I’ve heard of many opinions regarding the ego, most of which are dismal. The ego is considered “bad” and something to get rid of by many. I used to wonder about this myself until I realized the role of ego in the “Game of Life”.

Neuroscience really helped to clarify it even further for me. Ego is that part of your perceptual system (Nervous System), that allows you to pretend and via the five senses unconsciously believe that you are separate from everyone else and the surrounding environment.

I say, “pretend” because even quantum physics is now teaching that at a sub-atomic level, everything is connected. There is no such thing as “empty space”. We are swimming in a sea of energy and yet we are like the fish in the ocean that asks “where is the water?” or “what water?”

We cannot sense it with our five senses but we do have more than the physical five senses. Ever heard of something called “intuition”?

There are lots of studies which are also demonstrating that the energy field of our minds can become “entangled”. An example of this is when you think about someone and immediately they call you on the phone. This is no longer sci-fi.

When I was in medical school years ago, I realized that the more I learned, the less I knew. There is an infinite amount of knowledge floating around. Unfortunately, wisdom seems to be a much more scarce resource. Wisdom would say, “you know not because you ask not and when you do ask, you ask amiss”.

We often close our minds to whatever conflicts with what we already believe. And then we wonder why we use only 10% of our brains! Some people’s minds are so close you could not pry it open with a sledgehammer. I would not even try.

I’ve come to appreciate that everyone is where he or she need to be at the moment. If people are open and ask, sincerely, I’ll share my point of view. If you are reading this, it is still your choice. Whether or not you agree is not the point. We all have our point of view.

The question I started asking is, “does this belief serve me and expands my life or does it constrict me and keep me in fear and playing small?” If it does the latter – “off with its head” – so to speak. I believe that as long as you live in a human body you by definition have an ego; it allows you to function in the world.

The key is, is this ego wounded or is healthy? Another way to put it is, are you asleep or aware? If you are aware, you will realize that the real YOU is not the ego of the mental mind.  If you are aware, are you consciously healing the wounded ego, which is the source of the “cataracts of the soul”? When these wounds, these emotional blockages are healed, you can then see clearly a more expanded vision for your life.

You can see your own inner Light better and the Light in others. When the ego is healthy, it can serve your soul instead of always frantically attempting to cover up (persona in personality means “mask”) illusionary stories about the self. Shame can be healed and you can start to feel again without running away from emotions.

When you make friends with emotion and feelings, you can start to consciously manage your thoughts and feelings in a manner that is proactive instead of staying in the reactive “asleep” zone. It’s a thought. Heal the ego, and play the Game of Life to win. I’m going for it, what about you?

Because our ego forms early in life, when we are operating with plenty of emotion yet lacking in logic, we often create these “Mental Me’ ego stories based on the logic of a 3-year-old. This would explain why to your conscious mind it makes no sense how a subconscious belief that you are not good enough, or a “bad girl”, is still running your life.

When these beliefs of identity are wired into our brain and nervous system, we did not have the mental maturity to use logic in the formation of the stories we created. If the teacher calls little Johnny a bad boy because he talked too much (according to the teacher’s standard), little Johnny cannot reason that the authority figure (the teacher) is having a bad hair day perhaps.

What the adult says about the child is only the adult’s opinion anyway. In reality, the child’s identity is not changed by the words of the adult. In reality, our being is independent of what we do.

You see, what you do, what you think, is NOT the same as who you are at your essence.

I have discovered for myself that as I started to heal the stories of the Mental Me, as I learned how to release the cellular memory of those stories, and even sometimes reframe them, my sense of identity, my self-image dramatically improved. Does this matter? You bet it does.

If one has a poor self-image or feels unworthy of success and abundance at a subconscious level, he or she will not likely reach their true potential to create for their own personal experience, nor are they likely to contribute as much to the lives of others. We cannot rise above our own self-image.

At issue here is the wounded ego, an ego that is a storyteller, “re-membering” the stories from early childhood or even early teen years that we told ourselves about ourselves. Your brain and mind cannot tell the difference between something vividly imagined with emotion and something that is actually occurring.

If you feel unworthy, and you are not aware of the True Self, you will attach these feelings to your sense of (ego) self, the “false” identity. You will start to believe the outside world and not listen or trust your own inner Guidance. Hence, the True You, the Magnificent Me, gets covered over and hijacked by the mental construct of ego.

The journey to empowerment is about healing these old cellular memories that steal your sense of identity, the potential seeds of greatness and substitutes instead feelings and mental ideas that keep you playing small and feeling not good enough. If you are still comparing yourself to the next person, you are still very much not aware of the “True I” which is unique and knows better than to do this.

Wherever your understanding is, know that the journey is the adventure, and to appreciate and accept today is always another opportunity to create a tomorrow for yet another level of YOU to unfold.

If it does not empower me to live a healthy, happy and prosperous life – it just has to go. The ideas have outlived their welcome. There was a time in my life when I used to blame the devil for the drama in my life.

It was a funny thing; I wondered how was it that this devil knew all of my thoughts? How was it that it could “make” me do anything and how was it creating the drama in my life and fear thoughts? Here’s something interesting – spell devil backwards and notice what you get.

Devil is “Lived” spelled backwards. Well, knowing what I know now, I’d say I was living my life backwards all right. In fact I commonly lived with regret and worry all the time. Or, I was unforgiving and bitter about something from my past. I rarely lived in the present moment.

Here’s something else. Notice that “evil” is “live” backwards. I personally don’t see life as “the devil made me do it” anymore at all. In fact, the closest thing I see to some devil is a wounded ego. I don’t believe that the ego is the enemy; it is just that if your thoughts and your sense of self formed in the brain’s area of “autobiographical memory” is full of negative perceptions, you will wire your nervous system with negative self-talk.

Your ego, or “false sense of self” just needs to have its stories re-written, so to speak. These thoughts/beliefs literally get wired into your body at a cellular level. Well, when your negative wounded ego storyteller gets going, you start thinking negative thoughts and acting on them.

This is the source of those negative thoughts. There’s no devil doing anything. It is just your unconscious management of your life happening. You are living your life going in the wrong direction. Instead of learning the “secrets of the Universe”, the principles that will expand your life and bring peace and joy, you are inadvertently creating fear and drama for yourself.

The key to empowering spirituality is to heal an unforgiving perception so that your heart can open and heal, and you can start to remove the emotional blockages that block your Light from shining and that constrict the vision for your life.

Practical spirituality based on universal principles instead of folklore or hand-me-down systems that you have outgrown, is something that can help you to live a healthy, happy and prosperous life.  Once the wounded ego is healed of its emotional blocks and healthy flow restored, those devils and boogymen under the bed will probably flow right on out of your awareness as well!  Any thoughts?

“In times of change the learners will inherit the earth while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists” ~Eric Hoffer

Ego in Latin is translated “I”. It is the false “I” however, as it is the sense of self that is tied to the area of the brain that forms the “autobiographical memory”, or the story of who you THINK you are.

In my soon to be released book, “Empower Up and Play Big: Winning at Life From the Inside Out!” I refer to it as the “Mental Me”. It is the mental construct of your self-image. I have come to understand that it really is a “false self“, so to speak.

The “real you”, what I call the “Magnificent Me”, is the awareness, the consciousness, the spirit, or what quantum physics refers to as the “observer”. The one that can see the thought, sense the thought apart from the thought. The real you has all types of potential gifts and talents that you have not even begun to develop.  Not to get too convoluted here, this is the take home message: YOU are not your thoughts.

Thoughts are things, literally. Thought is energy strictly speaking. What you do with this energy as it flow through your perceptual system will ultimately determine the action you take which will lead you to your life’s destination. Now, if you have created an ego that has a low self-image and low self-esteem, an autobiographical memory that says you are not good enough or whatever, this is what will run your life and cause suffering.

The good news is, the more aware you become of HOW your powerful brain/mind/spirit work together and start to operate your life consciously, the more you will be able to take the misperceptions of your EGO and turn it into Enormous Growth Opportunities.

In other words, what I did was learn the lessons, heal the blind spots from a wounded ego, and re-write the story. The storytelling ego of the left-brain (autobiographical memory) can be rewritten when you understand how to heal the blockages in your body’s nervous/energy system and retrain/rewire your brain.

It really is not very complicated, but it does take a willingness to get out of your box and learn something new. Be aware that change will happen, with or without you. I personally am training my ego to cooperate and get on board!

Who we think we are is a story based on perception and our interpretation of experience that we have as we evolve from childhood throughout our lives. I say perception and interpretation, as it is not what happens to you, as much as it is HOW you interpret the meaning of the events.

Based on the meaning you assign, particularly in early childhood before the age of seven, you start to behave, or shape your personality to help you to feel safe. For example, when I was a young child, due to my position in my family, I often felt unnoticed and “not good enough”.

So I went out of my way to be a “pleaser” personality. Notice within the word personality is “persona” which means, “mask”. When I became a teen-ager, due to my environmental circumstances, I changed my personality to more of an aggressive “warrior” to adapt and feel safe. As adults, we wear many masks based on our environment.

We have a persona for work, for play, for parenting and often for when we are with close friends. This is all fine, however, if you think you ARE these roles and versions of yourself that you present to others, you can start to box yourself into thinking that you are “just the way you are”. Actually, we can consciously choose to adjust these self-defining roles if they limit us by realizing that some parts of our personality were formed by the logic of a three-year-old!

Until I understood this, I used to behave in ways that were no longer serving me in my present circumstances as an adult. Believing I’m not good enough was directly connected to ego “storytelling” formed in my early childhood. At the time, it was the best I could come up with to adapt to my world.

However, the more aware we become that we, our “spirit self”, what quantum physics would call “The Observer” or “consciousness”, is not the ego’s version of who we think we are, the more empowered we can become. When we realize that we are more than our thoughts about our life experiences, we can learn how to release the cellular memory from our body’s cells and re-create consciously a more empowering version of how we present ourselves to the world as “characters” on the stage of life.

Ego presents “Enormous Growth Opportunities” when understood from this point of view. Have you noticed that your personality is subject to change?  It is really emowering to be able to heal those parts of yourself that are holding you back from living the best version of your life that you can create for yourself.  Consider updating your “storytelling ego” and re-write who you “think you are” in a way that expands your life instead of keeping you constricted, stressed and playing small.  Empowerment really is an “inside job”!