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May 4 - June 6, 2020
The ego is the false self. As it is understood in Eastern philosophy, the ego came to be as a way to protect the inner child. When we needed to survive in childhood whatever we were experiencing, a part of us needed to hide, and we developed a false self to protect the true essence of who we are. So, the ego grew in order to protect us. It grew to keep us safe. But really, this ego must be kept in check with a close and careful eye. It needs to release the belief that it has to stay in control. When it does, when we are able to shed the ego, our true essence can be in the lead, and we can
be our light. At that point, we can heal at a cellular level.
It takes only sixty to ninety seconds for a feeling to pass through the body.
Emotions are our minds’ reactions to feelings.
For the purposes of this book, I am briefly touching on the subject because we often turn to addiction to fill a part of us that feels empty or in pain. In other words, we are looking outside of ourselves to fill holes in order to feel whole.
As Michael Singer says in his book, The Untethered Soul, “We are not our thoughts.”
Perhaps you are always chasing another’s love. This may show up as insecurity with the need to prove oneself. It may show up when you are constantly and consistently putting someone else’s needs in front of your own. It shows up in the feeling that taking care of them is more important than your own self-care. Self-care is self-love. When you take time out for self-care, it is a way of showing self-love. I am not referring to activities such as manicures and massages.
Hoping someone else will change or that a situation will change only robs us of our own internal knowing. It indicates that we are wishing for something outside of us to change in order for us to feel better internally. If something or someone outside of us happens to change and we feel better because of that, but have not shifted internally, that state of feeling better will only be temporary.
Hoping for others to change
A person may consider meditation as worship or prayer. But meditation is simply awareness.
In the mid 1990s I read Simple Abundance by Sarah Ban Breathnach.
Check it out!
Expectations will only cause you pain.
Expectations
When you hold onto expectation, that expectation limits you, because when you do not get what you are expecting and it does not look as you imagined it to look, it becomes “the death of us.” After that, we wonder, “Now what? What do I do? This did not work out the way I thought it would.”
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Instead, we feel a feeling and unconsciously know we don’t like the feeling, so we have an immediate reaction to squash the feeling, push it down, hold it, or numb out until it goes away. Or we give the feeling a name, and it becomes an
emotion like anxiety, fear, or depression, at which point we attach a story to it. Once there is a story attached to it, we get caught up in that story. Our minds can spin out of control, getting into all sorts of “what if” scenarios. This robs you of the moment and pulls you into the abyss of worry about the unknown future. The problem here is that the feeling does not go away. You are either burying it or building stories and stress around it, and one day it will need to get unearthed. Feelings let us know they are there.
