My wife hasn’t ventured out into the water with me. She is ego dominated in almost every way and lives in deep pain at times. So, I wanted to see if I could plant a seed of realization and awakening.

I ordered a couple of copies of the book Loving What Is by Byron Katie. Her concepts are the same as all the mindful approaches in that their goal is the cessation of thought. She takes that approach by getting people to review the thoughts in their lives that cause the stress. By challenging the thoughts and breaking them down it helps people see that all belief in thought is useless.

My wife read the back cover of the book and thought it meant I was trying to accept a miserable life, which couldn’t be further from the truth. I told her as much and just asked her to read the book.

Her response today might as well have been coming from the girl in the Exorcist. “I was so aggravated and bored reading about that woman asking those questions, I couldn’t keep going. It just pissed me off. I stopped reading! How stupid!”

I told her that I appreciated her making the effort and to try again to just read it. Who knows… maybe a seed of awareness was planted in the dark shadows of her ego and we’ll see a mushroom grow or a flower bloom later because she’ll put the seedling out in the sun.

Seeing the ego in action like that is fascinating with awareness. Incredible to see it work.

Competition amongst egos seems to be at the core of everything we do as humans, but just a simple reflection on what that reaps, should be enough for any soul to resist, but instead we believe that the death of our ego is inherent in losing ANY competition and on we go fighting to win win win. This is especially true in our silly country where everyone is taught that success only comes through competitiveness.

I saw this vividly recently when my 3 year old was playing soccer. It was wonderful to see that he had learned to be gentle and loving and that his exposure to other kids had not reduced that, but we also wanted him to succeed at the competition in soccer and that meant being aggressive, which he wasn’t inclined to do. When we released his compassion “bonds”, we created a beast and were scared of what we saw, so we had to step back and reflect on the fact that life can’t be a competition, because ultimately there are no winners or losers in life. none.

So, how do we stay mindful of this inherent need to compete in order to save ourselves. I do it with the simple mantra “life is not a competition”, “nobody wins”. Remembering this reminds me that my egotistical thoughts of winning are manufactured and not mindful and it brings me back to mindfulness and presence upon my thoughts.