During a compassion meditation just now, something came up that I’m really proud of ~ and perhaps an insight I think will be helpful for anyone who has become aware they are acting out a conditioned response and weren’t able to stop. It hurts to let go of our conditioning while we are in the middle of such an emotional reaction, because when we try to let go, our ego thinks it is dying.

But it’s okay ~ compassion to the rescue!

It can hurt to renounce our egoic position because we conflate the ego with ourself and we feel like we’re letting ourselves down, but we’re not ~ we’re letting our ego get out of the way so our higher self can come through.

So I share this story for anyone who has experienced the exquisite pain of relinquishing egoic conditioning to allow a heartfulness to come through instead of the controll-y fear that a lot of us put up with inside us because of maladaptive coping mechanisms. I’ll see if I can be concise.

Today a decision was made in our family that I didn’t agree with*;

it was a decision that really, ultimately, has nothing to do with me, and getting in the way of it would have caused more conflict and tension than it was worth;

my ego/conditioning thought otherwise ~ that I should step in and dictate values, make ultimatums, control the situation and ‘fix’ the ‘problem’;

but I saw the egoic conditioning for what it was, sat myself down, selected a guided meditation that seemed appropriate (this one here) and submitted myself to a bit of ‘cultural re-education’.

I’m deeply grateful for that guided meditation, because it helped me find the space to remember I can let go of how I think reality should be, and allow reality to unfold as it sees fit, and wow, what a relief it was!

The suffering of resistance fell away, and something like a higher (compassionate) self kicked in.

I can be honest and say I wasn’t all that happy about it: there is something exquisitely uncomfortable and painful about the micro-ego-death it felt like I went through.

In my experience there is something really painful about relinquishing egoic control and recognising that my opinions about reality don’t mean shit to reality … in recognising that my conditioned ideas about how we should be raising our son are probably a bit shit.

But the pain is just my ego taking a hit, and that’s okay, necessary, especially as there is a compassion practice in my life to support that death and rebirth.

After some compassionate reflection, I feel lighter and liberated and refreshed and grateful because now there is more room in me for compassion to move in where egoic conditioning had once been “man-spreading”.

By renouncing my conditioned attachment to expectations and to values I borrowed from my parents and upbringing, I am able to move into alignment with compassionate values that tell me Zane’s mental health is more important than whether he’s going to school.

~ ~ ~

* The details are not super relevant, but sometimes they can help a person to relate to a story, so, what happened is: Zane was allowed to go out and see his mates after he bullshitted his way out of school for the second day in a row ~ after being out of school for six months. Whether this was a good or bad decision is not the point ~ he’s having a hard time lately, and forcing him to go to school would only make that worse, but I was worried that rewarding him for wagging would establish a problematic precedent. Any argument made on compassionate grounds is bound to trump what my ego thinks is best.