Posts Tagged ‘ego’

By Seamus Anthony

Do you suffer from a lack of self-confidence? Is so you should know that learning to meditate effectively can really help you to build your self-confidence levels up.

I recently started doing stand-up comedy as a hobby. Many people I know commented that I must have such strong levels of self-confidence to even consider such folly!

They are correct.

Despite my dubious comedic material, the reason I can go through with it (even though I still get very nervous before getting up on stage) is because I do actually have a lot of self-confidence and yes, a major reason I have this personality trait is due to meditation.

Allow me to explain.

How Meditation Helps You Become More Self-Confident

It is a sad fact of life that as we grow from childhood to adulthood, we invariably go through various degrees of emotional trauma. This is true even for those of us with relatively stable upbringings; think about how horrible kids at school were to you sometimes. This stuff all takes it toll on our developing minds and to protect ourselves from unwanted emotional pain, we build up defensive emotional walls.

By Seamus Anthony

Here is a slightly exaggerated list of the reasons why my music career kind of stalled …

1) Either by fluke or an initial burst of hard work, achieve a minor level of proficiency and/or success and then decide you have made it already, that the world owes you continued growth, success and adulation, and that you don’t need to try anymore.

2) Foster and fertilise your ego until it becomes so inflated that you can’t see around it anymore.

3) Believe your own hype.

4) Get stuck into drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes until you are both psychologically and physiologically addicted to both. Allow the unchecked consumption of these vices to eat up all of your cash, and destroy your health and your grip on reality. Eat badly and allow your fitness levels to plunge, and your body image to go to pot.

5) Don’t listen to other musicians and learn from them. Don’t listen to many different kinds of music. Don’t constantly read and research, ask questions, pay attention to what the Pros do, or invest any time whatsoever into learning new skills. And NEVER practice. Fail completely to plan your career in advance, and be very careful to utterly neglect to utilize any strategy or common sense whatsoever as you go about your business. MOST IMPORTANTLY – ALWAYS REFUSE POINT BLANK TO GET INVOLVED IN ANYTHING THAT EVEN VAGUELY RESEMBLES HARD WORK.

By Steve Mills

Many eastern spiritual texts put forward the idea that you must learn to have a full awareness of your whole self. While our self looks like it is an integrated whole from one level, scratch the surface (via meditation or other methods of self-enquiry) and you will find a whole heap of different parts of your personality, all striving to express themselves. The one that stands out the most initially is the Ego, the self-important, self-centric aspect of our personality . The ego (which is a modern western psychological term I might add) has been given a fairly bad rap in the modern “new age” scene.

image by Swiss Bones

Somewhere along the way, our Western minds have turned this into the ridiculous notion that to be happy you must get rid of, or even completely destroy the ego.

My own personal experience has brought me to a different understanding. I believe that there is no reason to destroy what is essentially a part of yourself. The real power is in learning to integrate this and all of the other interesting and unique parts of your personality into a functioning whole.

… the trick is getting in touch with this truth so that you feel it.

By Seamus Anthony

If you read a lot of Zen stuff, enlightenment stuff, you’ll come across the idea that we are all inherently enlightened, and I believe that this is true.

But also true is that most people don’t usually feel anything like they’re enlightened at all.

In fact most people either don’t even know what enlightenment is or they believe that it’s something “up there” that they cannot hope to achieve. Well, we’re not the first but we at Rebel Zen are here to tell you that it is true – you ARE enlightened but you just don’t know it yet.

Getting in Touch with Your Inherent Enlightenment

At the core of your being, underneath all of the emotions, moods, thoughts, opinions, and physical sensations is your True Self or your soul. Your True Self knows that it is one with all of creation, the Universe, God. It exists in a permanent state of peace that cannot be shaken even when you are in the midst of the worst possible crises imaginable. It is NOT the part of you that freaks out because somebody is pointing a gun at your head (or more likely, because the new guy in the office is using your favourite damn coffee mug). This part of you, much more readily accessible, is your ego.

By Steven Mills

There is nothing better then finding that you have carved out a spare hour in the day to sit and meditate.

The daily worries of the world have started to float away, and the big thoughts that fill your normal waking mind have started to quieten down. A slow, easy feeling of peace works its way over your body as you focus on the simpleness of in breath and out breath. You begin to focus on nothing, to pull your observing mind out of the “stream of consciousness” and begin to notice your thoughts as something separate.

Then you start to hear them.

“Oh yes doing well, yes quieten down the thoughts” says one.

“You really should be doing that blog post and not meditating” says the next.

“Sounds like a truck outside, wait.. wait… no it’s a bloody leaf blower!” complains a third voice.

It’s the small voices of the mind, the thoughts that during waking life dictate your actions and way of thinking, but now in meditation serve to distract you from your aim of letting go and giving the mind a rest.

I have heard it said many a time that every person on this planet has a story tell. If you sat down with a pensioner from Melbourne, an office worker in Berlin or a 12 year old kid in Beijing, each would have a unique and compelling tale to tell. I bet that you also have an interesting story regarding your life and your place in the world.

You possess a chronicled history of your past, a unique viewpoint on the present and a predictive prophecy about what you assume is going to happen to you in the future.

Everyday when you wake up you listen to the story of what today might be like, and the story of what occurred yesterday. We are constantly re-telling this life story to ourselves, checking it against our immediate reality in order to make decisions, evaluate what other people are doing and to know our cultural place in certain situations.

This story is the blueprint that the voice inside your head, your inner narrator, uses to explain to you what you are seeing, thinking and doing in the present moment.