Part Two of a Three-Part Series
Tricked by the Egoic Mind
I just wanted to stop the pain. That was the motivation for nearly every relationship I’ve ever had, but I didn’t know that. Most of us don’t. The pain came from the belief that I am not good enough. This belief is taught to us from the moment we are born. When we believe we aren’t good enough, we can’t be truly happy, content, joyful or healthy, and we definitely don’t feel loved. We carry this belief and the resulting pain whether we are aware of it or not.
The pain is almost unbearable for us and so to deal with it, we have been trained to go outside of ourselves to obtain and accumulate material objects or “commodities” to feel good enough. One of those commodities is often another person, or a relationship. We are tricked by the egoic mind into thinking we are looking for love, but we are really looking for pain relief.
Many of us create a list of the qualities for the perfect partner in our mind and we believe finding this person will make us happy and feel loved. When we find the one who ticks all the boxes on our list, we discover that our happiness and the love we initially feel are both short-lived. They are short-lived because the intention behind that list wasn’t love at all, it was pain relief. This type of love isn’t real love. It is ego love. It turns out that all such lists (“I’ll be happy when.”) are just a cover for our hidden intentions of pain relief.
Our perfect partner list was written with the hope of finding someone who could relieve our pain of not feeling good enough, but what it brings us instead is someone who validates our pain. How can this be? Our pain gets validated when our partner does not perform his or her duties of pain relief. This only happens because he or she is not the one who can relieve us from our pain. Only we can do that.
Ego love isn’t actually motivated by love; it’s motivated by fear. Fear is pain. The only outcome possible of ego love, then, is more fear, which is more pain. This is why relationships built on pain relief don’t give us real love. If we go even deeper, we will see that the system of ego love doesn’t work because the original premise on which it is built, the belief that “I’m not good enough”, is not true to begin with. We are all good enough. We always have been.
Each relationship we enter where we haven’t uncovered this truth will begin and end in the same way – empty promises and continued pain. If, however, we take this opportunity for inspection of the ego’s patterns and introspection of our motivation for each relationship, we will uncover the tricks of the ego for ourselves and will no longer be ruled by them. Awareness is the first step. Intention to experience real love is the next.
All intentions are powerful. If our intent is to continue looking outside of ourselves for love, to continue repeating patterns that we know don’t work, we will continue to experience fear and pain. If, however, we look inside and intend to find real love, not pain relief, we will experience the love we are looking for.
What is the real love are we looking for? It’s self-love and it comes from within us. It’s not out there. Most of us find that hard to believe because the ego mind system is set up opposite from this. But, no other person has the power, the capability or the capacity, to make us feel this love. We find it by no longer looking to others for it.
So, what is self-love? It’s you without the fear of not being good enough, without the pain and without the lists. It’s love without tricks. It’s you being free to love just because. It’s you in the most authentic sense -free to live and free to just be. This is the only love that heals the pain of not feeling good enough. Self-love is truly all that is needed to bring joy, healing and happiness to our lives each day.
How will you know when you are experiencing real love? You won’t look to others for authentication, happiness and well-being. In ego love, not only do we expect others to make us happy and get rid of our pain for us, but we constantly look outside of us for approval. In real love, we are already happy and we approve of ourselves. That releases a massive burden from our relationships. Our motivation for those relationships will now be to simply love.
Most of us have not yet experienced this level of freedom and peace. But, we are capable of it. This is because when we love ourselves we automatically love everyone and everything else due to our divine energetic connections. This is the power of real love.
Uncovering the Red Flags of Ego Love
To find the real you and experience self-love, we need to get used to looking at ourselves when we feel unloved in a relationship rather than looking at and blaming others. This can be a difficult concept in the system of ego love where the focus is external rather than internal. But, it can be done.
When we are involved in relationships based on pain relief instead of real love, there are repetitive patterns that play out every day. This is a gift to us since such repetition allows us to identify the patterns and then begin the healing process. The patterns are red flags for us to realize we are experiencing pain, not love. The red flags will help you find where you can change your patterns to ones that serve you and your relationships – patterns that are built on real love, not pain.
Here are some of the most common red flags in a relationship based on pain and fear:
- Controlling – When we are controlling in a relationship it may come out as jealousy or berating our partner. Trying to control how that other person feels, trying to control what your partner does do, who they do it with, where they go and when they go are all examples of trying to control your partner. Control is not love, it’s fear. We are afraid of losing our pain reliever so we try to control them so they don’t leave. We also try to control them so they act the way we want them to act. This in turn serves to keep our pain hidden from us.
- Conditional – Anytime we think or say to our partner, “I love you if..”, “I love you when.” or “I love you because..”ewe love that person out of fear. The fear is they have to look, act and be just as we imagined them to be in order to fulfill our needs -epain relief. It they no longer tick the boxes on our list, we won’t get pain relief. This causes fear in us.
- Expectations -I expect you to be there.” I expect you to do this for me.” I expect you to.” Expectations of your partner or of the relationship in general isn’t real love, it’s fear. The reasons we have expectations of others is so they will be there to meet our needs, which is to hide our pain. They are a mere commodity to us.
- Making Enemies of Loved Ones -Your partner becomes your enemy when your fears are exposed. But, nothing outside of you has the power to make you feel anything. All that is happening is that your pain has been brought to the surface for you to see. In the realm of ego love, we believe everything outside of us causes our pain. Real love knows we have been tricked into believing this and looks within for healing. Seeing your pain is the beginning of healing. No one is your enemy, not even your own ego. It is all a matter of transcendence.
- Withholding love -Any time we withhold love, which includes withholding interaction, conversation, intimacy and more, we are punishing for not hiding our pain from us, which in ego love, is their only purpose. Real love does not punish. Real love investigates, uncovers and heals.
- Desperation -Inflicting emotional or physical pain on your partner, tracking your partner, begging and crying all happens when your needs are not being met -which means your pain is not being hidden. When you feel desperate, look within. Your partner is not making you feel this way, your fear of not being good enough is creating this desperation. Becoming aware of this puts you on the path to healing.
- Illusion factory-There is one thing ego love is good at and that’s story-telling. Why? Because the ego ignores anything that doesn’t validate its pain. In order to do this, the ego has to tell a lot of stories. These stories are based on fear and illusion because that is all the ego knows. Such stories are a distraction to keep us from seeing truth and reality. Truth dispels and reveals what is false. In the light of the truth the ego has no power and no longer exists. This is where self-love is revealed to us. This is where healing begins.
All red flags show us our pain in full view. This is where our fears are revealed. It is up to us to see them for what they are – just beliefs in a false self that says we are not good enough. We are able to use this view to begin the process of introspection and healing.
This step of self-inspection of ego love and introspection of personal pain requires a great deal of honesty within yourself and a willingness to see the old system for what it is. It also requires courage, forgiveness of self and support from trusted sources that understand the system of ego love. There is no blame here and no judgment, only uncovering red flags for the purpose of leaving them behind and allowing real love to surface -it is always there.
This process helps us see the contrast between illusion and reality, pain and healing, fear and love. Through this we will see that we are good enough and that we deserve to love ourselves. When we do, we will find real love in others. Our relationships with others will mirror our relationship to ourselves, as it always has, but this time it will be about love, not fear. It is time to transcend ego love and allow real love to shine through, touching and illuminating every aspect of our life.
Next week: Part III: Transcending Ego Love to Find
Last
week: Part I: Is it Love or Just Your Ego?
