Divine Manipulation

I recently read an essay by Tamara at Museguided titled Soft Power: The Art of Influence Without Domination. It stayed with me for days because it reminded me that there are people whose presence changes the atmosphere around them.

We all know someone like this. They walk into a room, and people notice them. Not because of beauty or charisma, but because something about them invites us to become a little more present, generous, and ultimately more ourselves.

This presence isn’t performed. It travels ahead of words, energetically conveying how they expect to participate in the encounter—an unspoken confidence that something good can emerge between human beings. We feel it before we understand it, and without realizing why, we relax in their presence.

And yet, few of us move through life with this effortless presence, available to the fruition of our needs and desires. Instead, we learn to protect ourselves from disappointment, rejection, and misunderstanding. Our lived and inherited experience leaves an imprint, teaching us whether we can expect to be welcomed or abandoned, understood or dismissed. Those expectations don’t remain private. They shape our posture, our tone of voice, our gaze, and ultimately the version of ourselves that arrives before a single word is spoken.

The result is that we rarely meet another person as they are. More often, we see them through the lens of what we’ve learned to expect. For instance, if I expect disappointment, I brace myself, my shoulders tighten, and I become vigilant. I prepare to defend myself before there is anything to defend against. The energy I bring isn’t openness but defeat. Even if I smile, I am not meeting the person before me with genuine presence; I am meeting a story written by my fears, my history, and everything I have learned to expect of life. But there is another way of meeting life—one that doesn’t begin with fear or strategy, but with participation.

For years, Masiandia—the beings I channel—have spoken of divine manipulation, or in other words, sacred invitation. They’re not referring to coercion or control, but to an entirely different understanding of power: one that leaves room for life to surprise us.

Here, Masiandia uses provocative language deliberately, not to confuse but to interrupt our habitual thinking and invite deeper inquiry into how power actually works.

We often imagine power as something one person exerts over another. Yet, in its essence, soft power is seductive. It enchants us into a relational dance in which collaboration arises naturally.

What I’ve learned from the channel guidance is that love is always arranging the conditions in which life can flourish. The sun warms the earth until the seed can no longer remain dormant. Spring coaxes the forest into blossom. A mother’s attentive gaze invites a child’s trust. Nothing is being forced. Nothing is acting against its own nature. Life is simply inviting more life.

These examples point to something deeper: the seed’s need for warmth and fertile earth, the forest’s dependence upon a living ecosystem, the existential needs of a child. Need is woven into the very fabric of life, not as a sign that something is lacking, but as an intrinsic expression of life’s impulse toward wholeness. We are intrinsically woven into this living intelligence. Our needs draw us toward one another.

So often, our attention turns toward how our needs will be met. Yet the more meaningful question isn’t how; it’s who you become as you bring those needs into relationship. How do you enter that encounter so that life becomes freer, richer, more alive—for both of you?

When we meet another person with genuine curiosity, when we trust that something meaningful wants to emerge between us, we call forth qualities that neither of us could have produced alone. A bank manager becomes unexpectedly helpful. A government official slows down long enough to listen. A friend who seemed distracted finds themselves speaking with unusual honesty.

We often assume our needs are burdens we place on others. The opposite is true. Our needs are not simply our own; they are invitations that give another person’s essence an opportunity to participate in life more fully.

A person’s need to be heard gives another the opportunity to discover the quiet satisfaction of listening deeply. When someone needs to slow down, they give others permission to let go of the frantic pace they didn’t realize they were carrying. Willingness to speak honestly about feelings may awaken another person’s longing for intimacy, even if they were not aware of it.

It is not about influencing others; it’s about creating the conditions for something beautiful to arise between us. That, to me, feels less like power and more like prayer. Not prayer as petition, but as a way of meeting life with openness.

One memory from Tamara’s essay has stayed with me. It was the way she described her godmother—a woman who wielded influence with grace and met the world with an unwavering certainty that life would meet her needs.

Tamara writes, “I once saw her walk into a grey communist office where the clerk had spent all morning saying no to frightened people and watched him say yes to her inside four minutes, and not grudgingly. Gladly. As though being allowed to help her were the finest thing to have happened to him all year.”

When I first read about the godmother’s soft power, I recognized the same quality in myself—something people experience when they’re in my presence. And yet, there are times when I lose touch with it—when I downplay my needs or push harder to ensure they’re heard. It’s like some part of me doesn’t know that I can simply step into the light and be seen.

It’s no wonder. I didn’t grow up with a role model of this kind of power. I watched my mother collapse into despair, and my grandmother retreat into silence. Neither woman showed me that my needs could be welcomed or that another person’s humanity might gladly meet me. They taught me something they knew well: how to endure disappointment.

Perhaps that is why Tamara’s words landed so deeply. Her godmother seemed available for whatever unfolded, rather than approaching the other person as someone she had to convince or protect herself from. I imagine she moved through the world trusting that another person’s humanity would meet her own.

Reading about her left me with an inexplicable feeling of permission to embody that quiet power more fully. It has the quality of seducing life, not through certainty or entitlement, but through a way of meeting the world that is open, available, and profoundly alive.

We may all know someone who carries this quality, who makes us feel that life is a little more possible in their presence. Sometimes we spend years admiring it in them before realizing that all along they were giving us permission to recognize it in ourselves.

It’s easy to mistake the source of soft power because what is most visible is rarely what is most influential. Our attention is naturally drawn to a warm smile, an easy confidence, or an unhurried gaze. Yet none of these qualities, in themselves, explain why one person’s presence touches us while another’s does not. What moves us is not merely what a person does, but the consciousness they bring to the encounter.

My counseling practice has taught me that presence is not something we do. It’s not a technique. It is an orientation. Clients don’t respond only to my words; they respond to the way I hold them in my awareness. They sense whether they are being evaluated or genuinely encountered.

What is true in the therapy room is equally true in every relationship. Every relationship is shaped by the expectations we hold of one another. If we expect pathology, we will look for brokenness. If we expect resistance, we will brace against it. And if we expect deception, we will be suspicious before anything is even spoken.

But if we meet another person with the unwavering certainty that something whole still lives within them, they begin to inhabit that wholeness themselves.

Presence, therefore, isn’t something we project. It’s something we embody. It may be reflected in our gaze, but its source isn’t where our eyes are looking. It arises from what our hearts are willing to evoke, receive, and experience.

In this way, our wants, our needs, and whatever influence we may have remain sacred invitations only as long as we remain available to receive and willing to be changed by the encounter. The moment another person’s response becomes predetermined in our minds, we have crossed into something else. We are no longer participating in relationship; we are trying to manage its outcome.

Sacred invitation is a participation with the unfolding of something larger than either of us could create alone. Something neither of us could have planned, because it belongs to the relational field. It is in that shared unfolding that life reveals possibilities no amount of strategy or control could ever anticipate.

May you meet the quiet power within you.
With an open heart,

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