ME, fully, and, even though I am back in LA.

I guess the reason this phrase in this context keeps coming to mind is that without becoming empowered, I would not have made this journey, and this journey had casualties left in its wake. One casualty is who I thought I was. 

I was way too caught up--indeed caught, trapped by my own self-image--in being who I thought I needed to be: The Martyr, and what a wake up call it is to realize that even though you can get your ya-ya's met by sacrificing yourself, there is no way you can be truly fulfilled, or happy hanging on that cross (yeah, well, religious imagery is the theme of the locale).  But more than that, you cannot reach your true potential as a human being, and do what God or the Fates have planned for you.  You are not fully living, you are just existing, because in order to be fully alive, you have to be walking your Path.

My personal definition of empowerment is the steadfast courage to risk everything on every level to fully live your beliefs, especially the belief of who you are meant to be,  to relentlessly pursue your Path to make a difference for good in this life, and the full acceptance of the responsibility and consequences of taking that Path.  In my mind, it's the sacred Oath to Self, and I am humbly grateful to finally swear to it.   Thanks, Illana.