EGO

Massage Everything. Except Your Ego!

Massage, as we all know, is very good for our physical well-being. Only problem is we don’t enjoy the benefits for long. That’s because we’re too busy massaging our own egos.

What is your ego? Do you think it’s about being big-headed, arrogant, thinking yourself above others? Wrong! Ego is your entire identity, your persona, the mask you never take off, whether in public or in private.

Your ego thinks it’s you. YOU think it’s you. It takes place in your mind, in the la-la land of thoughts and beliefs but you are totally identified with it, as it. Your ego provides a constant running commentary on your life, on other lives, judging, criticising, comparing and complaining. When it’s addressing you in your mind it sometimes calls you “I” and it sometimes calls you “you”. Have you noticed that? Start noticing!

When you watch it 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?”. And the insanity is 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 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; that there are depths of reality within him, within you and within all of us that are never dreamt of in our 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 you will deflate it. Simply notice when the commentary is running (which is pretty much always) and drop your attention down into your heart and take a nice, deep breath. You experience a 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 slap down 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.