Softening up

Greetings all,

This will be a short post this week.  I'm getting ready to head out the door and get on the road.  I'm off to Columbus to work at the Gift of Light Expo.  I get out of town a few times a year to do these shows and it is always a relief to get away for a few days.  It is also exhausting but in a good way.

As I was talking to a few friends this week dealing with both physical and emotional wounds I was struck by the similarity of them.  I've also been working through a home study course from the Monroe Institute.  I'm looking at beliefs, and reaction patterns.  One of the things I read from my course in the past week was about ego.  Their approach is to ask the ego to soften.  Now I've heard many people talk about destroying the ego or killing it.  I've talked before about how that seems just a little violent and like the spiritual equivalent of cutting yourself.  

The lightbulb went off for me when hearing about someone's shoulder and the possibility of scar tissue how much that resembled the wounded ego.  Our ego is our interface with the world particularly with other people.  When our feelings are hurt it is like a wound, now we can either heal it by opening more and expunging it or we can (and this is the more common response) stiffen up and become rigid.  When the ego is not healed properly, not honored it becomes like scar tissue rigid and inflexible.  This limits us in our ability to adapt and respond accordingly.  Instead we react not necessarily to what is going on around us, but to what happened to us in the past.  A healthy ego is engaged in the present.

There are certainly areas where I am rigid and react rather than respond.  So now I am looking into those areas and seeing I am trying to avoid something that has already happened.  I am still living from that space of feeling betrayed, disrespected, and feeling deceived.  This does not engender positive responses from the world as I struggle to manifest something new.  I am lucky that in my work I have to get my ego to step aside while spirit does the heavy lifting.  So as I do my work from now on whenever my ego steps aside I shall thank it  for being strong enough to step back.  In this way I hope to diffuse the struggle a little bit.  Perhaps by feeling gratitude for it I can help myself to soften just a bit and start dismantling the scar tissue.  We talk about loving the self all the time so why do we leave the ego out of the picture?  That would be like a mother saying, "Oh I love all my children except for Clarence, he's just useless."

So how about you?  Are you still reacting to the past in the present?  Do you find there are areas of rigidity in your personality?  Do you break instead of bending?  Well if you do perhaps your ego has some scar tissue too.  What if instead of trying to sneak up on the ego and strangle it you embraced it?  What if you gave it the love that others denied it?  Maybe as we soften we'll become more resilient, more forgiving, and hopefully more joyful.

Peace and Blessings,
Thomas Mooneagle