Hope you had a love-filled Valentine’s Day even if you were on your own! Remember, Love is always here… because you are here.
So how can you deepen into that ever-abiding love?
One way is to understand how your ego takes you away from experiencing that love which is your true and essential nature.
This is why I wanted to devote the next few weeks to exploring the ways we can consciously and unconsciously get taken out. Specifically, by diving into the seven (I call them veils) of the ego, that Meggan Watterson outlines in her book, Mary Magdalene Revealed.
In addition to really unpacking each of these, I’m going to offer you some questions to support your own personal inquiry into how you and your loved ones may/may not experience these particular aspects of ego that we’re focusing on.
To begin, Watterson shares that according to the Gospel of Mary Magdelene, there are seven powers (ego veils) that exist within us human beings, and they are:
Darkness
Desire
Ignorance
Zeal for Death
Realm of the flesh
Foolish wisdom of the flesh
Wisdom of the wrathful person
Today, we'll focus on the first two.
Darkness
First, here is an inquiry question for you: When you experience an internal sense of darkness, how would you describe it?
Watterson says she experiences it as: “heaviness, depression…being trapped, or constricted.”
I can experience it as a sense of drowning in feelings, in overwhelm. This can be accompanied by hopelessness, even helplessness.
Can you relate to any of those feelings?
Do they arise in relation to a specific person or situation? At a particular time of day/month/year?
I used to really struggle with this, the darkness. In part, it’s the DNA I came in with. Depression and addiction run in my family of origin, and are in my system as well. As you know, I’ve done a lot of healing with this but at times, the darkness still grabs me. Thankfully, when it does, it doesn’t have the same heft or weight it used to, nor does it stick around as long.
I did have an experience of falling into darkness recently. I call it a pit, and when I’m in one, it can feel like I’ve been there forever! Know what I mean?
Thankfully, at some point I recognize where I am and make a loving choice to shift my perspective. Sometimes this is through prayer, sometimes it’s playing an uplifting song and dancing, sometimes it’s moving my body and exercising.
The trick is to understand yourself and your cycles and know how to re-right yourself when you get stuck in an ego jag.
How about you?
What’s a trigger that can make you fall into darkness, into hopelessness?
How do you find your way back?
The second veil that we’ll look at today is:
Desire
Some other ways to think about this is: yearning, craving, wanting, envy.
How do you experience desire?
Some experience it as clinging.
Others as a never ending hole to be filled, of wanting.
I once heard, and cite often, that the 2 things our ego is most afraid of are:
Losing what you have
OR
Not getting what you want
Most often, these sensations take us out of the moment because we’re so busy harkening back to the past or projecting into the future. It’s the inability to be content right now, with who you are, what you are and what you have. And that sorely activates the place of lack within us.
Are there certain people, situations or times when this gets triggered for you?
My favorite antidote to this is… gratitude.
Why? Because gratitude is the shift from having or wanting to being.
The invitation when you feel that desire, longing or envy, is to stop a moment and take a quick inventory of everything you have right now.
Clean air to breathe
Fresh food to eat
A safe place to live
Money
Friendships
You get the idea.
As we shift back to being more present and grounded, that lack dissolves into the remembrance of who we are and how much we already have. Which ideally brings you to remembering that you are what you seek. As Walt Whitman reminds us in his poem, Song of Myself, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
We all do.
The invitation here is to spend some time unpacking these two veils, and next week we’ll explore two more!
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Image courtesy of Roxana Zerni