Mar 11, 2019 2 min read Personal Growth

Being At Ease With Yourself – LOP067

“…from the standpoint of the ego, the universe is seen as the “other.” The ego concludes that this “other” is against it and, therefore, that I must struggle to survive.”The Tao of Abundance, Laurence G. Boldt

Are You Struggling in Any Part of Your Life?

Is your love life, career, or your life purpose a problem or are you at ease with who you are, and making the best of your life? Many clients come to me as a coach wanting to work on a creative endeavour. More often than not, there’s something much deeper and more profound to the reason they’ve chosen to work with me. It almost always has something to do with the ego.

It’s not that a client has ever come to me and said, “Hey Darren, you know I’m really challenged by my ego. It just keeps getting in the way and keeping me from getting what I want.” That would be an interesting conversation!

“I exist as I am. That is enough.”Walt Whitman

The Ego is a Delicate Construct.

Ego is “I” or “me”. We first learn about the ego as babies when we are taught to recognize our name; to recognize “who we are” at the level of owning or identifying with our name. Our naming is when we first learn about ownership and possessions. How else do we come to understand that we are a “Darren” or a “Kathy”? We learn to own our name in contrast to, or in defence of everything “other”, everything that is outside of us and not who we are.

Another way of say that is,

I identify as me, and what is not me is you, or something else – an other that I do not identify with or as.

Defence of the ego forces us to seek some construct to which we belong that demonstrates “otherness” as all that out there, against which we must defend ourselves. We seek to belong to a group of people, a family, a religion, a political movement, or an ideology that strengthens our ego identity and the need to “possess” that belief or self-perception.