Most people don’t really want to heal: they just want less pain and suffering while staying the same.
 

What most people seem to be looking for today is another “magic pill”, instant-cure approach to alleviate the pain, discomfort and frustration in their lives. They say they to want to find healing—may even think they mean it intellectually or emotionally—but their preferred solution is still the quick fix: the ‘pill’—chemical or non-chemical (food, alcohol, TV, sex, surgery)—to alleviate their discomfort and take away their symptoms.

Pain brings a cry for change, but once the discomfort disappears, they want to get back back to “normality”, not continue towards true healing. That’s scary and threatening. It requires asking yourself how you are contributing to your own discomfort, and how far you are responsible for what is causing the problem. Which of your thoughts, beliefs, choices and actions are causing the imbalance and unhappiness you are now experiencing? Then it challenges you to to make the necessary changes to reduce or eliminate the dis-harmony.

These are profound and difficult questions to face, which is why people think about change far more than they take positive and sustaining action to make it happen. Thinking is easy and costs little. Action is often neither of those.

What stands in the way of willingness to change is ego.

Ego is necessary. It supports you, creates your personality and individuality, acts like the clothes you put on in the morning in helping you be ‘you’ when you go out into the world. Ego helps you appear to be who you say you are; to remember where you left your wallet and what time the team meeting is.

Unfortunately, your ego also feels that it’s its job to keep your image of yourself safe and protect the lenses through which you see the world. That’s why we all spend so much of our lives defending ourselves against others—sitting in judgment, acting critical, defensive or resentful; resisting change in an effort to avoid more pain and suffering.

Fear comes from the ego. How many of your thoughts are healing or loving thoughts, how many are ‘killing’ ones—fear-based, judgmental, scary, hurtful and negative? Your ego believes that your most limiting beliefs are necessary, even when they cause you pain. Why? Because it imagines that the pain you experience protects you (and it) from a much greater pain: the pain of death and dissolution.

Ego wants to feel safe. When it comes to changing your (actually your ego’s) beliefs and thoughts about life and living, your ego becomes scared. It tries to ensure that you continue to think, believe, and behave exactly as you have in the past. According to your ego, change is hurtful. It wants to keep you (and itself) safe by not changing in any significant way.

Ego prefers thoughts and more pain to actions that threaten its security. That’s why, when people start to realize change is needed, their ego diverts them into seeking out what’s ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ about them. You can spend a huge amount of time beating yourself up over that—all without doing anything to change. You have the illusion of working for change, but none of the substance of changing.

Quieting your ego

If you want true and real change, you must first allow your beliefs and thoughts freedom from instant censorship—just observing them without judging. This action quiets the ego, your ever-present Inner Judge and Critic. It wants you to feel small, scared, wrong and bad. It wants you to set aside the freedom to think new thoughts and take up new beliefs. It wants to block you from making different choices or walking down new paths.

You created most of your limiting and painful beliefs about yourself and the world around you, typically in childhood. You used whatever resources you had at that time, so you could feel safe and garner Mommy and Daddy’s love, attention, approval and recognition. Those beliefs maybe worked then. They don’t work so well now. They need to be updated.

We can all can change our thoughts and beliefs. Despite what our egos tell us, doing so won’t kill us or even cause us greater pain. We can realign our lives by creating new, supportive thoughts and by choosing to act on what they show us. If you really want to heal, that choice is yours to make. What better time than now?

Here are some questions for self-reflection:

• What stories do you tell yourself to keep you from making real change in your life? What beliefs or blockages prevent you from experiencing new ways of doing things?
• Do you constantly beat yourself up? Do you constantly label yourself as ‘bad’, ‘wrong’ or ‘not good enough’ in some way? Would you allow your friends and colleagues to speak to you in the way your ego—your Inner Judge and Critic—speaks to you?
• Do your current beliefs bring you happiness (be honest) or pain and suffering (be equally honest)? If the latter, why do you continue to hold them and allow them to run your life? What would it take to heal yourself?
• The average person has 16,000 thoughts a day. Would you characterize the majority of yours as ‘healing’ (love-based) or ‘killing’ (fear-based)?
• Did you ever just observe your thoughts without getting caught up in them, or in a ’story’? What is that like?
• What one or two debilitating or limiting beliefs would you like to update right now? Can you do it? Will you?
• What one or two baby steps can you take this week or next to make changes in your life by creating new thoughts and beliefs about yourself—and then taking action?

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