Almost every day, I go for a hike or a run for 40 or more minutes in my neighborhood. Although the weather is usually quite warm, even in the wintertime here in San Diego, the daytime temperature drops into the 40s a few times every year. In that brisk cold air, I wear warm workout clothes, including a hoody over my head and a pair of sunglasses to shield against the glare of the sun.
The ego pursues whatever validates and strengthens its sense of self — a pursuit that ultimately ends in suffering. On the other hand, love takes the gifts and talents that we have and expresses them in ways that bring others and ourselves joy and wholeness.
The ego is the cause of your unhappiness and unhealthy relationships and can even create sickness in your body. So during this month, we will explore through our Daily Wisdom posts how the ego works in our lives and why we must awaken within to our union with God to enjoy healthy relationships and thus live our best life.
All of us have different experiences that shape our sense of self. We are by-products of our upbringings and what we have experienced and learned in life. Those events live on as the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Whether our understanding of what happened is factually correct or not doesn’t matter, because what remains as an unconscious memory is our interpretation of what happened. Combined with other memories, these stories about who we are form an egoic pattern in our subconscious that then determines our conscious thought-patterns, beliefs, passions, and pursuits.
It didn’t take long for me to forget about the episode. The memory was too painful, so I suppressed it into my unconscious. But as it lodged in there, it had altered my personality and my self-perception.
