Breaking The Ego's Spell: Finding Peace In A World Of Fear

The ego mind is a tyrant. Just notice how we move through our days from one sense of torture to the next. And we've been taught that there's nothing we can do about it. We've been told that we just have to deal with how bad we feel. We even get to the point where we are numb to how we feel.

The ego's main tool is fear. When you are experiencing any of the fearful emotions, you know the ego's in charge. The best thing you can do to deal with the ego is notice it and disregard it. Don't react to it. Don't fight with it. Let it go.

Our emotional body, our emotional self, is the gauge we can use to understand which part of our mind is in control. If we divide the emotions into two types, there's love and there's fear. You can tell which is which based on the tension that you experience in your body. If the emotion is allowing you to relax and be at peace, your emotion is under the general category of love. If the emotion that you're experiencing causes tension and discomfort, the emotion that you're experiencing is under the general category of fear.

You have to be honest with yourself because we gaslight ourselves more than anybody else gaslights us. We gaslight ourselves constantly. The ego loves to gaslight you by telling you you're not feeling fear when you are. It doesn't want you to look at what you're feeling. It doesn't want you to look at the truth. It doesn't want you to see the wizard behind the curtain. Because as soon as you see the wizard behind the curtain, by the power of your awareness and you're seeing the truth, it will be shined away. It will cease to exist.

We don't need to study the ego. We just need to understand when we're under its spell and choose differently. One of the fastest ways you can do that is by being aware of what you're experiencing emotionally. Some of us go through life with general malaise. We generally feel bad. And if we don't feel as bad as normal, we call that feeling good. We go through life putting up with these fearful emotions and then pretend like we're not feeling them just so that we can get through our day. If we didn't pretend like we weren't feeling what we were feeling, we wouldn't want to even get up out of bed.

Most of us, when we wake up in the morning, feel awful emotionally. But then we have to talk ourselves out of that just to get out of bed and move through the day. What the ego does understand is that if you suppress an emotion, it gives it more power. By feeding you these false ideas, it gives you this idea that if you can just suppress that emotion outside of your conscious awareness, it's going to go away.

And then when those suppressed emotions start to appear in our lives, since we are unwilling to experience them and unwilling to purify them for ourselves because we're afraid of them, those emotions show up in all kinds of interesting ways. They show up in relationship problems, they show up as arguments, they show up as financial catastrophes, they show up as health problems, general stress.

We are masters at displacement. We displace the emotional experiences that we are unwilling to confront onto everything outside of us. We project it. They are bad. That is bad. This is the reason for my discontentment. That is the reason for my discontentment. That's exactly where the ego wants you. Because if you're projecting and blaming your general malaise on everything outside of you, you're never going to look at what the culprit is, and you're never going to be freed from it. And then it's done its job.

The ego's job is self-destruction. The ego's job is to prove to you how separate you are from your good, to prove to you that you are not good. It'll do that as subtly as it needs to so that you don't question it. Because if the ego comes out with too bold of a statement for you, you're going to say, no, I don't believe that. So it loves to just keep it super subtle, just barely under the surface.

We need to understand that mild annoyance is no different than major annoyance. The need to verbally snipe at somebody and say, just kidding, is really no different than wanting to destroy them. We're not willing to see the full extent of what that emotion is saying to us because we don't want to look at it. When you understand that, there's no minor annoyances. You can't be sort of upset. That's like being a little bit pregnant. You're either experiencing love or you're experiencing fear. There is no spectrum.

If the ego can keep you busy categorizing your experiences, looking at degrees of upset, it's got you busy with insane activities. Instead, once we come to the realization that it's either love or fear, there's no small fear and big fear. There's no small love and big love. It's just one or the other. Once we understand that, our job becomes very simple. Those emotions then become for us a system of guidance. They're like a GPS.

When we're experiencing fear, we understand that there is a fearful thought. When we're experiencing love, we understand that there's a loving thought. When we are experiencing an emotion that is unpleasant, rather than believing there's nothing we can do about it except for suppress it or pretend it's not there, we then start to accept ownership of our power. These emotions are coming through me. These emotions are coming through my emotional water body. I am in charge. I'm the powerful one.

Nobody ever teaches us we have power over our emotional body. Nobody ever teaches us that. Just you got to live with it. You've got to live with the tyrant. That's just all there is to it, and nothing you can say or do will change it. Even some of our psychology is into that. You can't do anything about your emotions. They're just there. You have to learn how to live with them. And then we learn how to live in the torture and just accept that's as good as it gets.

When the reality is we are the boss. Dealing with a negative emotion is not as hard as it sounds. When you have a negative emotion, you don't need to necessarily figure out what happened in your past that's causing this trigger. You just have to locate where you're feeling the emotion in your body and relax the tension. One of the easiest and most profound ways to do that is by having your exhale be twice as long as your inhale.

If you're experiencing upset, any kind of fearful emotion, notice where it is in your body, and then take a breath, and just count in your mind just to see how your natural breathing is right there. And then leave the count as it is for the inhale, but double the amount of counts for the exhale. Keep doing it until you notice that you're feeling better. And notice that you had control over that emotion, and all you had to do was change your breathing. So that tyrannical behavior was just destroyed, was dissolved, just by changing your breathing and making a new decision.

Now, once I've calmed down and I'm experiencing that sense of peace, then what I need to do is listen to my thoughts. What am I thinking that's drawing me into this emotion? Usually I'm upset about something, so I can just as easily change my thought about that while I'm breathing.

So for instance, let's say I hear on the news something awful going on, some awful, horrible thing, and my mind starts racing thinking, oh my gosh, we're all going to die. And I get upset and angry. I can go around being upset and angry. I'm free to do that. But if I don't want that, I have a choice. First and foremost, I can turn off the TV because me being upset and angry about something in the world that I don't have any direct control over is not worth me being upset about right now, because that's not going to change anything. It's not going to change anything.

I'm going to get my emotions handled first. And then if there is something I can do, it'll be revealed to me when I'm in a sense of peace, because that's when spirit speaks to me. That's true for everybody. So I turn off that television and I do the breathing that I just described for you. I just notice where my breathing is and double the exhale until I can feel that peace, feel that relaxation, and then notice what my thought is. Notice what my thought is about whatever this thing is that's causing me the upset.

In this case, I'm afraid that I'm not safe in the world. And then I can just change that thought. I can say, I am perfectly safe. Infinite intelligence is with me, guiding me and protecting me in this moment. I am safe. All is well. Maybe you do Psalm magic and you can recite a verse out of Psalm 91 or Psalm 23, or a gentle affirmation or statement about your safety. I am safe.

Then you have a choice, knowing that I'm safe, knowing that I am protected. What am I going to do about this thing that upset me? Maybe I'm going to get involved politically. Maybe I'm going to get involved with some kind of group. Maybe I'm going to light a candle. Whatever you are led and directed to do by spirit, to actively put, as we say, feet to your prayers and make a difference in whatever the thing was that was causing you so much upset. But not allowing the tyrant to take over and punish you for being alive, which is what the ego's game is.

The ego will give you reasons why you're not good enough, but it will never tell you that it doesn't care why. It doesn't care why. It just wants you miserable. It ultimately wants you to destroy yourself. If you take it to the nth degree, the ego wants you gone. Until we understand that, we're going to keep listening to its nonsense. We're going to keep wanting the carrots that it dangles. All of the nonsense that the ego gives us, we're going to have some sort of investment in it.

But once we realize that the ego's job is self-destruction, we don't want anything to do with that. And so when fearful emotions come up, we understand that's part of its self-destructive plan for us. It's time for us to get busy. Not feel bad that we have bad emotions, negative emotions, fearful emotions, because that's the ego's game, feel bad that you have negative emotions. Have a negative emotion about your negative emotion.

Instead of that, we say, I have a choice and I have tools. I don't have to sit here and be abused by my ego and have these negative emotions run me. I can calm my body. I can start to replace that fearful emotion with a loving emotion just by having physical relaxation and peace. And then I can get underneath the emotion to the cause of it, to the root of it, which is thought, and replace whatever that thought that is the seat of that emotion with something that is true.

Because anything that's a fearful emotion is based on a lie, an idea that you're not good enough, or that you're defective, or that you're separate, or that you're vulnerable, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. When the truth is that you are a shining extension of truth. You are spirit, and spirit cannot be destroyed. You're not a body. You have a body, but that's not who you are. The only thing that the ego can scare you about is that something's going to happen to your body. Not that anybody wants anything bad to happen to their body, but on one hand, that in and of itself is a relief, knowing ultimately, even if the ego was capable of killing my body, I'm still going to be fine.

But just understanding that puts you in a place where you can find the protection. That is your birthright to keep your body safe too. Finding your connection to the truth that lies outside of the ego's thought system does provide you with all the protection that you need to keep your body safe. Maybe you're afraid about your finances. Once you find your connection to spirit, then you have all the power you need to get the money you need. Maybe it's about a relationship problem. Well, once you find that power outside of the thought system of fear that is causing you to spin your wheels about your relationship, then you have spirit available to heal and lift up your relationship. Spirit can help you, whereas the ego is never going to help you. The ego is only wanting to destroy you, and you know which part of your mind you're listening to based on how you feel.

Are you feeling emotions that are tense and fearful, or are you feeling emotions that are relaxed, peaceful, and loving? And if you're feeling emotions that are tense and fearful, welcome to the club. You're not bad. You're not stupid. There's nothing wrong with you, but you do have a choice. You do have a choice. It does take work. It does take discipline. It's not difficult, but it is different. And different is so scary for us. We don't like different. Why? Because the ego's taught us that different is dangerous. The ego wants us in the same old, same old status quo, whereas spirit wants us free. Spirit wants us to know how free we actually are. Spirit wants us to have all of the things that make us happy, to do all the things that we want to do, to be everything that we want to be. And it wants that not only for you, but for everybody else.

The ego is going to keep you busy judging other people, going to keep you busy judging yourself, and keep you busy being afraid so that you never experience the truth, and you never experience that freedom, you never experience that success. Even if you are successful by the world's standards, if you aren't doing it from spirit's perspective rather than the ego's perspective, frequently, you feel worse than ever because now you're afraid it's going to get lost or somebody's going to take it or that you're going to stumble and fall and everything's going to be ruined.

A lot of us are taught to not go for anything too big because that'll keep us safe. And so then we just sit in our mild state of mediocrity thinking, well, at least nobody's coming after me. It does take some courage to stand up to that, but once you do it, you realize the ego has no power. There is no power. That fear that we experience is nothing. And we do have all the power over our emotional body. We do. It's just that we are so accustomed to living in a world of fear that when we even get a glimpse of a world of peace, when we get a glimpse of a world outside of that world of fear, it is so different, we're afraid it's bad.

It's easier for us to just complain that we don't have peace, complain how bad the world is than to actually experience that world where we don't have fear, even just for a few minutes a day. It's excruciating if you're accustomed to being part of the ego's thought system. It can feel excruciating to feel peaceful, to feel serene, at one with your good. That's why sometimes it's best to start with just 60 seconds, and then maybe try 2 minutes the next day or the next couple of days, just to expand that feeling of peace little by little, because it can feel overwhelming, like something that we want to label as uncomfortable, because we're so accustomed to feeling bad.

We've always been taught this is the way it is. We've gotten used to it. We almost enjoy it. We've made-up societies to accommodate that. Anything that comes and says, you don't need to feel bad is seen as a threat to the ego, so we believe that it's a threat to us as well. And so we tend to say no thanks and go back to our misery. And that misery, that fear that we experience, like I said earlier, if it got too bad, then we might question it. And that's why for the most part, it is like the frog in the water. The ego starts very subtly and brings up the heat little by little by little.

We are each complicit in allowing that tyrant to thrive within us. So if we say no to our own tyrannical minds, say no to our temptation to stay in the hot water, there will be resistance from our egos. And that's why it's so important to have some sort of a regular spiritual practice in place. Because if you are accustomed to even just a few minutes a day, trying to get it to at least 5 minutes a day is a smart idea where you're sitting in the presence of the peace and the truth and the freedom of spirit.

What happens is you then have a relationship with that part of your mind that you didn't have before that you're capable of moving into at will when you are threatened by the ego mind, when you're threatened with fear. And a lot of people think that sounds really dangerous. Yeah, but if I get rid of all my fear, I might get attacked. I might get hit by a car because I'm not going to have the fear. That type of fear that you're talking about that's there to keep you safe is not from the ego. That kind of fear is not from the ego. That's part of your GPS. Occasionally, you do need to have that little just to get out of the way. But that, what we label as fear, is part of the software for your good that you were given when you were created.

But that kind of fear doesn't come up too often. And you don't need it as frequently because you're less prone to the kinds of mistakes that put you in the way of the oncoming vehicle or whatever. Most of the time, the reason why you didn't look where you were going is because you were so obsessed with how bad you felt, or you were off on some tangent, thinking in your mind about something that wasn't good for you. But once you are accustomed to leaning into the spirit rather than the ego, the need for spirit to wake you up with those momentary fear responses become less frequent.

Understand that the fear that comes about in order to keep you safe is not the existential fear that the ego brings us. The existential fear the ego brings us will show up in all kinds of ways. It's not only being scared. The fear response will show up as anger. It will show up as attack. It will show up as depression. It will show up as any emotion that is uncomfortable and tense. Whereas the emotion of spirit, which is love, is always an emotion of peace. You're capable of feeling at peace no matter what's going on around you, no matter what's going on around you.

And when you are in that state of peace, regardless of what's going on around you, you are invoking projection, safety, prosperity, joy, happiness, and your very presence starts to change what's going on around you on some level or another. There's no downside to moving into peace and purifying ourselves of these fearful emotions. But like I said before, we have become accustomed to them. And some of us have never experienced a moment without one of those fearful, tension-ridden, gloomy, awful emotions. When we get a glimpse of it, it feels good, but then we're afraid that we're more vulnerable if we drop our fear, if we drop these negative emotions. We feel like somehow everything is going to be worse, not better. But it never works out that way.

Take it slowly. Slowly is holy. One day at a time. A lot of times we feel guilty. That's where our fear comes from. Remember that guilt demands punishment. So if you're feeling guilty about something, you are automatically fearful because you know something bad's coming your way because that's what you deserve. And you may have objective reasons to feel guilty. You may have done something to cross someone. You may have done something that you feel bad about. But no matter what you've done in your past, you deserve forgiveness. You deserve grace. You deserve peace.

Now, we're not going to go into all of why it's a good idea to clean up your mistakes and all of that. That's a talk for another day. But do know that no matter what you think you've done or what reasons you have for feeling guilty, they're not valid. And Spirit doesn't see it that way. Spirit loves you no matter what. No matter what. And from Spirit's point of view, whatever you feel guilty about never really happened anyway.

So in this world, you do have to go clean up your mistakes, you do have to make amends, you do have to apologize, all of that, yes. But you don't need to live in guilt, to live in fear. You deserve the grace that everybody else deserves. And sometimes it's just as easy as remembering that what we give, we get. So if you're feeling bad, if you're feeling upset, you can take a moment with that breathing to calm yourself to the best of your ability. And then find somebody that needs your blessing and bless them. Bless them with the things that you wish you were experiencing. Bless them with peace. Bless them with joy. Bless them with forgiveness. Bless them with grace.

Forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors is not just a nice thing to do. It's a formula for purifying yourself of guilt and fear.

Thank you so much for spending some time with me today. I so appreciate you. Until next time, blessed be.