Self Esteem: The Secret to Uncovering Hidden Personal Power Is the Ego Shadow

Self-esteem is essential to living free of external "busy bodies" that want to tell you have to live. It is very important to love and accept yourself if you want freedom of expression and to live out a high level of your potential gifts and talents.

As long as you are "looking for love in all the wrong places" you will not find it. You must first begin within and then you will see it "with out" - out there in the world. Now ego gets a bad rap and a lot of people who are seeking spiritual principles are inclined to think that they need to get rid of it.

Another challenge I see in people seeking spiritual awareness is that they tend to judge almost everything in sight! Well, one spiritual truth that has made all the difference in my world is learning to stop judging people, including myself - actually, especially myself.

As I've come to embrace the "shadow" parts of my ego, forgive myself and "upgrade" the beliefs around these parts of my self, I've become more compassionate and loving towards others. Judgment is a tool to show us where we need to develop compassion in ourselves, for others and ourselves.

It is not about condoning behavior; it is about transmuting it. It is about changing the energy around the beliefs about the behavior as a reflection of who you THINK you are. You see, what you do is NOT the same as WHO you are.

We get the two confused because we have been conditioned to believe as children that our self-worth comes from our performance. This is a characteristic of the "wounded" fear-driven ego. The ego is needed to be human however.

The key to power is in recognizing that the Authentic You is not the ego. The challenge is to stay aware and present in the moment enough to realize that you are playing a role; ego is not really the real YOU as the Being. In fact, there is an area in our brains, the area of "autobiographical memory" that allows you to function as a social person (actually persona or "mask") in the world.

If you had no ego you would not say, "my name is so and so". You would not be able to distinguish your body/self from another. It would be like experiencing a left-hemisphere stroke of your brain. So forgot about getting rid of your ego, it is just another misunderstanding made on the evolutionary journey to your personal power.

Instead, learn how to heal the misperceptions you hold, that you have wired into the brain. This is the "shadow". The stories we have created about who we think we are that we have a lot of negative emotion around in our cellular memory and we keep avoiding dealing with it. If we would learn how to access these parts of ourselves and deal with them, which can be done without a lot of emotional shock if you know how to work with energy, you can empower yourself in quantum leaps!

You see, you also need a healthy ego to express in a healthy way in the world. You need to be able to speak up and push back when some of those dysfunctional egos come at you to try to manipulate your money out of your pockets or to have forceful control over your choices. If you don't heal your ego shadows, you will have a tendency to be a "pleaser" who cannot not speak up for your own truth and is more concerned about being liked than being honest about your own soul's needs.

So the root of self-esteem is connected with healing the ego's misperceptions, the stories of the "Mental Me" so that the True, Authentic Self of you can "glow on" and let your Light shine. I call this the "Magnificent Me". When you learn how to transmute these shadows of the ego, it will turn into the gold of love energy, (see what an alchemist you are?), the love energy that is the substrate of all things.

It's just that your consciousness, which has been clouded over by fear is distorting the love light that is already the Truth of who you really are. Self-esteem has to come from the inside out or it is just another "fiction of your imagination".