For a long time, when I was suffering, I had a clear agenda.
Validate my pain. Validate my suffering.
Misery loves company, right? That’s what we think. I’d go into pity party mode, and what I was interested in was having somebody join me there.
Then something shifted.
I became a dedicated spiritual student who was still experiencing these intense upsets. Still experiencing pain, suffering, challenges. And I found I was becoming less and less interested in the pity party.
Not because I’d healed.
Because my ego identity had found a smarter game of sabotage.
It said: this feeling miserable, this feeling sad and stupid and wrong and bad, that’s a sign you’re a spiritual failure. You have to hide it from your spiritual friends. Your spiritual friends will judge you and think you’re not spiritual.
And the last thing in the world my ego identity could tolerate was spiritual failure.
My ego identity wanted, absolutely, to feel spiritually superior. It was a constant self-sabotage.
That’s what my ego identity was always after. Feeling spiritually superior. Why?
To counterbalance that feeling of completely and totally, forever spiritually inferior.
Do you see how the separation is always playing out, even among spiritual students? When a spiritual student is still strongly identified with their ego identity, the ego thoughts drive their spiritual studies and their spiritual practice.
Superiority. Inferiority. Same coin. Different sides of the same illusion.
Here’s what made a difference for me:
I stopped trying to win the game and started noticing the game, and I decided to get out from under it – because it really was like a knee on the neck.
The games the ego thought system has derived are an endless loop of “I’m not good enough.” And we don’t have to play.
When we see the games playing out, that’s our perfect opportunity for a healing. Let’s claim it. Let’s maximize our awareness right there.
I place all of it on the holy altar fire of divine love and say: “Holy Spirit, please take these thoughts, these feelings, all of it, out of my mind and out of my experience. I’m not interested in spiritual inferiority or superiority anymore.”
What I’m interested in now is transmutation, transformation, Freedom, liberation from the suffering – for everyone, not just me.
I cannot truly be free until we all are.
Learning to catch this, in real time, in community, is exactly what we practice week by week in my Masterful Living Program. It’s the work I love most.
That’s what shifted me from feeling like a victim to loving my life.
End My Self-Sabotage 6-Week Program begins Sunday, July 26th. Self-sabotage is designed to slow down our spiritual growth. But what if I told you that we can dissolve that pattern? When you recognize the pattern, you can interrupt it. And when you interrupt it with Love instead of willpower, everything changes. I used to struggle with self-medication and other forms of self-sabotage, but that’s behind me now – if you can relate – let’s do it together! Click here to learn more.
LATEST PODCAST EPISODE: Learning to Trust Yourself with Author Tama Kieves My friend Tama Kieves wrote the book on trust I wish I’d had years ago. She’s a Harvard Law honors graduate who walked away from her law career with no plan and no money, following a single voice toward the life that was actually hers. We sat down to talk about her new book, Learning to Trust Yourself, and the thing nearly every A Course in Miracles student wrestles with: how do we tell the voice of love from the voice of fear?
