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      "author": "gokike",
      "body": "![heart-1616465__340.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYBEBQTwGsSgijarFqfdZm6yTfWGNKSEnAKhHDVdtbExU/heart-1616465__340.jpg)\n\nAddictive relationships are always are always driven by the ego. You are “in love” with your partner but on the opposite side, your hate manifests as possessiveness, blame, anger, fear of loss, manipulation, need to be right. That type of relationship does not convey the true meaning of love. It is an unconscious relationship which stems from your attachment to the person. You are trying to find fulfillment through your partner, hence, instead of realizing your individual completeness, you think you are incomplete without the other.\n\nA conscious relationship is not like an addictive one. The love comes from someone who is at peace with himself and is not trying to find salvation in another person. Issues may arise in a conscious relationship but partners do not lose themselves in the issue. In order to enter a conscious relationship or transform your addictive relationship to a conscious one, knowing the following can be helpful:\n\n    Love is a state of being: You have been searching for love. That is because you think love is outside of you and when you get it, you will be fulfilled. But love is not outside of you. It is not dependent on an external object or person. Love is not a thought or a feeling. Then what is love? Love is an aspect of the true nature of your being. Love is already present in you. But because your ego dominates you, you do not seem to be connected to the love in you. When your ego (false self) dissolves, what is left is who you are. When you are at home in yourself, being who you really are, your true nature manifests. In that state, you experience the love that you already have. Your love does not start with another person. It starts with you and shines through to others.\n    Be present: Conflicts intensify in relationships because we hardly live in the present moment. When you lose yourself in a fight, you are definitely not present. If you are present in the Now, you cannot lose yourself in a fight. You feel the need to attack and criticize your partner because your thoughts have taken over you. When you feel the need to attack, anchor yourself in the present moment by focusing on your breath – breathe in and breathe out, and be aware you are doing that. This would stop you from giving power to your thoughts and avoid a situation where you ask, “What came over me?”\n\nUnconsciously, you fear being present because it will lead you to your pain. But your presence has power and with that power it is able to dissolve or transmute your pain.\n\n    True communication is communion: Where is the relationship without communication? If you and your partner are not really communicating then you do not have a relationship but an illusion of one. When you communicate, put aside your mind games and emotional tricks. Your communication should be to commune not to win.\n    Relationship does not offer salvation: When you seek salvation or fulfillment from a relationship, you are likely to suffocate the relationship by being manipulative because of the fear of your partner leaving you. Your being is already complete and so no thing or person can complete you.\n\nBeing at one with your Being is fulfillment. It is therefore not when you have a relationship that you will be fulfilled. It is when you are fulfilled that you will have a true relationship.",
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      "author": "gokike",
      "body": "In 1987, a company, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), launched Breast Cancer Awareness Month in USA. It is a highly publicized event which takes place every October. Breast Cancer Awareness Month is focused on educating women about early breast cancer detection with a particular focus on mammograms. Its trademark slogan is “Early Detection Is Your Best Prevention.” That may make sense or seem convincing to you but it is actually silly. By the time cancer is detected, it already exists, so what are you preventing then? Breast Cancer Awareness Month says it is about prevention but with its focus on mammograms, are people’s attention not being diverted away from real prevention?\n\nContinue Reading: https://consciousevolutionpath.com/cancer-prevention-iii/![nerve-cell-2213009_640.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmbeBs3fb3w5TN68u5bkbmWriCXg2hxz3aNPoJiHEqe1C4/nerve-cell-2213009_640.jpg)",
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      "author": "gokike",
      "body": "![rumen-648637_640.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmcYFqTAc91CBRB8VWFJvC4iZLu4Sswc8u2L6rzf9AiN3V/rumen-648637_640.jpg)\n\nDiseases of affluence is a term used in referring to selected diseases and other health conditions which are usually linked to increasing wealth and luxury in a society. They include obesity, diabetes, cancer, hypertension. The assumption has been that increased luxury and wealth result in a better quality of life but this has not really been the case. When wealth comes, there is usually a change in lifestyle and food choices which greatly affect health.\n\nOne factor that has really contributed to chronic health conditions is diet. When people have luxury, they tend to switch to western diet and adopt a sedentary lifestyle. These can be disastrous to health. Because the vast majority of people in the United States and other Western countries die from diseases of affluence, the diseases are often referred to as “Western” diseases.\n\nIn the course of the China Study, Dr. Campbell and his team compared the prevalence of Western diseases in each county with diet and lifestyle variables. To their surprise, they found that one of the strongest predictors of Western diseases was blood cholesterol.\n\nWhen it comes to cholesterol, there are two main categories: dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol.\n\nPresent in the food we eat is dietary cholesterol. Much like vitamins, minerals, fat, protein, and sugar, dietary cholesterol is a component of food. Where is this cholesterol found? Only in animal-based food. It is the one you find on food labels. How many organ meat did you eat last week? Your doctor cannot measure that just as he cannot measure dietary cholesterol. When your doctor checks your cholesterol levels, he cannot know how much dietary cholesterol you consume. What your doctor measures is the amount of cholesterol present in your blood. This second type of cholesterol which is made in the liver is called “blood cholesterol.” Dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol are identical but they do not represent the same thing. Dietary cholesterol does not necessarily turn into blood cholesterol. Hundreds of different chemical reactions and dozens of nutrients are involved in the extremely complex way the body makes blood cholesterol. As a result of this complexity, the health effects of eating dietary cholesterol may be very different from the health effects of having blood cholesterol.\n\nAs blood cholesterol levels in rural China rose in certain counties, the incidence of “Western” diseases also increased. What made this so surprising was that Chinese levels were far lower than we had expected. The average level of blood cholesterol was only 127 mg/dL, which is almost 100 points less than the American average (215 mg/dL)! Some counties had average levels as low as 94 mg/dL. For two groups of about twenty-five women in the inner part of China, average blood cholesterol was at the amazingly low level of 80 mg/dL.\n\nIf you know your own cholesterol levels, you’ll appreciate how low these values really are. In the U.S., our range is around 170-290 mg/dL. Our low values are near the high values for rural China. Indeed, in the U.S., there was a myth that there might be health problems if cholesterol levels were below 150 mg/dL. If we followed that line of thinking, about 85% of the rural Chinese would appear to be in trouble. But the truth is quite different. Lower blood cholesterol levels are linked to lower rates of heart disease, cancer and other Western diseases, even at levels far below those considered “safe” in the West.\n\nAt the outset of the China Study, no one could or would have predicted that there would be a relationship between cholesterol and any of the disease rates. What a surprise we got! As blood cholesterol levels decreased from 170 mg/dL to 90 mg/dL, cancers of the liver, rectum, colon, male lung, female lung, breast, childhood leukemia, adult leukemia, childhood brain, adult brain, stomach and esophagus (throat) decreased. As you can see, this is a sizable list. Most Americans know that if you have high cholesterol, you should worry about your heart, but they don’t know that you might want to worry about cancer as well.1\n\nLow-density lipoprotein (LDL) and high-density lipoprotein (HDL) are two types of blood cholesterol. HDL is the “good” kind while LDL is the “bad” kind. Higher levels of LDL cholesterol were associated with Western diseases in the China Study.\n\nNote:\n\n     T. Colin Campbell, PhD, and Thomas M. Campbell II, The China Study: Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-term Health, 2006, BenBella Books, Inc., Dallas, pp. 78-79.",
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      "body": "![heart-529607_640.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmPTyqc1u7rN59CcKpqn8rB3Un8F3aF4tAtq4XXvyFD2uC/heart-529607_640.jpg)\n\nAddictive relationships are always are always driven by the ego. You are “in love” with your partner but on the opposite side, your hate manifests as possessiveness, blame, anger, fear of loss, manipulation, need to be right. That type of relationship does not convey the true meaning of love. It is an unconscious relationship which stems from your attachment to the person. You are trying to find fulfillment through your partner, hence, instead of realizing your individual completeness, you think you are incomplete without the other.\n\nA conscious relationship is not like an addictive one. The love comes from someone who is at peace with himself and is not trying to find salvation in another person. Issues may arise in a conscious relationship but partners do not lose themselves in the issue. In order to enter a conscious relationship or transform your addictive relationship to a conscious one, knowing the following can be helpful:\n\na.\tLove is a state of being: You have been searching for love. That is because you think love is outside of you and when you get it, you will be fulfilled. But love is not outside of you. It is not dependent on an external object or person. Love is not a thought or a feeling. Then what is love? Love is an aspect of the true nature of your being. Love is already present in you. But because your ego dominates you, you do not seem to be connected to the love in you. When your ego (false self) dissolves, what is left is who you are. When you are at home in yourself, being who you really are, your true nature manifests. In that state, you experience the love that you already have. Your love does not start with another person. It starts with you and shines through to others.\n\nb.\tBe present: Conflicts intensify in relationships because we hardly live in the present moment. When you lose yourself in a fight, you are definitely not present. If you are present in the Now, you cannot lose yourself in a fight. You feel the need to attack and criticize your partner because your thoughts have taken over you. When you feel the need to attack, anchor yourself in the present moment by focusing on your breath – breathe in and breathe out, and be aware you are doing that. This would stop you from giving power to your thoughts and avoid a situation where you ask, “What came over me?”\n\nUnconsciously, you fear being present because it will lead you to your pain. But your presence has power and with that power it is able to dissolve or transmute your pain.\n\nc.\tTrue communication is communion: Where is the relationship without communication? If you and your partner are not really communicating then you do not have a relationship but an illusion of one. When you communicate, put aside your mind games and emotional tricks. Your communication should be to commune not to win.\n\nd.\tRelationship does not offer salvation: When you seek salvation or fulfillment from a relationship, you are likely to suffocate the relationship by being manipulative because of the fear of your partner leaving you. Your being is already complete and so no thing or person can complete you.\n\nIf you cannot be at ease with yourself when you are alone, you will seek a relationship to cover up your unease. You can be sure that the unease will then reappear in some other form within the relationship, and you will probably hold your partner responsible for it.\nAll you really need to do is accept this moment fully. You are then at ease in the here and now and at ease with yourself.1\n\nBeing at one with your Being is fulfillment. It is therefore not when you have a relationship that you will be fulfilled. It is \nwhen you are fulfilled that you will have a true relationship.\n\nNote:\n\n1.\tEckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, 2004, New World Library, Novato, and Namaste Publishing, Canada, p. 174",
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      "author": "minibot",
      "body": "This post has been upvoted for free by @minibot with 5%! \n Get better upvotes by bidding on me.\nMore profits? 100% Payout! Delegate some SteemPower to @minibot:  [1 SP](https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/delegateVestingShares?delegator=&delegatee=minibot&vesting_shares=2049%20VESTS), [5 SP](https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/delegateVestingShares?delegator=&delegatee=minibot&vesting_shares=10245%20VESTS), [10 SP](https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/delegateVestingShares?delegator=&delegatee=minibot&vesting_shares=20489%20VESTS), [custom amount](https://steembottracker.com/delegation.html)\nYou like to bet and win 20x your bid? Have a look at @gtw and [this description](https://steemit.com/guessthewitness/@isnochys/guess-the-witness-steemdice-for-witnesses)!",
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      "author": "gokike",
      "body": "![architecture-1477041_640.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmd5YQmcYynKcBGEqknzJvfWEgwWJpDp4tC7Cc3h6F5HCm/architecture-1477041_640.jpg)\n\n“I need to look good so that men will talk to me,” a young lady said. An older lady affirmed, “Yes o. If you don’t look good, they won’t even notice you.” I asked them, “What if after looking good no man appreciates your look?” I went ahead and said, “Nothing is wrong with looking good in itself but to look good so that men will talk to you means hanging your happiness on that happening so that if you look good and men do not talk to you, you feel unhappy as a result of thinking something is wrong with you.”\n\nIf a young lady believes that she needs a man’s compliment to be happy, then she is not at home in herself. She may not be able to place her hand upon it exactly but there is a void, a fear, a pain, a level of dissatisfaction she has within. She does not want to give attention to the pain within rather she is constantly trying to escape it. But how can you escape what is in you already? Nonetheless, she continues her fruitless attempt to escape the pain. Before long she comes across something or somebody in her life that serves as a blockage preventing her from accessing the pain. She now has a partner or boyfriend. Because she desperately does not want to feel the pain in her, she is addicted to her boyfriend. In her fear of losing her boyfriend and facing “death” she manipulates him. Her manipulation frustrates his own attempt to control her. Things fall apart – they break up. Her story becomes, “He broke my heart.” She does not see it was her expectations that were broken, not her heart. When that happened, it brought her closer to her heart, closer to that pain that has been there before the relationship but constantly avoided by her, the pain she tried to use the relationship to cover. The relationship is ended and she feels the pain intensely. The pain seems overwhelming and she blames her ex-boyfriend for that. But it was the same pain that was there before the relationship. Now she is not far from the pain because she is not having her ex-boyfriend blocking her from accessing it. This why she feels the pain more intensely. One thing she does not realize is that the break up that happened needed to happen so that she can love herself and be at home in herself.\n\nA relationship is a by-product of your connection to yourself. There are times when we need to work on connecting to ourselves and we need to do it alone. You may feel additional pain after a breakup because of your belief that you have to be in a relationship or because of the conditioning that love is found outside of yourself. The pain is there so that you can learn to love yourself but you will find it difficult to do so until you appreciate yourself on a whole new level. When you succeed in doing this, the pain will leave you. \n\nA relationship is sharing and appreciation not control or ownership. When you truly love or appreciate yourself, you will not love your partner like an addiction. If in order to numb the pain you feel following a breakup you quickly go into another relationship, you succeed in doing a rinse and repeat.\n\nThere was a period following a breakup that I decided not to go into any relationship for sometime. That decision helped me to appreciate myself and to stop looking for someone to make me feel happy. I found joy in myself. I even asked myself what it was I saw in some of the persons I had relationships with. If I had loved and appreciated myself, I know those relationships would never had happened. If you are in a hurry to find love, you may end up going astray just because you found someone available and willing. It then becomes a case of “if the desirable is not available, the available becomes the desirable.”\n\nDuring that period of staying away from an intimate relationship, I saw myself cherishing the bonds I have with my family and few friends. I saw how I had wrapped my whole life around relationships which stunted my growth in other areas of my life. I found myself developing new friendships and expanding my horizons. I felt an expansion within and I knew I was growing. In fact I was conscious of my evolution even though I was “alone.” I experienced peace in myself. \nIf you cannot be happy outside of a committed relationship, you may need to stop and reflect why this is so. In fact you may need to be alone even though you are scared of being alone. There is no way around pain but there is a way through it.",
      "json_metadata": "{\"tags\":[\"consciousness\",\"transformation\",\"power\",\"spirituality\",\"africa\"],\"image\":[\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmd5YQmcYynKcBGEqknzJvfWEgwWJpDp4tC7Cc3h6F5HCm/architecture-1477041_640.jpg\"],\"app\":\"steemit/0.1\",\"format\":\"markdown\"}",
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      "author": "steemitboard",
      "body": "Congratulations @gokike! You have completed the following achievement on the Steem blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :\n\n[![](https://steemitimages.com/70x80/http://steemitboard.com/notifications/posts.png)](http://steemitboard.com/@gokike) Award for the number of posts published\n\n<sub>_Click on the badge to view your Board of Honor._</sub>\n<sub>_If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word_ `STOP`</sub>\n\n\n\n> Support [SteemitBoard's project](https://steemit.com/@steemitboard)! **[Vote for its witness](https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=steemitboard&approve=1)** and **get one more award**!",
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{
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  "op": [
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    {
      "author": "gokike",
      "body": "![ship-1366926_640.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmbTMb4X616abzGdKmjvURVhT7ustd3YaReVu5HdkMPUYT/ship-1366926_640.jpg)\n\nOne who is dominated by the ego would find himself constantly accompanied by deep-seated feelings. It could be a feeling of discontent. If one were to be at one with one’s true self, then one would no longer be dominated by the ego and one would transcend one’s self.\n\nBut as often is the case, the person with the feeling of unhappiness instead of accepting the feeling resists it. He feels unhappy and now he has added resistance to the unhappiness. The result is suffering. He does not know why he suffers but he is hell-bent on escaping the suffering. Escapism ensues which is usually in the form of an addiction. As often as is the case, a human being becomes the object of addiction and we usually call this a relationship.\n\nHe feels unhappy so he says to himself, “I need someone in order to be happy,” or, “I don’t want to be alone.” So he looks for someone to go into a relationship with and he finds her. The odds are good that the person he finds was also looking for someone to escape her loneliness. They become codependent on each other but the say they are in love. Both of them are using each other to avoid the fear they have inside. As they constantly avoid accepting that fear, they block themselves from experiencing the fear and then transcending it. They are stuck but they are not aware they are.\nAddiction, attraction, eroticism, control, then add possessiveness to it – this combination produces an intense emotionalism which we often call love. But that which we often call love is an ingrown dependency relationship where another person serves as the object of one’s need for security. This results to an unhealthy attachment to the passion felt at the beginning of the relationship. Shortly after the excitement subsides, you see no reason to continue the relationship. If you have a history of short romantic relationships, falling in and out of love many times, this may be your case. You were looking for a fantasy and you went into a relationship. The relationship did not meet the expectation of your fantasy so you abandoned it and went on to the next. You repeat the cycle again and again. No person or thing can permanently cover up the pain inside you. No relationship can meet the expectation of your fantasy. The pain is the universal feeling of not being connected with the deeper level of your being – not being at one with yourself.\n\nWhen we go into relationships, we often enter with memories of past relationships and expectations. We also enter with personally and culturally conditioned mental concepts of what a relationship should be like. So on the one hand, you have mental concepts of what your relationship should be like, on the other hand, you have your relationship. You are now trying to make your relationship conform to your mental concepts. You become controlling. You are trying to control reality but you cannot so you get disappointed and angry. You dwell in resistance, you suffer. If you want to truly love, you have to let go of those concepts and ideas. \n\nTry this exercise, the next time you see your partner, let go of the mental ideas and beliefs you have about her. In the moment that you are with her, be with her fully. How can you be fully with her? By giving her your full attention. Relate with her in that moment without judgment. Be empty, be there, be the space, and relate. This exercise may be the beginning of a shift in your relationship.",
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      "author": "pabisovsky-b",
      "body": "<b><center>Welcome @gokike on Steemit Blockchain!</center></b>\n\n<center>Join our Discord Server https://discordapp.com/invite/hkteFvR and <b>get free upvotes from bot</b> soon!</center>",
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{
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      "author": "gokike",
      "body": "![hand-784077_640.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmehXCPH7CzJ8r7aFoQ6wKfUQGyG9teZMBcmMLrxT5U1Cf/hand-784077_640.jpg)\n\nIn order to achieve the desires of the ego, we often end up being manipulative in our relationships. This does not only happen in intimate relationships but in relationship with family members, friends, and colleagues at work. Some people may not be conscious of the fact that their actions are manipulative.\n\nA manipulative relationship is one-sided and unbalanced, advancing the goals of the manipulator at the expense of the person being manipulated. No one likes being manipulated, so when the one being manipulated finds out about the manipulation, the relationship becomes troubled.\n\nManipulation is not influence. One may try to advance one’s goals with influence but one recognizes the rights and boundaries of other people, and it is based on direct, honest communication. Influence recognizes the integrity of the other person including the choice not to go along with attempted persuasion. Manipulation, on the other hand, depends on covert agendas and usually attempts to coerce the other into giving in. A manipulator may appear strong and in control but behind this show, insecurity is often found. With the tendency to exploit others, people who manipulate others have difficulty in maintaining good interpersonal relationships.\n\nA manipulator does not usually start his manipulation at the beginning of a relationship. What does he gain if the relationship ends immediately? So, the manipulation progresses over time. The manipulator observes the other person’s vulnerabilities and learns how to exploit them.\n\nManipulative people have a strong need to be in control. Full of ego, they believe they will be annihilated if they lose this sense of control. They may display strong self-confidence but that is a compensation for the underlying feeling of insecurity. Their motives being self-serving, they pursue their goals regardless of the cost to the other. They find it difficult to show their vulnerable emotions because to them, this suggests they are not in control. One who is being manipulated may actually be enabling the manipulator. So, if you feel you are being manipulated in your relationship, you may want to sit down and see how you may be encouraging the manipulator unwittingly.\n\nDepending on the severity of the manipulation and the damage it has done to your sense of integrity, you may need to consider whether it is worth it to continue in the relationship. There are of course situations where instead of leaving you may have to change the situation. Parent-child relationship is an example.\n\nIt is not helpful to try to out-manipulate a manipulator. You will be making yourself vulnerable to further manipulation. The relationship will then be a battle between egos and this can in no way be of benefit to you. Instead you open yourself to a continual experience of pain and suffering as you persist in your resistance mode.\n\nYou can disable a manipulative behaviour by making a change within yourself. Surrender. Surrendering does not mean you should be okay with the manipulation. Surrendering is more of an internal acceptance than an external resignation. It involves you seeing the situation the way it is. You do not surrender because you like it. You surrender simply because it is and so that you offer no resistance to what is. Surrender, then act. Change the dynamics of the manipulative relationship. Cease to be cooperative with manipulative tactics. Manipulators who keep working hard to maintain control in a relationship without success usually give up by leaving the relationship and looking for someone else to control – until they become conscious.",
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      "body": "Nice, very good read!\nThe greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.",
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      "body": "![face-66317_640.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQMc1nED7acBU49Zk1eF6RwDtK61D7Hp4TBtD9jWpZsme/face-66317_640.jpg)\n\nYou approached your relationship not with the intent of sharing love but with the intent to win affection and avoid loneliness.  With the fear of being alone, you approached her for a relationship. In relationship with her, you will keep dancing on the edge of loneliness, “What if she leaves me?” So you keep doing things and present yourself a certain way so that you can avoid loneliness. You are not being authentic. Whatever you do to avoid loneliness becomes a link that holds the potential to that loneliness you are avoiding. It is a counterproductive way to love. Sensitivity to loss and rejection results in dependency on another person who “completes” you. You complain about not being very close with her and the next minute you worry about the thought of being too close with her. You formed a relationship to battle the turmoil going on inside you. You have not resolved the turmoil. Actually, you want the relationship to do that but it cannot. The relationship has become a distraction. It is a means of escape. When the high of the early stage of the relationship wears off, the turmoil inside you alerts you of its presence. Then you unconsciously blame your partner for not getting rid of your fear. You quarrel and fight. The inner conflict manifests in your external world – as it is within, so it is without.\n\nYou did not start out to share love but to steal it. You did not fall in love, you fell in need. The whole drama in your relationship is about you attempting to fill a void with a person. The earlier you realize that person cannot fill that void, the better. How can your peace totally depend on what someone does or does not do? You wanted your partner to show you love by doing something. She did not do it. You got angry and you blame her for getting you angry. You are angry because she did not pretend to want to do what you wanted her to do. Had she pretended, you would be happy. She would have been inauthentic and deceived you, and you would have felt happy. A superficial problem is covering your fear. By not resolving that fear, you compound your sensitivity.\n\nMarriage is a wonderful institution but marriage is being used by many to fulfill the needs of ego. You want to commit, you want to present a ring to her. You like how she makes you feel about yourself. You want to feel more of that and you desire her. You are hooked. You are addicted to a person. You do not realize that and both of you go into marriage. The reason you went into marriage with her is how she makes you feel. That reason will take over your marriage and if you are not careful, that reason will cause your separation. Your ego wants this so that you can feel happy. Her ego wants that so that she can feel secured. The marriage increasingly becomes your ego’s agenda versus hers. Conflict again and again. Mentally you live somewhere and mentally she lives somewhere else. Both of you have not just taken positions, both of you are actively defending your positions at war with each other. So both of you wait for the other’s trigger so as to make a move. At this stage, many couples will agree that the love is gone. No, love is not gone. Love is trapped. \nYour ego creates problems. It wants love to solve its problems while it goes on creating new ones. You cannot control people. Stop trying to control her life – her interests, opinions, behaviour, even how she loves you. Let go of that script in your head telling you how she ought to love you. You may then realize that she has been trying to share love with you in ways you have never acknowledged.",
      "json_metadata": "{\"tags\":[\"truth\",\"consciousness\",\"peace\",\"love\",\"nigeria\"],\"image\":[\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQMc1nED7acBU49Zk1eF6RwDtK61D7Hp4TBtD9jWpZsme/face-66317_640.jpg\"],\"app\":\"steemit/0.1\",\"format\":\"markdown\"}",
      "parent_author": "",
      "parent_permlink": "truth",
      "permlink": "the-ego-in-relationship-ii",
      "title": "The Ego in Relationship II"
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  "timestamp": "2018-09-08T08:35:18",
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{
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      "author": "gokike",
      "body": "![woman-1566154_640.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmNuJ86Gv3pQDAS8NpGBGnyzAeiWoCUz8yZ3mNZ8TRCgEc/woman-1566154_640.jpg)\n\nYou have your thoughts, opinions, interpretations, judgments, and experience. All these come against her pattern of thoughts, opinions, interpretations, judgments, and experience, in your relationship with her. What is the result? Misunderstanding, grudges, and bickering. “But it was not like this at the start,” you say.\n\nYou remember meeting her for the first time. She was the woman of your dream. Full of your egoic thoughts, beliefs, and ideas, you started a conversation with her. And she responded or rather, her ego responded. A relationship is about to begin. There is talk but no true communication. It is your ego communicating with her ego not your true self communicating with her true self. You are not being real, you are not being you, so you pretend to be who you are not. The same happens with her. You do not meet her, your ego meets her ego.\n\nEgo meets ego and so the egos interact and form a relationship. You call it love but ego love is conditional, possessive, having so much expectations. Love is a state of being but for the ego, it is not so. Love for the ego is a business transaction, “I will give you my attention and resources and you will give me your appreciation and sacrifices.” This is why ego love ends up being a story of negotiation and compromise, a journey of infatuation, lust, and betrayal.\nAt the centre of our being is God. If we are in alignment with the centre of our being, we are in alignment with God. That is a blissful state. I call it the state of grace. In that state, it is no longer you who lives but God – God lives through you. But the problem is that our mode of living is decentred from the source of our being, we are no longer in alignment with God. A void is created and we feel it as fear. The void gives us anything but peace. Instead of dwelling in God to fill this void and experience peace, we try to fill the void with work, entertainment, pleasures, and other forms of distractions none of which can fill the void even though they can make us feel happy. Needless to say, a relationship cannot fill the void but you have the expectation that your relationship will fill the void, will make you happy.\n\nA true relationship is a communion of beings in love, in love with themselves first. You cannot give what you do not have, so if you want to give or share love, you have to experience the love in you first. If you are in love in yourself and she is love in herself, then the relationship both of you will form will be a communion of love. If you are not in love in yourself and she is not in love in herself, then the relationship becomes a distraction, a distraction that prevents both of you from going within to face that fear created by that void resulting from your decentred mode of living. Instead of dissolving the fear, you compound the fear.",
      "json_metadata": "{\"tags\":[\"love\",\"hate\",\"fear\",\"consciousness\",\"nigeria\"],\"image\":[\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmNuJ86Gv3pQDAS8NpGBGnyzAeiWoCUz8yZ3mNZ8TRCgEc/woman-1566154_640.jpg\"],\"app\":\"steemit/0.1\",\"format\":\"markdown\"}",
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      "permlink": "the-ego-in-relationship",
      "title": "The Ego in Relationship"
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{
  "block": 25403092,
  "op": [
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      "author": "gokike",
      "body": "![perception-3539332_640.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmRw8ZZjkyXfZTyJ8KrGJfZecbSiW1nu6sEg9AupkDrVzo/perception-3539332_640.jpg)\n\nIn the early stages of many relationships, role-playing is common. Both partners usually are not being who they are and they play roles to attract and keep one another. The unconscious agreement they have is: “I’ll keep playing the role you want me to play, and you will keep playing the role I want you to play.” The agreement is unconscious and so is unspoken. But keeping up with the role that is being played is hard work. Hence, the roles cannot be sustained. Role-playing drops when they start living together. Then both partners seem to be watching Discovery Channel. Discoveries about the other person keep hitting them. What do they see? Ego in its raw form not covered by role-playing. And what do they feel? Anger towards each other. In this situation you blame your partner for not removing the fear and sense of lack you had before the relationship. But the fear and sense of lack have always been with you; they were obscured by the dysfunctional relationship you have.\n\nThere is no true love in the relationship, hence, it is dysfunctional. This is why the relationship oscillates between “love” and hate. The love you felt at the beginning now turns into hostility or withdrawal of affection which can happen in an instant. Some couples get addicted to the love and hate cycle of the relationship. The drama makes them feel alive. As time progresses, the negative cycle increases in frequency which finally leads to the collapse of the relationship. The “love” in the love and hate cycle is not true love. True love does not have opposite. It does not arise from the mind but from beyond it. The “love” and hate are actually two sides of the same coin – the dysfunction.\n\nI am not not proposing you avoid relationships in order to avoid pain. Whether you are in a relationship or not, the pain you have is there. This write-up is rather asking you to awaken, to be conscious. It is asking you to bring your presence to your Being. This helps you to be present for your partner in a relationship without wanting to manipulate him or her. And you give your partner attention and space, space to be. Not space to be what you want him or her to be but space for him or her to simply be. Then the love in your Being will manifest as true love. If your partner is also conscious, both of you will have a relationship that can be truly called a love relationship. If your partner is unconscious, it is either your consciousness draws your partner to consciousness or your partner leaves you. Unconsciousness cannot stand consciousness for long. Instead of blaming your partner for leaving, you feel compassion for your partner. And as for you, your consciousness will most likely attract someone else who is conscious. The result is a better relationship.\n\nRelationships with true love are rare today. Maybe it is because conscious individuals are rare.",
      "json_metadata": "{\"tags\":[\"love\",\"consciousness\",\"spirituality\",\"being\",\"nigeria\"],\"image\":[\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmRw8ZZjkyXfZTyJ8KrGJfZecbSiW1nu6sEg9AupkDrVzo/perception-3539332_640.jpg\"],\"app\":\"steemit/0.1\",\"format\":\"markdown\"}",
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      "permlink": "unconscious-relationship",
      "title": "Unconscious Relationship"
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  ],
  "op_in_trx": 0,
  "timestamp": "2018-08-18T11:30:33",
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{
  "block": 25174261,
  "op": [
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      "author": "gokike",
      "body": "![hands-437968_640.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmWA87G8JUMF3qovE3oSesKq75ggpV7UchTBpxoxwTgtUC/hands-437968_640.jpg)\nYou have fear, the fear of being alone. Your “aloneness” makes you feel a sense of lack. So you want to hook-up; you want to have a partner. A partner that will be with you in a relationship, an intimate relationship. And you meet the person. The person makes you feel special and happy. There are butterflies in your stomach. You fall in love. You feel alive because someone wants and needs you just as you want and need the person. You feel that the part of you you felt was missing has appeared in your life. The relationship is everything and everything else seems insignificant. The fact that something outside of you has become the centre of your life does not seem to matter to you. But there is something you are not aware of because you are unconscious: you are having an addiction.\nYou are addicted to the other person. No. You are actually addicted to the image you have of the other person. What you call “falling in love” is really an intensification of egoic wanting and needing. This is not true love. True love has nothing to do with wanting. Think of losing your partner. This creates the fear of loss in you which can manifest as jealousy, possessiveness, control, emotional blackmail. And if your partner does leave you, you find yourself in an intense grief. You get “low.” But you feel low because you have been high. Your addiction to the image you had of your partner acted on you like a drug. Your addiction came about because you unconsciously refused to move through your own pain. So you used a person to cover your pain. In other forms of addiction, substance can be used to cover up pain – drug, alcohol, food. Whether the addiction has to do with substance or someone, it starts with pain and ends with pain.\nWhen the relationship ends you feel pain. The end of the relationship is however not the cause of the pain but you do not know this. The end of the relationship brought out the pain that has been in you. And you feel it intensely. “You broke my heart,” you tell the person. But no, your heart was not broken. Your expectation was broken. You can say that the end of the relationship got you closer to your heart. And you felt the pain has been there all along, covered up by the relationship but there. Every addiction gets to a point where it no longer works for the addict. The addict feels the pain more intensely then.",
      "json_metadata": "{\"tags\":[\"pain\",\"consciousness\",\"freedom\",\"spirituality\",\"nigeria\"],\"image\":[\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmWA87G8JUMF3qovE3oSesKq75ggpV7UchTBpxoxwTgtUC/hands-437968_640.jpg\"],\"app\":\"steemit/0.1\",\"format\":\"markdown\"}",
      "parent_author": "",
      "parent_permlink": "pain",
      "permlink": "dysfunctional-relationship",
      "title": "Dysfunctional Relationship"
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  "op_in_trx": 0,
  "timestamp": "2018-08-18T11:29:06",
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{
  "block": 24970226,
  "op": [
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    {
      "author": "gokike",
      "body": "![forward-412761_640.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmdcDQifhnA537CFPedDn691mxP1xYEy2ViKV9Tpmm8sG3/forward-412761_640.jpg)\nThe mind is very powerful. However the mind is a tool, an instrument. It is a tool that should be used when necessary and left when not needed. But the mind is the master of many people. It runs many people’s lives. It has become the master and they are mind-possessed. The mind then uses time to wield its power and dominate them. The mind is so powerful that if you fail to use it creatively, it will creatively sabotage you.\nThe power of the mind comes from you or rather the loss of you. When you are unconscious, you give attention to your thought which is the product of your mind. A thought that started out as little, used a subtle means to get your attention. It then grew bigger and bigger and has resulted to your pain. You may not be aware of it but you create your own pain.\nWhen you are in pain, when you suffer, you are in resistance; you are resisting what is. You are unconscious, therefore, you are not aware of this. The more identified you are with your mind, the greater the degree of resistance you have for what is, and the greater the intensity of your pain. Understand the egoic mind: it is always seeking to deny the present moment and escape from it. It accomplishes this through the use of time – past and future.\nTo be free of pain or suffering, you have to be free of the egoic mind. To be free of the mind, you have to be present in the Now. The mind keeps resisting the Now because it perceives the Now as threatening. It uses time – past and future – to remain in control. In fact, time and mind are inseparable. But the Now is timeless. Be still and be in the moment. In the very moment that you are, time does not exist. Your mind does not run your life in the present moment if you are conscious.\nThe mind is a tool which we need in this world. Time is also necessary for us to function in this world. But the point where the mind and time takes over our lives is where pain and suffering come in.\nThe mind keeps trying to flee the Now into the past or future. It runs to the past and asks, “What could I have done differently?” It flies to the future and asks, “What can go wrong?” This is how we are dominated by regret, fear, worry, anxiety, and other forms of pain. What the mind is doing then is covering up the present moment with time – past and present. When it succeeds in doing this, your true nature becomes obscured by your mind. You are unconscious, not connected to who you are, not connected to your Being.\nHow do you stop creating pain for yourself? By making the present moment the primary focus of your life. Use the mind and time when necessary in dealing with the practical aspects of your life situation and when you are done, be present in the moment. In the Now, you neither have past nor future. What you have is the present moment. You experienced the past in the Now and when the future comes, it will come as Now. All you ever have therefore is Now. This is a fact.\nYou may say that the present moment is unpleasant. But is it? The present moment is what it is. It is as it is. But your mind, conditioned by the past and in judgment of the present moment, has labeled it unacceptable and unpleasant and this is causing you unhappiness. Do not resist the Now. Allow the Now to be. Then watch your mind in action, be the observer of your mind. Bring consciousness to the activity of your mind. Be present. Your consciousness implies acceptance of the Now. And when you are present in the moment, time ceases, your mind therefore loses power and you are free from its mechanics, hence, free from pain.\nDo not resist the present moment for if you do your life situation remains the same if not worse. What you resist persists. Accept the present moment and then act. Your action then will have power which goes to change the situation you consider undesirable. Do not fight or work against the present moment. Rather, work with it. When you make the present moment your friend and work with it, you begin the transformation of your life.",
      "json_metadata": "{\"tags\":[\"awareness\",\"consciousness\",\"spirituality\",\"mind\",\"nigeria\"],\"image\":[\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmdcDQifhnA537CFPedDn691mxP1xYEy2ViKV9Tpmm8sG3/forward-412761_640.jpg\"],\"app\":\"steemit/0.1\",\"format\":\"markdown\"}",
      "parent_author": "",
      "parent_permlink": "awareness",
      "permlink": "now-now-now",
      "title": "Now. Now. Now."
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  "timestamp": "2018-08-11T09:23:57",
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{
  "block": 24803382,
  "op": [
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    {
      "author": "gokike",
      "body": "![aware-1353780_640.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmexi7zWwCgZA48koQpJqKZatsxFKDf9CrWqxBjRocrpp8/aware-1353780_640.jpg)\n\nMany thoughts arise without you even knowing it. You usually end up identifying with these thoughts and that defines your experience. So you have many worries, many troubles which do not seem to be going away. Even though you are not conscious of your identification with your thoughts, you still suffer the consequences.\nSay you have to get your car fixed. You know you have to get your car fixed but that thought keeps repeating itself asking to be resolved. You carry the thought which seems to have a hundred pound weight on your shoulders. Now your thought tells you life is not the way it is supposed to be and will not be as it is supposed to be until the car is fixed. All of a sudden the mechanic calls to tell you, “I cannot come until Monday.” This hurts you as you have to carry the hundred pound weight around until Monday. Many thoughts arise fast in your life – car fixing, appointment with the doctor, office work with deadline, rent payment. When you are asleep in the night, you are in a state of deep peace and you are free from all your identifications. You wake up. Boom! Mind activity resumes and the mind at a terrible speed looks for something to identify with and quickly finds the car to be fixed, the appointment with the doctor, the office work with a deadline, the rent. While you were asleep you were at peace but now you are awake and thanks to your mind, your life appears miserable.\nIt is not as if you do not have what you may call good thoughts. The presence of the “good” and “bad” thoughts creates conflict. You want one over the other and the result is stress. The remedy is not to have one thought over another but to stop identifying with your thoughts altogether. You can witness your thoughts by being the watcher of your thoughts. You can bring your attention to what is here and now. And by doing so you break the thought pattern and your identification with thought. \nRight now you are breathing. It is happening in this moment but you are hardly aware of that. In your natural state of being you have peace. This peace is not some emotional experience which takes place on the surface. This peace is deep within you and you have it regardless of your life situation. The activities of your mind however obscures you from experiencing that peace. To experience that peace means you are no longer identified with thoughts. The car still have to be fixed, you still have to see the doctor, office work has to be completed, rent has to be paid, but you are no longer wearing these like a hat. The hundred pound weight is off your shoulder. What you may not know is this: When you lose your identification with thought and experience the peace that is an aspect of the nature of your being, you have opened yourself up to the creativity that lies within you and this brings up ideas and leads you to take steps that will be helpful in changing the situation you consider undesirable. \nSo we are hindered and kept down in many ways when we believe that our thoughts are literal representations of our circumstances, people, ourselves and things around us. That is an illusion. If I say, “Orange,” you know what I am referring to but the word “orange” is not what the thing is – orange. In the same way, your thoughts about your parent, sibling, friends, situation, or anything else, are not what those people or things are. The mind which produces thought is a wonderful instrument helpful in the creative process. It is also necessary for practical day-to-day living. But to use the mind as an interpretative tool for situations, people, and things can be highly misleading. It can trap you in an illusion where you think what you think is real.",
      "json_metadata": "{\"tags\":[\"spirituality\",\"consciosness\",\"awareness\",\"ego\",\"nigeria\"],\"image\":[\"https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmexi7zWwCgZA48koQpJqKZatsxFKDf9CrWqxBjRocrpp8/aware-1353780_640.jpg\"],\"app\":\"steemit/0.1\",\"format\":\"markdown\"}",
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      "parent_permlink": "spirituality",
      "permlink": "transcend-your-mind",
      "title": "Transcend your Mind"
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{
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  "op": [
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      "author": "gokike",
      "body": "![girl-2940655_640.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmXVxZuaSdhvJVmCF2nzu5yN5931F2rqGQrQXChsAJd1eV/girl-2940655_640.jpg)\nAs we go through life, we sustain physical injuries. However we have access to bandages and ointments to treat cuts and sprains. We also sustain what we may call psychological injuries. But you hardly know how to treat emotional pain and you end up brooding over memories or thoughts that are distressing to you. The urge to brood over them is compelling. Over time, stress hormones are released into your bloodstream which can put you at an increased risk for cardiovascular disease.\nYou have ideas about how things should be in your life but those ideas collide with how things are presently. Sometimes you torment yourself about choices you have made or a path you did not follow. Or you may find yourself postponing your happiness with thoughts about what is wrong now or what is missing. Thus, you live in the future. You fail to see that your pain arises from your thoughts.\nIt is easy for the body to let go of pain the moment the underlying cause is healed but the mind has a sort of instinct for holding on. It finds it difficult to let go. With the use of your mind you create suffering and you imprison yourself in this suffering. You then forget that you created what seems to have imprisoned you so you do not even know that they key to your liberation is with you.\nWe can feel overwhelmed by the intensity of a strong emotion and simply not know how to deal with it. As a result, we unconsciously try to suppress our feelings and in the process form various coping mechanisms. We suppress our feelings because we seem to believe that we will die if we feel them. So growing up, we have learnt how to push intense emotions down into the subconscious. In trying to survive under challenging circumstances, we not only turn away from emotional pain, we also deny it. But even though we unconsciously suppress the feelings, their energy operates in our lives. You may be cut off from your feelings but that does not mean that they are not there. You are only trying to protect yourself from what you perceive to be intolerable. You feel powerless. So you go about your life pretending to be fine but in the background, there is a feeling which ranges from some sort of uneasiness to intense emotional pain. You wish you had a word to define or describe it.\nWe often make the mistake of believing that it is something outside that makes us anxious, angry, or afraid. But the cause of every emotion is within. Outside events can only serve as triggers. Give permission to yourself to feel your emotion. See it and experience it. You have been running away from your feeling. First, stop running. Now summon the courage to turn inward and face the pain. You will not die. Your emotion will not kill you even though it seems it will. Your thoughts however can kill you – suicide. So do not dwell in your thoughts but you can bring your presence to your emotion. If you are conscious and allow your emotion to be without labeling or judging it, you create a space around it such that the emotion feels safe to leave.\nDo you want to heal that emotional pain? Go within and let it rise into your conscious awareness. Care enough about yourself to spend time with yourself looking within. There is an infinite source of wellbeing and emotional support available to you. But this is available to you from within. What you call negative emotion lets you know that something needs to be seen within you. The negative emotion is therefore calling for your attention. It is calling for your presence. Go within.",
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      "permlink": "diffuse-the-emotional-pain",
      "title": "Diffuse the Emotional Pain"
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  "timestamp": "2018-07-20T18:00:39",
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{
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  "op": [
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      "author": "gokike",
      "body": "![arm-3345706_640.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYwoV5qjbuRPLenJt12hZVUP7GrF8q15z9RbzJEFerqZt/arm-3345706_640.jpg)\nACCEPT THE NOW\n\nYou may want a life that is predictable, a life in which you have control over everything that happens in your life. But the reality is that your life is unpredictable. We are in a world of forms and no form is permanent. So things come and go and even form changes form. You are not able to choose what happens in your life but you can choose how you respond to what happens. Respond not react. When people react, they are not in alignment with reality. When you accept what is, you align with the Now and your power is ready to manifest as a response. What you do when you are in alignment with the Now will have the power to move you forward which is a step in changing the situation you consider undesirable.\n\nAccepting the Now is the beginning of the end of suffering. It is a liberating experience. By accepting what is, a new door will be opened for you to go through. But when you do not accept what is, you struggle. What is already is and you are fighting it. That is insanity. It is a fight you can never win. To accept what is is to accept the truth and this will set you free.\nAcceptance does not mean that you do not desire in any way to change your present situation. No. Acceptance does not imply helplessness. On the contrary, it is when you have accepted what is that you can really move past it. You go deeper in yourself and you find a new resource, a new way, or a new opportunity. You act with what you have found to create a different life situation for yourself. This is how you change your situation. Accept, then act. See what happens afterwards.\n\nYou do not need to create an identity out of what you have accepted. Say for instance you told a lie and you have fully accepted that you lied, if you create an identity for yourself by saying, “I accept myself the way I am. I am a liar,” then you are keeping yourself stuck. In such a situation, there is hardly any chance for change. Acceptance is realizing the situation as it is. It is unnecessary and not helpful to identify with it. No singular act, whether you describe it as good or bad, can define who you are. \n\nIn his book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, Eckhart Tolle narrates the session he had with a woman in her thirties. When she started telling Eckhart her story, she began to sob uncontrollably. She felt lonely and unfulfilled with much anger and sadness. She had been abused as a child by a physically violent father. Eckhart quickly saw that her pain was not caused by her present life circumstances but by an extraordinarily heavy pain-body (which I simply refer to as the pain entity in her). Eckhart saw that the pain in her had become the filter through which she viewed her life situation. She was unable then to see the link between the emotional pain and her thoughts and she was completely identified with both. So with her thoughts she fed the pain in her and this resulted to a deeply unhappy self.\n\nEckhart directed the focus of her attention to what she was feeling inside her body and asked her to sense the emotion directly, instead of through the filter of her unhappy thoughts. Thinking that this was a way into her unhappiness instead of a way out of it, she reluctantly did what she was asked to do. Tears rolled down her face while her body was shaking. “At this moment, this is what you feel,” Eckhart said. “There is nothing you can do about the fact that at this moment this is what you feel. Now instead of wanting this moment to be different from the way it is, which adds more pain to the pain that is already there, is it possible for you to completely accept that this is what you feel right now?”\n\nShe was quiet for a moment. Suddenly she looked impatient, as if she was about to get up, and she said angrily, “No, I don’t want to accept this.” “Who is speaking?” I (Eckhart) asked her. “You or the unhappiness in you? Can you see that your unhappiness about being unhappy is just another layer of unhappiness?” She became quiet again. “I am not asking you to do anything. All I’m asking is that you find out whether it is possible for you to allow those feelings to be there. In other words, and this may sound strange, if you don’t mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness? Don’t you want to find out?”\n\nShe looked puzzled briefly, and after a minute or so of sitting silently, I suddenly noticed a significant shift in her energy field. She said, “This is weird. I’m still unhappy, but now there is space around it. It seems to matter less…” That space, of course, comes when there is inner acceptance of whatever you are experiencing in the present moment.\n\nI didn’t say much else, allowing her to be with the experience. Later she came to understand that the moment she stopped identifying with  the feeling, the old painful emotion that lived in her, the moment she put her attention on it directly without trying to resist it, it could no longer control her thinking and so become mixed up with a mentally constructed story called “The Unhappy Me.” Another dimension had come into her life that transcended her personal past – the dimension of presence… Emotion in itself is not unhappiness. Only emotion plus an unhappy story is unhappiness.\n\nReference:\nEckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, 2005, Penguin Group, New York, USA, pp. 165-166",
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{
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      "author": "gokike",
      "body": "![thinking-272677_640.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmdGMJUzvMFYYc5BVw1NkwR9pd5uFQRj8hizj5wTzrCSqk/thinking-272677_640.jpg)\n\nAs I talk about pain, I am not referring to physical pain or such pain that can be felt if you touch a hot stove. When you feel the heat from the stove, you quickly remove your hand. You responded to an external situation by removing your hand when you felt the heat. The pain I am referring to is the mental-emotional pain which is as a result of your internal response to a situation.\nYou are upset – understandably upset – about a situation you consider undesirable. You get angry and question how unfair life is to you. You are not at ease with the current situation. Your thoughts have taken over you and your body has responded with the feeling of distress. You are in pain but you do not stop there. You are in resistance to the pain so you deny it. The consequence is suffering – pain plus resistance. The pain is real and you are fighting against what is real, what is. You suffer.\nA common form of resistance is people rejecting their emotions. You feel anger towards your brother for instance and instead of acknowledging the feeling of anger which is there, you deny it. So you experience an inner conflict with your anger as you continue to harbour the anger. If you want a change for the better, acceptance is the first step. But many people find acceptance difficult. Perhaps they have these beliefs about acceptance unconsciously:\n•\tIf I accept this painful situation, I will give in to it and it will take over my life.\n•\tIf I do not accept this it will miraculously change and I will not have to face it.\n•\tIf I accept this painful situation, I am accepting a life of pain without end.\nBut how do you move on to problem solving without first accepting that what you call problem is? Let us assume you do not like the colour brown. Then you move into a house where the room is brown. If you refuse to accept that the room is brown because you do not like the colour, you will be fighting reality and that will make you suffer. You deny the colour of the room which you do not like while still living in the room. The room remains brown. You get so caught up in denial that you do not change anything. Accepting the brownness of the room is the first step to having that room painted with a colour you like. Acceptance is not approval. It is not the same thing as judging something good. Acceptance is acknowledging what is. That is the beginning of your freedom from suffering.\nThe way your child died, the way your father treated you, the way your husband cheated on you, these may be hard to accept. The memory comes with pain and so you avoid the painful thoughts. When this avoidance becomes habitual, it turns to denial. Denial makes it difficult for you to be aware of the pain in yourself or in others. So here you are hoping to eliminate the pain through denial. Ironically, the denial perpetuates the pain.",
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  "op": [
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      "author": "gokike",
      "body": "![girl-2786277_640.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmNiNWbMgZG65BgrAysXyWyXhMaGyENfTRUGjTUpF53dWU/girl-2786277_640.jpg)\nSuppressing an emotion does not mean you have dealt with it. It may seem as if you are protecting yourself by shutting off your emotion but that is not really what you are doing. Many cultures believe that it is a masculine quality to suppress emotion and that the expression of emotion qualifies one as weak. Avoiding your emotions never makes them go away. If the same situation that led to the emotion were to happen again, you are likely to find it more difficult to manage. In fact suppressing your emotion can strengthen it. If you feel pain because your girlfriend left you, you may try to avoid the pain by watching movies, going out or chatting, however, the pain is still present in you and a little incident can trigger it and cause you to overreact to the situation. Effects of consistent emotion suppression include high blood pressure, stress, and heart disease. While I was having a conversation with a lady one day, she told me she does not forgive anyone who has made her cry. Even if she tries to forgive, she will never forget. When someone does something which makes her feel hurt, she does not tell the person about her hurt but she carries it within her. Hardly does the person know how hurt she has come to be. There was a time someone very close to her was giving her a cold treatment. She was very much hurt by this as she never expected such a treatment from the other person. I asked her to go have a discussion with the person concerning this and she was emphatic that she would never do such. She expected the other person to talk to her about whatever she may have done that led to the cold treatment instead of being quiet about it. At a point while we were talking she broke down in tears. I saw clearly that this lady was suppressing so much emotion in her. I saw a child who was feeling hurt. She was able to discuss this with me but not with the other person involved in this even though the discussion would have been a forward step in letting go of the pent-up emotion. In a matter of minutes she was back to her old state. Now she smiles but the emotion is not gone. It has gone back to its dormant state waiting for a situation to activate it again.\nThere is so much pain in the world but the greater part of human pain is unnecessary. This pain is self-created but we are hardly aware of this due to unconsciousness. When the mind possesses you and runs your life, you are unconscious and in such a state, you will create pain for yourself and activate other people’s pain.\nPain comes in when you are in resistance to something particularly to what is. So behind pain, you find non-acceptance. You have what is but you do not accept it, so you resist it. Your resistance then brings about pain. Your resistance is in your thought in which you have judged what is. You have judged what is and labeled it unacceptable. So you are in resistance. This reflects in your emotion which manifests as negativity. The greater the degree of your resistance to what is, the present moment, the greater the intensity of your pain. You have the present moment but you are denying it, you want to escape from it. This gives you pain and you suffer, the consequence of mind identification.\nWhen you suppress your negative emotion, you are avoiding it. You are trying to escape from it so you do not even bother to look at it. Since you do not face it, you do not see the negative emotion for what it is, you do not see what it is in the present moment. You succeed in suppressing it. But is the pain gone? No. The pain cannot be completely dissolved without you fully facing it. So you have a remnant of the pain as you go about your life situation.",
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      "permlink": "do-not-suppress-the-emotion",
      "title": "Do not Suppress the Emotion"
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{
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  "op": [
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    {
      "author": "steemitboard",
      "body": "Congratulations @gokike! You have received a personal award!\n\n[![](https://steemitimages.com/70x70/http://steemitboard.com/@gokike/birthday1.png)](http://steemitboard.com/@gokike)  1 Year on Steemit\n<sub>_Click on the badge to view your Board of Honor._</sub>\n\n\n**Do not miss the last post from @steemitboard:**\n[SteemitBoard World Cup Contest - Sweden vs Switzerland](https://steemit.com/steemitboard/@steemitboard/steemitboard-world-cup-contest-sweden-vs-switzerland)\n\n---\n**Participate in the [SteemitBoard World Cup Contest](https://steemit.com/steemitboard/@steemitboard/steemitboard-world-cup-contest-collect-badges-and-win-free-sbd)!**\nCollect World Cup badges and win free SBD\nSupport the Gold Sponsors of the contest: [@good-karma](https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=good-karma&approve=1) and [@lukestokes](https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=lukestokes.mhth&approve=1)\n\n---\n\n> Do you like [SteemitBoard's project](https://steemit.com/@steemitboard)? Then **[Vote for its witness](https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=steemitboard&approve=1)** and **get one more award**!",
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{
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      "author": "gokike",
      "body": "![worried-girl-413690_640.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmSZJ7mj9YpUucDVNDTWsoYWHpZdDRuUZE1a6WLTY5XJbx/worried-girl-413690_640.jpg)\n\nYou are here now but your mind is not. Your mind has raced to the future and it does not see good. It sees “bad” things coming, “bad” things that will happen to you. And you feel something in your body. Something we call emotion. Your mind is at work and your body is reacting. Emotion is your body’s reaction to your mind.\nLove, joy, and peace are aspects of your true nature. When you are still without the activity of your mind trying to sabotage you, you can experience true love, true joy, and inner peace. They are connected to your being. They do not have opposite because they do not arise from the mind but from beyond it.\nWhen you are unconscious, you often call pleasure joy. But it is not. Joy arises from within you but you derive pleasure from something external. When that thing that gives you pleasure leaves you, you feel pain due to its absence. The thing may even give you pleasure today and tomorrow give you pain. When it comes to addiction, the “high” gives you pleasure and the “low” that follows afterwards gives you pain. In this way, pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin. This is nothing like the aspects of your true nature – love, joy, peace - which you cannot get from external things.\nThese aspects of your true nature are obscured by the activity of your mind. Through thinking compulsively, your mind serves as a noise-maker that hinders your connection to your nature. You do not feel connected to your true nature because you are not conscious. Love, joy, peace are already part of you. Seeking them in external things is vain. They are within you already. What you have to do is to connect to your true nature. The sky may be cloudy but that does not mean that the sun is gone. On the other side of the cloudy sky is the sun. It is there but obscured by the clouds. Your true nature is, but it is obscured by the mind. The mind cannot however destroy your true nature. The disturbance of your mind causes you to feel emotion. That is literally what emotion means – “disturbance.” The word “emotion” comes from the Latin emovere which means “to disturb.”\nThere is an energetic charge that results from the amplification of a thought pattern. You feel this as emotion. The emotion usually succeeds in taking over you because you are not conscious. You have not being able to bring the presence of your being into the Now. With enough presence, your emotion cannot take over you. But you lack presence and you identify with the emotion unconsciously. In other words, the emotion becomes “you.” A loop develops between your thinking and your emotion. Both power each other. The thought pattern which is magnified results into an emotion in your body. You magnify the thought by giving it your attention and dwelling on it. The emotion this creates energizes the thought pattern. And it goes on: the thinking-emotion loop.\nThe emotion gives you pain and your mind fights the pain so that it can remove it. But it never succeeds. Imagine the Inspector General of Police trying to find a murderer where he himself is the murderer. The mind can never find the solution to emotional pain because it is part of the problem.\nThe solution then is to free yourself from your mind. Disidentify with your mind and become conscious. The mind which has held a place of power is toppled and you connect to your being. This is consciousness. When you are conscious, the true nature of your Being will reveal itself.",
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  "block": 22937181,
  "op": [
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      "author": "gokike",
      "body": "![guerrido-2426584_640.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQ1MvAs3mgBTDMFic5hMtP4js5ytzVy7f36NE8MGsppUk/guerrido-2426584_640.jpg)\nYour ego left unchecked sabotages you. You call a number of things that happen in your life “bad.” What you may not know is that most of these so-called bad things are ego-created, so in essence, they are self-created. I call those things drama. The ego in its operation creates drama, and if only you will be fully conscious, the drama will end.\nEckhart Tolle defines the ego as the unobserved mind that runs your life when you are not present as the witnessing consciousness, the watcher. When this ego encounters other egos, it will either see them as a potential threat or attempt to use them for its own ends. The ego has no real connection to any other being. When you observe the ego, you see the patterns because it has a deep-seated fear and a sense of lack. So it comes up with strategies to combat the fear and sense of lack. These strategies can be clever but they never truly solve the ego’s problems. Ego cannot solve your problems. Why? Ego is the problem.\n“Bad” things happen when egos come together. They can come together in groups, institutions, or personal relationships. The resulting drama of the coming together of egos can be in the form of emotional or physical violence, power struggles, conflict, and so on. You can still create your own drama all by yourself. You create drama when you see yourself as a victim, feel guilty or anxious, or sorry for yourself. Most people have invested their sense of self in their drama. Ego runs their life. They are in love with their story which is their identity. They therefore fear and resist the end of their drama. This is why someone with financial need can win N5,000,000 today through sports betting and be back to the same situation of financial need three months later. That is why after being in dysfunctional relationships filled with drama, you sabotage a situation where someone comes into your life to truly love you. You unconsciously act so as to send the person away. In a way, what you are saying is, “If I should respond to your love, that is the end of my drama,” because you think the end of your drama is the death of yourself. You do not see that you are addicted to your drama.\nYour ego, your false sense of self, has reigned for a long time and has made decisions, taken actions, and brought up thoughts. Your Being then follows the thoughts, actions, and decisions of the ego even though the agenda of the ego is mostly at odds with your Being. As your Being follows the dictates of the ego, you undergo misery. This is because your ego does not have the capacity to lead your Being which is way more intelligent than the mind that constructs the ego. As long as the ego presides in your life, you cannot have peace and joy. You may get pleasure but remember that joy and pleasure are not the same. Whereas you do not need to look for joy because joy is an aspect of the nature of your Being (you have it already even though it is obscured by your ego), you get pleasure from external things. The pleasure which your ego seeks from external things is superficial and temporal. External things are bound by the law of impermanence, they come and go, and they also change form. They may satisfy you today and tomorrow you are no longer satisfied by them. Rather than seeing what is happening and understand that transients cannot fulfill you, you seek bigger “toys.” This is the reason consumerism is thriving today and the advertising industry keeps having its way in exploiting your ego. They make you feel a sense of lack and present you with a product that will make you complete by filling the lack. You purchase the product and your temporary satisfaction with the product makes you think that your lack has been taken care of. Sometime later the sense of lack returns and you try to fill it up with another advertised product. This goes on and on.\nYour Being wants to be in charge but your ego which lives in constant fear does not want to allow that. And so your ego fights your Being. Your ego knows that your Being being in charge implies the end of its reign and even its death. It fights for survival. This is why after decades of living under the dictates of the ego, you find it difficult or challenging to be who you are. When you allow your Being to be without trying to be this or that, the works of your ego comes to question. Your Being examines things that the ego has spent decades putting in place, things like alcohol and drugs. Your Being tries to stop certain foods from coming in but the ego sees this as foolishness. “Have you forgotten the pleasure you derive from these things?” asks the ego, “I need to fix this right away!” Most people then will gladly settle for much less. The reason is not difficult to understand: the inner battle of dethroning the ego and breaking free of its influence to trust and follow the unpredictable, unfamiliar, unorthodox, and uncertain ways of Being seems too difficult. But ask yourself which is more difficult: simply being or trying to be this or that.",
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      "body": "![face-3189805_640.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmZCNADW2DkdkJm4ax85nQKHhwLBpxhSv6LKPfBctAmC4A/face-3189805_640.jpg)\nHow did the ego come about in the first place? This sense of self that is false, how did it develop? As a baby you had no idea of you as an “I.” You were not able to recognize your inherent nature. You heard your parents refer to you again and again by a name and you got the idea that your name refers to you. You went on to adopt your name as your identity, your sense of self. As time went on, you identified with your attributes and you defined yourself with forms: I am beautiful/ugly, I am intelligent/stupid, I am tall/short. And so your family, education, friend, profession, cultural and social conditioning determined how you think of yourself. A sense of separation was what you got when you started identifying yourself with “I.” Your ego which is your self-image developed. In relation to others and the world, you see yourself as separate. Ego is your self-image and it includes that compulsion you feel to defend the image. The ego is a concept, an idea, it is therefore not real. And for something that is not real, the ego certainly brings a lot of problems. If you say, “I am tired of myself,” then one can ask, “Are you one or two?” Even though there is ultimately one “you,” the statement, “I am tired of myself,” implies there are two of you: the I and the self which the I is tired of. One of them is real, the other is not.\nThe ego’s role is to form and to protect the images you have of yourself. You may think that you are a good leader. If someone criticizes your leadership, the image you have of yourself as a “good leader” will feel attacked or threatened. Before you know it, you are fighting to protect or defend that image. Your defensiveness causes you to withdraw or attack. Then your ego feels threatened and you react with fear. Your reaction may seem bold and powerful but underneath it is fear. People usually react in negative ways because they feel threatened and unsafe. \nYou hardly take cognizance of who you really are. In the process of identifying with a false sense of self, your awareness has been absorbed into the forms you identify with. You lost your mind in the process and now your mind runs you. You actually have an awareness that has the ability to look at things with clarity but this awareness has been obstructed; it is there but it is covered up. As a result of this, you seem to have lost the freedom you have. Then your often irrational feelings, habits, and unconscious reactions run your life.\nYou seem to have lost your true self. You really have not but it seems so. Your true self is always there, covered up but there. You can get to be who you are but first you have to become aware. When your awareness comes alive, you can see things as they are. Be present in this moment. Be present and be aware of your thoughts and feelings. If you become fully aware of your thoughts and feelings, your identity with them is dissolved already. In your natural awareness, you will be able to see the transient nature of forms, they come and go: money, career, beauty, thoughts, emotions. All of these come as forms, stay for a while and then dissolve. In your awareness you will realize that your true Being is a space for all these. It is formless and without concrete identity. It is because you do not know yourself that you feel the need to find an identity. This leads you to get entangled and lost in the forms you identify with. You look for yourself in clothes for instance. You cannot find yourself in clothes. You end up losing yourself in clothes.",
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      "author": "gokike",
      "body": "![face-3189811_640.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/DQmb9WpB75tgB3VEbnFdqYe4q3cyDWtm8nXe1wauVdH32AK/face-3189811_640.jpg)\nThe divine in us is what we call God. So, God is in you and is also in every other person. We are therefore one for God does not have parts. Because God does not have parts, he can never come apart. God is love and by being who we are we can manifest love. One who manifests love is not empty. In fact, we cannot be empty. But living through the ego often results in a feeling of emptiness. Then you feel a void in you; you feel that something is missing in you; you feel that you are not whole. But we were created in the image of God, in God’s love. Feeling empty therefore is not a natural expression for anyone. Feeling empty comes from a false belief that we are separate from the divine. Feeling empty then is an indication that we have separated ourselves from our Being. The ego is in control.\nThe ego promises to offer us joy and peace. But the ego is an illusion so whatever it offers can never be real, permanent, or fulfilling. Regardless of how you try to fill yourself with what the ego offers you, you will never be permanently satisfied by that. Usually the ego starts by offering us small “gifts.” We get the gifts and are temporarily satisfied. Soon the same gifts that were satisfying become unsatisfying and even meaningless. The ego does not give us the chance to question what has happened and before you know it, it is offering another gift, a bigger gift. We get this gift and it seems as if the feeling of emptiness has been taken care of. Before long, the feeling returns, maybe even stronger. You try to ask why but the ego offers a bigger illusion. It is time for you to realize that whether these gifts, these illusions, are big or small, they can never fill you up. It is time for you to awaken and be conscious.\nIf you try to ask, “How come I was satisfied by this a while ago but I am not now? Why?” the ego becomes nervous because its existence is being threatened. The ego does not like being questioned, it does not want questions. Asking questions is a step towards consciousness and consciousness cannot co-exist with the ego. Consciousness dissolves the ego. The ego, in an attempt to keep us from asking questions, keeps us busy. When you are busy, you hardly find time to question the ego. So the ego fills your time with as many illusions as possible. Then you find it difficult to be still by yourself. You cannot bear to be alone all by yourself. You dread that. You would rather be preoccupied with outings, watching TV or movies, going online to view posts and pictures or chat on social media.  These are some of the means the ego uses to prevent you from being who you are. You remain unconscious. The ego is ready to defend till death that the illusions it offers are truth. You often buy into these illusions as truth. But illusions are false, they are nothing. That is why illusions cannot fulfill anyone. The ego is keeping you from experiencing peace, love, and joy. These are eternal and they are aspects of your Being. You have them already but the ego obstructs you from experiencing them. \nTo recognize the truth, start by questioning the illusions. The word recognize means to “know again.” This implies that you knew before. The truth is already in you, what you have to do is to recognize it. As you begin to be conscious, you will increasingly be unable to tolerate false beliefs and illusions.\nWhen you begin this search in you to know who you are, the ego will not let go without a fight. Then it becomes fearful, fearful of the light. The ego lives in darkness and consciousness beams light on it. Where there is light, there cannot be darkness; where there is consciousness, the ego dissolves. Ego cannot withstand consciousness just as darkness cannot withstand light. Darkness reigns in the absence of light; ego rules where consciousness is not. So on your way to consciousness, the ego fights and tries to defend itself. It makes you feel uncomfortable and tells you that you are being ridiculous. By continuing your steps towards consciousness, the power of the ego over you weakens. You start seeing its illusions clearer. It wants to take you back to where you have been but you are already seeing the falsity of what it offers. You have heard the defenses of the ego before but now you no longer believe them. You choose not to blindly follow the ego. Enlightenment has come, awareness is rising. You are awakening.",
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      "body": "![arm-3345706_640.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/DQmYU2cXMLLkKQ6fjWvniGY2N8oiXQiq48cy5xcnksRPmsT/arm-3345706_640.jpg)\nWe have created a self out of our thoughts. We did not stop there. We have gone on to identify with this self we have created. That is the ego – our self-created identity. It is who we think we are. But you are not who you think you are. Your thought is a product of your mind and your Being is beyond your mind. Your mind finds it difficult to grasp your Being. \nYou are a manifestation of God, made in God’s image and likeness. Who you are then is after doing good. But your ego, your false sense of self, is standing in the way of you bringing about good. It does this by trying to prevent you from connecting to your Being and it often succeeds. Your true nature then is obscured.\nThe ego is always trying to protect itself. So, it is always attacking and defending. You may have been in a relationship where you tried to give love only for you to come out of the relationship feeling hurt. You still have love in you but your ego will repress the feelings or expressions of love in order to feel safe. Who you are was not hurt as a result of the end of the relationship. It was your ego that was hurt. Now it wants to feel safe, so it makes you build a wall around your heart to feel protected. What this wall does is to prevent you from giving or receiving love. The ego then prevents you from expressing who you truly are. You are still who you are but the light of your Being is obscured.\nHere are some of the ways the ego manifests:\n1.\tWishing the present was different: The ego does not live in the moment; it cannot. It is preoccupied with past and future. Living in the present moment is actually the only conscious way to feel. The ego is scared of the Now and to live in the Now is the death of the ego. So to continue being in charge, the ego flees the Now to the past or future.\n“I will be happy when I become a graduate,” “I will be happy when I get a job,” “I will be happy when I get married”… The ego goes on and on. To become a graduate, get a job, or get married is fine. But when you think that these will make you happy, that they will permanently satisfy you, you have an illusory expectation. You are being distracted from living in the present moment by the active ego. You are waiting to start living. Ego makes you believe that you need this or that to be happy or be at peace. But joy, love, and peace are aspects of your true nature – you have them already. Nothing outside of you can give you these. Things can only give you momentary pleasure. Before you know it, that which seemed to have satisfied you some time ago now dissatisfies you. It can even become a source of unhappiness. The ego which does not want to allow what is to be is always searching for more and more. It tells you that you will find peace when everything falls into place.\n2.\tIdentifying with your story: “I suffered as a result,” “He did this to me,” “She did that”… You keep retelling your story. Telling your story again and again is a pattern the ego likes to hold on to. Complaining about your story puts you in the victim mode and stirs up emotions as if it was still happening. This happens because you have identified with your story. The present is actually different but the ego is keeping you in that “story space” not wanting you to let go of the past. If it keeps you out of the present moment, suspect the ego at work. By retelling your story again and again, playing the victim, you create more drama which the ego feeds on.\n3.\tAddiction: When ego wants something like money or sex, it sets out trying to “make it.” It can manipulate or entice others to get what it wants. You are not your ego so even if the ego gets what it wants, it cannot fulfill you. You may get pleasure but it will be short lived. Before you know it, you have an addiction and you engage in a behaviour repetitively trying to fill a hole you consciously or unconsciously perceive to be inside you.\nFame, for instance, can keep you identified to the ego. Ego is an idea of who you are which you project onto the world. People fall in love with the image they have created of the famous person. They fall in love with the image but they really do not care about the person. Fame reinforces the ego and this serves to further disconnect one from one’s Being. The same ego that tells you, “You are smart,” “You are special,” later tells you, “You are dumb,” “You are incomplete.”\nThe ego leaves you chasing transients, vapours. It urges you toward a life of narcissistic self-absorption. The ego makes you center your existence on the desire of yourself rather than the common good. You then proceed to make yourself the centre of the universe.\nWhat can permanently satisfy the ego? Nothing. As it tries to satisfy itself with this or that, it grows bigger and hungrier like a fire requiring more fuel to sustain it. So, the ego creates a spot light pointed at things outside of us. Unfortunately this keeps us feeling separate from our Being as well as from others.",
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      "body": "![arm-3345706_640.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/DQmYU2cXMLLkKQ6fjWvniGY2N8oiXQiq48cy5xcnksRPmsT/arm-3345706_640.jpg)\nWe have created a self out of our thoughts. We did not stop there. We have gone on to identify with this self we have created. That is the ego – our self-created identity. It is who we think we are. But you are not who you think you are. Your thought is a product of your mind and your Being is beyond your mind. Your mind finds it difficult to grasp your Being. \nYou are a manifestation of God, made in God’s image and likeness. Who you are then is after doing good. But your ego, your false sense of self, is standing in the way of you bringing about good. It does this by trying to prevent you from connecting to your Being and it often succeeds. Your true nature then is obscured.\nThe ego is always trying to protect itself. So, it is always attacking and defending. You may have been in a relationship where you tried to give love only for you to come out of the relationship feeling hurt. You still have love in you but your ego will repress the feelings or expressions of love in order to feel safe. Who you are was not hurt as a result of the end of the relationship. It was your ego that was hurt. Now it wants to feel safe, so it makes you build a wall around your heart to feel protected. What this wall does is to prevent you from giving or receiving love. The ego then prevents you from expressing who you truly are. You are still who you are but the light of your Being is obscured.\nHere are some of the ways the ego manifests:\n1.\tWishing the present was different: The ego does not live in the moment; it cannot. It is preoccupied with past and future. Living in the present moment is actually the only conscious way to feel. The ego is scared of the Now and to live in the Now is the death of the ego. So to continue being in charge, the ego flees the Now to the past or future.\n“I will be happy when I become a graduate,” “I will be happy when I get a job,” “I will be happy when I get married”… The ego goes on and on. To become a graduate, get a job, or get married is fine. But when you think that these will make you happy, that they will permanently satisfy you, you have an illusory expectation. You are being distracted from living in the present moment by the active ego. You are waiting to start living. Ego makes you believe that you need this or that to be happy or be at peace. But joy, love, and peace are aspects of your true nature – you have them already. Nothing outside of you can give you these. Things can only give you momentary pleasure. Before you know it, that which seemed to have satisfied you some time ago now dissatisfies you. It can even become a source of unhappiness. The ego which does not want to allow what is to be is always searching for more and more. It tells you that you will find peace when everything falls into place.\n2.\tIdentifying with your story: “I suffered as a result,” “He did this to me,” “She did that”… You keep retelling your story. Telling your story again and again is a pattern the ego likes to hold on to. Complaining about your story puts you in the victim mode and stirs up emotions as if it was still happening. This happens because you have identified with your story. The present is actually different but the ego is keeping you in that “story space” not wanting you to let go of the past. If it keeps you out of the present moment, suspect the ego at work. By retelling your story again and again, playing the victim, you create more drama which the ego feeds on.\n3.\tAddiction: When ego wants something like money or sex, it sets out trying to “make it.” It can manipulate or entice others to get what it wants. You are not your ego so even if the ego gets what it wants, it cannot fulfill you. You may get pleasure but it will be short lived. Before you know it, you have an addiction and you engage in a behaviour repetitively trying to fill a hole you consciously or unconsciously perceive to be inside you.\nFame, for instance, can keep you identified to the ego. Ego is an idea of who you are which you project onto the world. People fall in love with the image they have created of the famous person. They fall in love with the image but they really do not care about the person. Fame reinforces the ego and this serves to further disconnect one from one’s Being. The same ego that tells you, “You are smart,” “You are special,” later tells you, “You are dumb,” “You are incomplete.”\nThe ego leaves you chasing transients, vapours. It urges you toward a life of narcissistic self-absorption. The ego makes you center your existence on the desire of yourself rather than the common good. You then proceed to make yourself the centre of the universe.\nWhat can permanently satisfy the ego? 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      "author": "redboy09",
      "body": "Uncomplicated article. I learned a lot of interesting and cognitive. I'm screwed up with you, I'll be glad to reciprocal subscription))",
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