My ego sees the world in black and white.

It craves concreteness. Labels. Meaning.

It feels strongest firmly planted in right versus wrong. Yes versus no. It holds absoluteness close and clings to what it knows fearing what it doesn’t know will hurt me and thus it, or at least damage the status quo it exalts in.

My ego thinks it is all I am.

Surrendering my ego leaves me breathless. It leaves me feeling exposed. Vulnerable. At risk.

Or so my mind tells me.

You cannot let go of me it says. I am all you are. All you want. All you need to be safe navigating this big, scary, unpredictable and chaotic world.

My mind likes to scare me. It likes to use words that make me believe I know everything I need to know to get through this life unscathed, or at least with minimal damage to my ego self. And everything else is irrelevant so why search for soulful meaning when ego is all I need?

But what does my mind know? It knows only the past and bases its response to today on its evaluation and assessment of my history. It filters its assessments through risk/reward ratios that are measured by how safe, or unsafe, it felt in every past experience and its measurement of the likelihood of ‘that’, whatever that is, happening again.

My mind cannot tell the future, even though it likes to tell me it can. All it can do is make up stories about the future based on what it experienced in my past.

Which, when I stop and think about it, is kind of funny. The past only exists in my mind. So where does the future live?

My mind is a trickster.

It does not want to surrender. It does not want to even give up a toehold to the possibility of ‘different’. It’s much more comfortable holding onto ‘the same’. In believing what was then, is what is now. That way, it doesn’t have to change its mind about anything.

My mind doesn’t like changing itself. It only wants to hold on. To control. To what it knows and tells itself (thus me) is true. It likes to create the illusion of safety through its capacity to rationalize, label and measure my life in terms of what it dictates is right, wrong, true, false, possible, impossible, fact, fiction and all kinds of jazzy stuff it feeds me to make me feel what it knows, or so it thinks, is the best for me to do, think, feel, be, become, have, go… without upsetting the applecart that is!

My mind thinks it knows it all.

It likes clarity and calls it insight so I will believe I really am in control of me, myself and I and how I am in this world. It also kind of enjoys the contradictions of my being too. It wants me to keep searching for the answers to ‘Who am I?’ because in my quest for answers, it doesn’t have to give up anything of itself. It only has to keep me searching.

Pretty sweet gig.

Keep me guessing and I’ll keep searching forever which keeps the mindgames going and going and going…

I surrender.

At least, until my next thought about what it means to surrender, or not…

Yup. Definitely some sweet mindgames keeping me running in circles in fields of folly.

When my ego thinks I just might surrender and quit playing its game, it can get downright dirty!

And so, I begin again.

I surrender.