EGO
MASSAGE EVERYTHING. EXCEPT YOUR EGO!
Massage is great for the body but not so great for your ego. Your ego is far too big as it is, running your life with its constant comments and complaints. The ego in psycho-spiritual terms is nothing to do with being arrogant or thinking yourself above others.
Ego represents your entire self-created identity, your persona, the masks you never take off, the face you show to others and yourself. It has blinded you to what lies underneath it, in the more real realms of your human being.
We may refer to the ego in the singular but it includes all the thoughts in your head, thoughts which transmit a running commentary on everything they perceive. One of ego’s favourite hobbies is holding grievances. When it’s not persuading you that you’re a victim, its telling you that your your judgements, complaints and criticisms of others is fully justified. So attached to it have you become, so bewitched by its constant chatter that it has you thinking that you and your ego are synonymous.
You have failed to notice that the la-la land of your mind is a tangled wilderness of useless information planted there by other minds. Quite simply, everything in your head is the product of your society and its beliefs and value systems. Had you been born on the other side of the world a thousand years ago, your head would have been stuffed with other nonsense which was fashionable at that time and in that place.
When the voice in your head addresses you, it sometimes calls you “I” and it sometimes calls you “you”. Have you noticed that? Start noticing!
When you watch your ego like a hawk, you find it says things like “I don’t like what’s happening here” or “why do you always feel pissed off?” The true insanity is that we buy into it, we believe what it says. We never address the most fundamental assumptions of our brainwashing, in this case the question of whether the voice in our heads is really all we are.
Buddha did, he addressed his ego. After a cosseted life of privilege, raised as a Prince in a palace, safely tucked away from the great unwashed, he finally escaped his golden prison and ventured out into the world. All he saw was suffering; the pain of childbirth, illness, old age and death which led him understandably to ask “What the f**k? Is this all there is?”. And eventually he found that it most certainly is not all there is; that there are depths of reality within him, within you and within all of us that are never dreamt of in our materialist philosophy.
So try to stop massaging your ego. Your ego is not your friend, quite the opposite. Your ego is what’s holding you in a loop of terror, the driver behind all your fears. It only has this power over you because you allow it. Sack it. Give it its marching orders. Refuse to listen to it any more. This is the only free will you really have. Listen to the ego, or not. Your choice.
Choose to remove your attention and therefore energy from it and it will start to deflate like a dead balloon. Simply notice when the commentary is running in your head (which is pretty much always), then drop your attention down into your heart and take a nice, deep breath. You experience a little massaging of your heart and not your head. In that moment you’ve conquered your ego. Congratulations! Its days are numbered…
With patience and practice, you learn to silence your ego and open your heart. When you consciously drop your awareness from your head and breathe into your heart, you will find it softening, opening and revealing its unique wisdom to you. Aha moments of the heart flood your body with love, peace and joy.
Your life is but a series of moments. And in each moment you have the power to choose – the nutcase in your head or the love in your heart.
