the core energy at the heart of any nonviolent social movement.

Person power was coined by noted peace scholar Michael Nagler, who is the founder and president of the Metta Center for Nonviolence and author of The Nonviolence Handbook: A Practical Guide for Action. The term is meant to highlight how individual contributions matter to creating positive change —every person’s input and potential makes a difference.

We’ve all heard the term “people power,” which describes mobilizing large numbers of people to undo a repressive regime (or system). “People power” arose in 1986, during the Filipino uprising that culminated in the military conceding to the people and the toppling of Ferdinand Marcos’ regime. Around two million people participated in the Philippines People Power movement, and while its success grew from mass participation, it ultimately consisted of “two million individual decisions,” as Cardinal Jaime Sin noted. Each and every person decided to show up on their own terms.

Person power describes an individual’s conversion of a negative drive to a positive drive. When one person transforms fear, anger, or aggression into universal love, compassion, and resilience, nonviolence is born.

With enough people together on the streets, anything is possible, as the People Power movement in the Philippines showed. But a lack of discipline can result in an unhelpful mob mentality known as the effervescence of the crowd. That’s where person power comes in: individual discipline adds up to an unstoppable movement, as the two million people who worked for the downfall of the Marcos regime proved.

So the question becomes: How do we tap our person power? That’s where spirituality — heart and mind training — comes in. Practices like meditation and yoga, for example, train us to respond to situations rather than react to them. Through disciplined practice, we learn to convert the raw energy of negative emotions into productive, creative energy that can be used for constructive purposes.

A quote by Gandhi summarizes the essence of person power:

I have learnt through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.

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