Cell-Mates

A very good friend of mine said to me "There are only two people in this world that can steal our peace and serenity, and they are Great Big I and Poor Little 'ol Me".

I thought this was a clever way of remembering that when we are angry, resentful or self-righteous, it's usually our great big ego going on a binge at the expense of our happiness. On the other side of the coin, wallowing is self pity and playing the victim can also be quite satisfying to the poor little ego.

So you see the problem here is with the ego. It can never be satisfied. There isn't enough attention for it. The ego doesn't mind that the attention be based in negative thought or emotion. To it, attention is simply attention.

Sometimes I wonder if the ego has a mind of it own! It finds any way it can to keep us thinking about ourselves -what we should have gotten, what someone should have said or done to/for us, etc -The more we allow ourselves to stay the center of attention in our own thought world the more we stay trapped in our own minds.

And the "ironic icing on the cake" here is that we are the only ones who have the key to this prison of thought. The ego doesn't truly have a mind of its own. We CHOOSE to continuously feed it and the bigger it gets the more food it needs to survive.

The choice is ours. It is up to us to stop feeding the ego, unlock our own cell door, let our two cell-mates "Great Big I" and "Little 'ol Me" go, and so free ourselves.