On practicing power-with in a power-over world
There is a tension that lives in the space between fingers and thread, between intention and outcome. The weaver knows this intimately: how the pattern can emerge or unravel in a single moment of inattention, how power flows through the warp and weft in ways that cannot be forced.
We are all learning to weave whilst the structures around us speak primarily in the language of dominance, hierarchy, extraction. They whisper that power means holding tight, accumulating, controlling the narrative thread until it becomes brittle in our hands. Yet something else moves beneath this surface teaching, something that knows how threads can hold each other without strangling, how strength can emerge from the spaces between.
Our bodies carry the imprint of power-over like scar tissue. We have learned to brace against the weight of systems that demand our compliance, our silence, our smallness. In meetings where voices are measured by loudness rather than wisdom. In spaces where being right matters more than being present. In relationships where care becomes a resource to be managed rather than a frequency to inhabit.
This conditioning runs deeper than conscious thought. It lives in the way we hold our breath when conflict appears, the way we perform certainty when we feel lost, the way we reach for control when connection becomes available. The body remembers what the mind tries to forget: that we have been taught to survive in a world that sees vulnerability as weakness and interdependence as naivety.
Yet even as we carry these patterns, we also carry their antidote. Somewhere in the cellular memory lies the knowledge of what it feels like to belong, to be witnessed without judgement, to move in rhythm with forces larger than our individual will. The weaver's hands remember this, even when the mind has forgotten.
Power-with emerges in the spaces between certainties. It cannot be grasped or manufactured, only invited through practices that soften the grip of separation. Like learning to feel the tension in the thread before it snaps, we learn to sense the moment when collaboration becomes coercion, when care becomes control.
This learning happens in the mundane moments: the pause before responding to criticism, the choice to ask questions instead of providing answers, the willingness to let ideas emerge from the collective rather than imposing a predetermined vision. Each small act of releasing control becomes a thread in a larger pattern, one that we cannot see in its entirety but can trust through the tactile wisdom of our participation.
The practice asks us to notice when we are forcing the pattern rather than serving it. When our desire to help becomes a way of maintaining superiority. When our commitment to justice hardens into righteousness. When our vision for change becomes more important than the people we claim to be changing alongside.
There is an intelligence that emerges when individual threads stop competing for prominence and begin responding to the tension patterns of the whole. This is not the intelligence of the expert or the leader, but the distributed wisdom that appears when each element is free to contribute its unique properties to the collective strength.
In circles where this intelligence is present, decisions emerge rather than being made. Conflicts become information rather than problems to be solved. Leadership rotates naturally based on what the moment requires rather than predetermined hierarchies. The group becomes more than the sum of its parts because each part is fully itself in service to the whole.
This emergence cannot be controlled or guaranteed. It appears when conditions are right: when power circulates rather than accumulates, when differences are welcomed as texture rather than threat, when the outcome matters less than the quality of presence brought to the process.
The challenge of practicing power-with lies in learning to hold complexity without collapsing into chaos or rigidity. Like a weaver working with threads of different tensions and textures, we must develop the sensitivity to know when to pull tight and when to release, when to introduce new elements and when to let the existing pattern settle into itself.
This requires a different relationship to time. Power-over operates through urgency, deadline, the pressure to decide and move forward regardless of readiness. Power-with unfolds according to organic timing, the slow rhythm of trust being built, understanding being deepened, wisdom being distilled from experience.
In a culture addicted to speed and certainty, this slower pace can feel like failure. Yet anyone who has witnessed the collapse of initiatives built on force knows the hidden efficiency of taking time to weave connections that can hold the weight of real change.
The thread can be lost in a moment of distraction, and reclaiming it requires the humility to acknowledge when we have strayed from the pattern. This acknowledgement itself becomes a practice: naming when we have slipped into old habits of dominance or submission, when we have prioritised being right over being connected, when we have forgotten that the strength lies in the weaving itself rather than any individual thread.
Recovery happens through return. Return to breath, to the felt sense of interdependence, to the willingness to be changed by what we encounter. Each return strengthens the pattern, creates new pathways in our nervous systems, builds the muscle memory of power-with until it becomes as natural as the way light moves through fabric.
The world may continue to reward the louder voice, the faster decision, the clearer hierarchy. Yet somewhere in the spaces between these structures, new patterns are being woven by hands that remember what power feels like when it flows rather than accumulates, when it connects rather than separates, when it serves life rather than diminishing it.
This is the work of our time: learning to weave without losing the thread, holding the tension between what is and what is becoming, trusting the intelligence that emerges when we remember we belong to each other.