The huge pressure of ego.

We humans suffer tremendously at the hands of our ego. It puts great pressure on us. It says, “I must be perfect.” ‘I must do everything on my own.” “I must be brilliant, have all the answers.” It makes us the center of the universe and that’s a lot of pressure, isn’t it?

I think Dr. Wayne Dyer describes ego well as an acronym: Edging God Out. It’s the part of us that tries so hard to separate us from everyone and everything. At the extreme, war is an example of this separation.

Notice when mind is making you the center of the universe. When it is burdening you with all the solutions and all the world. If you get to the point of, “I don’t know what to do!”, that’s wonderful because YOU don’t know what to do. Yes, the  ego you don’t know. This phrase is the reminder to open yourself to bigger answers. For some they call it God or The Universe. Carl Jung called it Collective Unconscious. We might also call it intuition or simply just looking around and asking another human.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love talks about how the pressure to have a perfect book is crushing. It’s just ego. Instead, we KNOW we aren’t writing the book. We don’t have all the answers. We have a genie by our side. We just open to the genie. This is where the word genius came from. Not that WE are a genius, that’s ego. Rather, I have a genie that works with me. Sometimes, I’m open to the genie.

Try it out this week. If you have a stuck moment, were YOU don’t know what to do, admit YOU don’t know what to do and open you heart to intuition as the answer. I know as a coach, my most brilliant moments are when I just surrender to let answers come out and can’t remember what I said right after.