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PRICKLY or BEAUTIFUL?

DeeOctober 8, 2016

Your worst enemy is hiding within yourself, and that enemy is your false ego. – Rumi

Within each of us exists a duality of light & dark that hardly ever subsides. We find ourselves consistently having to make a choice between the two. Do we find the courage to think and act out of love and show up as our authentic selves or do we let “good old fear” rule our thoughts and actions and show up as our egoic self? When we let our authenticity lead we are experienced as beautiful & lovable by those around us. When we let our ego lead we are typically experienced as prickly & unapproachable. So how would you rather be experienced…as a prickly unhuggable porcupine (aggressive), a slithering snake (passive agresssive) or as the radiating beautiful authentic self that you already are?

Let’s talk a bit about ego. It is usually thought of as something that we should control, right? This may however, be a very tall order because I believe the ego is the symptom…its underlying fear is the actual disease, the root cause. If we rid ourselves of our fears, our egos dissolve on their own. The ego is just the shield we build around ourselves to protect us from experiencing the pain that we fear. It is a shield that we are mistakenly perceiving as ourselves when in reality it is our false selves. The self that doesn’t have to experience the pain that we fear. Where do these fears come from anyway? Let’s explore a bit…

As young children, we started feeling fearful because of the many many “NOs” we heard between as we were getting our bearings in this world. While these NOs were very well intended in keeping us safe and shielded from pain, they were also based on beliefs, ideas, ways of thinking and understanding stemming from a foundation of fears that belonged to our caregivers and adults around us, not to us. Their fears became our fears and as a result we take on other people’s baggage, mistakes, faulty thinking and carry them around with us into adulthood as though they were our own.  In addition to this, the way modern society operates has further programmed us support excuses & fairness instead of personal responsibility, hate instead of love, wars instead of peace, competition instead of cooperation…all concepts that are very much rooted in fear.

So here we are as adults, not even aware that we had absorbed all these fears. The good news is that you’re here reading about it, and hopefully wondering what you can do. With reading this blog you are gaining awareness. Awareness builds understanding and understanding easily leads to change. By doing a lot of soul searching and being completely honest with ourselves we can bring awareness to our fears and start to identify, face and dissolve them…one at a time.

The first thing we can do is to learn to distinguish between the voice of intuition vs the voice of ego/fear. They can both be very convincing. We try to protect the armor at all cost because it gives us a false sense of security. The difference between the two voices is one comes from a place of love and good intentions and is anchored in truth, while the other comes from a place of fear and manipulation and is anchored in deceit…deceit of selves or others. When we start to bring our awareness to each of these voices we naturally know the difference because truth is what resonates the most with our heart and soul. Truth produces a sense of freedom. Deceit feels dense and stuffy.  Truth is anchored in love, deceit is anchored in fear.

Another way to detect fear is by maintaining awareness of what triggers negative emotions within us, and tracing that emotion all the way back to the core fear.  For example, if we get over the top upset about something, at the surface it appears that someone didn’t meet our expectation. Dig deeper and understand what that expectation is protecting us from.

It is certainly not easy to quickly eradicate fears that have grown strong roots over the years. It is also not prudent to deal with our fears all at once since it can be overwhelming. It’s best to single out and focus on removing one fear at a time.

You can start with asking yourself these questions. What is a fear that gives life to your ego? What do you do to protect yourself from the pain that you fear? What lies do you tell yourself and others? What is the truthful version of it? How is this affecting your life?

I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts. Please share! As always, if you need help in exploring some of your core fears that may be undermining your happiness, contact me for a session.

Love, Dee