Your own worst enemy

Is you.

Look in the mirror, deep into your own eyes and what do you see?  The mirror is full of you.  And to do that, it must be empty of itself.  Thus, what the mirror offers is a form of Unconditional Love.  It reflects, with no distortion, any and everything placed in front of it--what you see is what you get.

Or is it?  The truth is what you really see is a reflection.  It's not actually you.  If anything, it's the opposite of you.  The you in the mirror moves its left arm when you move your right arm.  In fact, what you see in the mirror is actually flipped upside down as it passes through the lens of the eye.  That information is then encoded in an electrical signal through a process called phototransduction before it's then flipped right side up again by the brain.

And something gets lost in translation.  You look at yourself and you see some fine lines.  Hell, let's call them what you're really thinking--wrinkles.  You see the extra 30lbs you've gained since high school.  You see every flaw, mistake, and "what if" in that reflection like you wrote it yourself.  So you do.  Then the adjectives of self destruction flow till you could write a thesaurus for masochists.  A few minutes turns into hours turns into days and maybe even years, and suddenly you are wearing your most dominant thought.

And it doesn't look good on you.  But after all this time, your idea of who you are has become deeply ingrained into your psyche.  Your ego has become attached to the label of fat or sick.  Even more, it holds onto a definition which promises to take away any responsibility you could ever take for yourself--VICTIM.  Yeah, you are powerless against the forces working against you.  Age.  Genetics.  Bad Timing.  Luck.  

Expression of will power are not tolerated and any attempt to take control of your own destiny is immediately but subtly undermined:  "You can take the elevator this once.  Another cookie won't kill you.  The show's not over...don't go to bed yet!"  The ego doesn't want to die, and it will say anything and employ anyone to convince you not to change.  Your parents taught you that you'd be rewarded with attention when sick or hurt.  Church indoctrinated you into meeting your needs before the needs of others was not the way to salvation.  This type of programming is exactly the kind of ally the ego will recruit to keep you from evolving.  Because evolution, even for the better, is death to the ego.  

And you need the ego.  Without the ego, you wouldn't have a sense of self.  You need the ego to help create the frictions in your life so that you can have the experience of living.  Unfortunately, the ego is most alive when it's in pain.  And when it's in pain, so are you.  The real you...and the you in the mirror.  So you end up being the ego's star player in this perpetual game of self-sabotage.  

I'm hoping you get tired soon.

 

Tired enough to stop playing.  Tired enough to listen to something other than fear.  Fear can only give birth to fear.  And when you're tired enough to quit participating in your own destruction, you can finally learn the truth about the ego, the truth of Love.  The ego is nothing--not even a reflection of the real you!  It's nothing but your set of ideas about your self.  Love is what's in the mirror.  Love what's in the mirror!  Love is the real you.  

And Love always Self corrects.