Self-Sovereignty was a spear of a pointer when I first read it in Adyashanti's The Way of Liberation. It landed deeply, scared me a lot, and I knew on some level that it was a clear pointer in whatever this new 'spiritual' endeavor was. In fact, if I'm being honest, the whole book fascinated and scared me the first time I read it, and it took about a year and a half before I could pick it back up with renewed curiosity [cue me starting with something that felt safer, yoga and meditation!].
That word - sovereignty - felt like a clear bell ringing in a dark foggy night. I had no idea what it really signified, which precise direction to go to reach it, or why it gripped me with panic. But it stuck with me for the last 4+ years as I navigated this process of rediscovering myself and uncovering the huge backlog of false beliefs that were creating a deep sense of suffering and dis-ease in my life. It is one of the key guidepost "teachings" that invites an ever-renewing sense of the momentary intuition and following what is true now. It invited me time and again to ask "who is in charge here?" and "is what this person saying true right now?" It's an invitation to ask every question yourself, and not assume anything is correct or not.
So what is self-sovereignty? It's the audacity of seeing life for yourself instead of through the filter of anything. And what does that mean? It means absolutely not buying into any story, belief, assumption, or rule that you do not experience for yourself directly. It means allowing clarity to come in by not deferring to someone else's authority on your life or experience. It means listening to life (inclusive of your body, feelings, stories, other people, opportunities, pain) without forcing it into a framework given to you consciously or not by society, family, teachers, friends, or any traumatic event.
Self-sovereignty is therefore also the willingness to see the ways in which these habits of deferring to others are still occurring, as this simple "seeing" (really, allowing into conscious awareness) is precisely what allows these stuck habits to become unstuck. Because in fact, (spoiler alert!) what you are really seeing is that these habits are not you and therefore you no longer identify with them.
This doesn't mean the habits immediately stop; they have a lot of momentum (literal generations of misinformation/misunderstanding) and depending on how strongly you identify with them (how deep is that belief/karmic knot?), they can take quite some time to fully unravel in the compassionate light of awareness - i.e., the real you. This willingness to let anything come into awareness without resistance, and responding from that place of non-resistance is sovereignty.
This is fairly heady/conceptual, but it lays the foundation for the journey of self-rediscovery. Different practices emphasize different aspects of this process, but they always meet at the same point: where the fire of awareness compassionately lights up and burns through the false barricades of separation. In part 2, we will explore this more by example in everyday life and "on the cushion."