Life can be very challenging at times. Our ego can be very fragile and easily offended. It doesn’t take much for the self-righteous anger of our ego to appear. The function of our ego is to protect us at all costs. The difficulty we have is that if we are always driven by our ego we will quickly find ourselves living a very limited life in a mental prison which our ego has created in its desire to keep up safe.

This egoic desire to protect us, at all costs, becomes so evident when we get triggered by something that another person says or does. Our immediate reaction is to protect ourselves by projecting blame. Some of us project blame externally towards the other person. Some of us project blame internally against ourselves. There is only one certainty when we project blame, either externally or internally and that is that we cooperate with our protective ego to build a prison of isolation and separateness. We disempower ourselves and we kill our inner life force of joy and internal freedom.

At times, it can appear so much easier to find someone to blame and our internal ego will provide us with lots of evidence and justification for why someone is to blame for the circumstances that I now find myself in. This is both human and really common. The thing that I’ve learned from my own life experience is that it is also disempowering and it keeps me stuck in my life. The self-righteous anger of our ego will want us to either attack the other person or to turn that anger inwards and attack ourselves. Both are incredibly unhelpful and incredibly unhealthy.

So what is the alternative?

The most challenging option of all might appear to replace the projection of blame onto another by taking personal ownership for the current situation. Please don’t hear this as blame yourself instead of blame others. The point I’m making here is that as soon as we can transition beyond the desire to project blame to another and the sooner we can return to a more empowered place of personal ownership the quicker we can return to a life of joy and inner freedom. Listening to the self-righteous anger of our internal ego will imprison us – taking personal ownership will lead to inner freedom and joy.

When our actions are driven by egoic anger, we create a mental prison for ourselves. Taking ownership, in such challenging situation from an awareness of our immense internal power is the only way I know to living a life of joy, fulfillment and freedom.

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