working notes from the textual underground
In this episode, I share my answer to the question I’ve been wrestling with: how do you reduce the interference of fear and ego? Fear and ego often show up as these trickster forces that keep us trapped in outdated stories about who we are and what’s possible. I found a few things you can do to shift your relationship with fear and ego that will help you balance and embrace them.
It seems to me that when you destroy the ego, life becomes infinitely more accessible. When you destroy the ego you are no longer bound by labels and your identity becomes free of attachments. I’ve done a lot of work to free my identity from attachments. In doing so, I found my worldview to be much more flexible.
Labels still continue to haunt me. People, that is other people, seem to need me to have a label so they know how to relate to me, whether that’s to help them decide if they want to be my friend or to buy something from me. But as a much wiser man than me said, “if you label me, you negate me.” And so for a long time I resisted labels. But that was when I falsely attached the label to my ego which was attached to my identity. Kill the ego and the label has nothing to attach itself to. Now the labels don’t matter to me. I can put them on and take them off like a t-shirt.
I thought this was an interesting topic to explore so I asked my co-host Sarah the question on the latest episode of our podcast, The Havana Cafe Sessions.
Have a listen: