Part Three of a Three-Part Series
“It’s impossible to truly find joy and peace when you are more captivated by your thoughts
than you are by love.”
The Power of Self-Investigation
“We don’t want to look at ourselves. We don’t want to look at ourselves in a negative way and we don’t want to look at ourselves in a positive way. This is because when we look in depth we see it’s not where we want to be. It doesn’t matter if we are looking at what we think is good or what we think is bad, the outcome is the same.” This observation of people and our aversion to change was part of a conversation I had with my dear friend, an amazing intuitive life coach and my editor, Heather Doyle Fraser. Heather continued by saying that “if we look at what we think is good about us, we see there is more we can do because we have done so much already. But, that means we need to take action and most of us don’t want to do that. And if we don’t take the action that is needed for us to live our life as we wish to live it, we are living a lie- we are not living the life we are meant to live.” Yes, change is hard for us. But, in order to transcend ego love to find real love, it is imperative.
Let’s face it – we all want to be loved. But, we are selling ourselves short if that is our main goal. And as we have seen, the way we have been going about it isn’t really working for us anyway. So, something has to change. If we are honest with ourselves – if we dig really deep, isn’t it that we don’t just want to be loved, but that we want to be loved freely, without conditions, without pain and without fear? If so, how is it that we would expect someone else to do this for us when we don’t do it for ourselves or others? The power of self-inspection gives us the fuel we need to do this because with self-inspection we begin to connect with our truth. Our truth is our all about love. There is nothing more powerful than that.
The truth is fierce. When we decide we are going to live authentically, we are deciding to live truthfully. We have to be willing to give up the tricks of the mind, the temporary love built on pain and fears and the empty promises. We also have to be willing to look at the relationships we have with others from a different, more truthful perspective if we are going to look at ourselves from a different, more truthful perspective. We have to be willing to see that our blame, anger, judgments and resentments are about us, not our partner.
Self-inspection takes honesty, earnest effort, pure intention and even bravery. Self-inspection takes work, but what could be more worth our effort than uncovering all that is false, all that is fearful and all that unloving for the purpose of real love? Nothing changes if we keep our heads buried in the sand and continue with the same patterns and beliefs that have not served us in our quest for love.
What do you get for all of your hard work of self-inspection? You get motivation and energy. The way we have been living and looking for love isn’t really very motivating at all nor does it ignite us with energy for longer than the first year of a relationship. On the contrary, we are exhausted, deflated and disillusioned. Take a look around. Who is smiling at the grocery store or in their cars on the way to work? We aren’t energized for life- we are barely surviving. We deserve better. I believe we want to be energized and motivated with a passion for life throughout our life. We have been trained to think this isn’t possible, but that is just not true. We are amazing, loving beings. We can do anything!
What would it look like if we were free from the illusions of ego love? We would have the freedom to be who we truly are. We would have the freedom to love ourselves, to be peaceful within, to improve our health and to exchange a stressful state for a calm relaxing one. This would be our typical, normal state of being and stress would be minimal. Under the ego’s system, it is the other way around – we are stressed most of the time and we are hardly ever, if at all, free to just be ourselves. With real love in place, we would embrace a partner in life for just love because the intention of pain relief wouldn’t exist. Can you see how pure love would become? This is the power of self-inspection.
Barriers to Self-Inspection
The mind sets up barriers to freedom because in the system of ego love there is no freedom. Fear does not allow us to be free and neither does our subconscious focus on finding pain relief. Freedom is a threat to the existing mind-created fear system – freedom is a direct threat to our pain. So, the ego mind will come up with all kinds of excuses as to why self-inspection, uncovering the truth about our relationships and self-love are useless, stupid, unattainable and impossible. Don’t listen to the mind on these. Remember, everything the ego mind tells us is from a system that is based on false stories and illusions. You will have to transcend these stories and illusions. You will have to be brave on a number of levels, but I know you have it in you.
We have to be brave because it is not easy for us to get out of our comfort zone even if we aren’t really that comfortable. If we are honest, we will know in our heart that believing we are not good enough and not loving ourselves is definitely uncomfortable. It is crazy to think we would stay loyal to such a life filled with such beliefs. We are explorers breaking ground on a new way of life. On this path we may be laughed at, we may have many naysayers, we may come into contact with people who want to keep us from our amazing journey to the center of real love, but don’t give up. We are doing something different than many. We are digging for an understanding that makes sense to our heart, not to our ego or our mind. We are on the path to freedom.
Barriers to freedom can also come from the fear of uncovering what is behind the pain we experience. But, this is just more fear. This is how the ego pushes us deeper into the dungeons of darkness, keeps us in the rut of pain and continues its stories and tricks. Don’t fall for that. Many of us don’t want to see what is beneath the surface because there may be pain there, but this is the pain that’s getting in the way of a peaceful, joyful, happy life filled with real love. We want to see the Loch Ness monster, but if we really saw it we might be afraid of it. This is a possibility of uncovering the source of our pain. But, once we see it and we know it is there, we can begin to deal with it. We begin our process of becoming our authentic selves – the person we are without the fear.
Many of us make an identity out of the fear and the pain we experience. For example, if we continually end up with partners who dump us, we think that is who are -someone who gets dumped all the time. But, that’s not who you are. That is just what is happening because you have not yet realized the patterns of pain that arise from the fear of not being good enough. What you do doesn’t make you who you are. Don’t attach your beliefs, your thoughts and your actions to your identity. They are not you. This is an important distinction to make because we are trained to think the opposite. Give yourself time to understand this on a deeper, more truthful level. Do not try to understand this using your ego or your mind.
The process of realizing self-love is challenging. We have many barriers to deal with, many that aren’t even mentioned here. Our mind runs on auto-pilot so a lot of our old beliefs about love come up without our awareness. Now, though, we are aware. Now, we know we have been tricked into believing lies about ourselves and others. We don’t have to listen to the lies any longer. We can do something different. We can change ourselves and find our way to real love. When each one of us does this individually, we collectively change the world.
Transcendence
Ego love is fear in disguise. It’s our fears playing out on the real world canvas with all of its outbursts, pity, unhappiness, anger, jealousy, guilt, blame and more. It must be obvious to us that this is not love. It’s not love for others and it’s certainly not love for us. It also must be obvious to us that the system we are using to find happiness, joy and love doesn’t work. This is a time for us to become aware of how our mind has been conditioned to believe in illusions which only serves to keep itself alive and keep us from real love. This is a time for us to become aware of our motives for love. It is a time to become aware of our beliefs and thought patterns about ourselves and others that do not serve us and do not lead us to real love.
We are moving to a place where there are no more facades. It is difficult for us to constantly segment ourselves and be one person in one situation and then feel the need to be someone else in another situation. All of this segmenting is really just a game of us not being our authentic self. Of course, the easy thing to do is to keep our head buried in the sand and continue. We must be willing to take all of the energy we expend on the continuation of fear and use it to practice self-love. We must stop looking for self-love and self-worth from others. It doesn’t really make sense to look there for it anyway, does it? Imagine not expecting someone else to complete you. Imagine completing yourself. What would your relationships look like then? How free would they be? How free would you be?
Self-love is being present, which means being right here in the moment that exists right now. This is where real love is. It’s not in the past where we have regrets, resentments and unresolved anger. It’s also not in the future where we have worries and more fear about the unknown. Being in a state of presence is like being in any other state of mind – with awareness, it becomes a choice more often. Sometimes, even with great awareness, understanding and practice, you will still have a day where ego love is playing its games and tricks. Do not think for a moment you aren’t getting closer to self- love or that you can’t get to self-love. If your mind tells you such stories, do not listen to them. Instead, use any ego moments as opportunities to see the contrast between ego love and real love. Do not judge anything or anyone in this process. Remember we are on the path to self-love. Stay focused.
Real love is a state of being where you do not hurt yourself or any other person. It is the state of being where self-love is supported every step of the way. It is freedom -the freedom to love yourself without conditions, without pain and without fear. When we are in a state of real love within ourselves we automatically feel the same for everyone else. So now when you love, you really love.
Read
Part I: Is it Love or Just Your Ego?
Read Part II: Uncovering the tricks of ego love.
