Imagine for a moment you’ve gone to a movie cineplex that has 16 separate theaters in it. You buy your ticket and walk into the show you came to see. But, before too long, you realize you don’t like what’s on the screen so you decide to change theaters. Unfortunately, the next movie’s just as pointless. So you change theaters again. And again. Now as long as you remain one of those audience members who live only from the level of the lower “me mind” your only choice is to ramble around within the cineplex. You move from one show to the next—all the while not remembering that the film you just walked into was unable to please you the first time you saw it.

But by learning to live from the higher Free Mind another choice comes to you. You walk out of the movies. You take yourself out of the theater complex. Now you’re free to go enjoy the rest of your day in some other way.

To help you better grasp the intention of this illustration, we need to take a brief look into the theater of our usual mind. Consider your own thinking for just a moment. Can you see how your mind loves to go over and over events that haven’t even happened yet? This mental process is the “me mind” hard at work. But let’s take a closer look at what this nature of ours is really doing.

Each time the “me mind” envisions some future event it’s actually trying to find a feeling of security for itself. But the only security this lower nature can ever know is imaginary. So it has to dream up one scene after another where somehow you’ll come out a winner. The more victories it conjures up in this way, the more fear it feels that it won’t win the battles it just created. And the more agitated this low level of mind becomes from its own unconscious activity, the more it tries to settle itself with more mental movies. We can see the end of this painful picture without having to draw it ourselves. This psychological profile demonstrates what it means to be both prisoner and prison maker!

The Free Mind is always a witness to your whole mental and emotional experience, so it can’t be made a slave of any hidden desire. In this instance, the higher intelligence of the Free Mind instantly understands that no mere mental picture of security has any real power to make you feel secure.

And this realization empowers you, effortlessly, to just walk out of your own mental movie. Can you see the immense difference between the “me mind” and the Free Mind scenarios? Being able to consciously walk out of the movie- making complex of the “me mind” is the same as the power to free yourself. Why? Because once you walk out of this tiny darkened theater that your lower nature considers the whole world, you know for certain and at last: there is something outside the world of your usual mind. And once you walk into its light, you know that everything can be forever new for you.

There are more than seven billion people living on this planet which means more than seven billion personalities, opinions and ways of seeing the world. With so many diverse and varying ideologies and socio-cultural milieus, someone is bound to act in a way, or say something that upsets another.

The question is: Do we always have to take everything so personally? If not, how do we make what seems personal, impersonal?

Ego: Why We Take Things Personally
From the time we are young, usually before we’re even ten years old, situations or moments in life occur where we feel unsafe or insecure, or someone says something that makes us feel unlovable. When this happens, we begin to develop a second self, or a false self. That false self is often the “ego,” which I like to call the “protective personality” because no one likes to have an ego, but people don’t seem to mind having a “protective personality.”

Any seemingly scary condition in your life, whatever it may be, is not the real problem. It’s your reaction to it that has you shaking. Which is why, if you’ll become truly conscious of a fearful condition instead of afraid of it, you’ll change forever your relationship with fear.

Being conscious of your fear empowers you to interact with it in an entirely new way. This new inner relationship gives you the power to be awake to fear's scary influences, instead of being their unconscious slave. And as each day you discover something new about the shaky nature of your own fearful reactions, they lose their power over you. Why? You see them for what they have always been: unintelligent, mechanical forces.

To be consciously afraid means that you know you are frightened. You feel it, but at the same time you know that these very fears, as real as they may seem, are not you.

Fear is really nothing other than a self-limiting reaction that we’ve always mistaken for a shield of self-protection. It’s time to let it go, which you can do anytime you want. Here’s how: Dare to proceed, even while being afraid.

The Goddess Metis has a strong and powerful message inherent in her archetypal nature that encourages us to heal some of our self-sabotaging behaviors this week. But, before I focus in on her, I’m going to break down the storyline of the energetic umbrella over all our heads this week to reveal the invitation that was revealed in the weekly forecast.

This week’s universal energy reading begins with the energy of the goddess Mnemosyne, goddess of memory and mother of the 9 muses (of course Zeus, that ol’ horndog was the dad) in the Greek pantheon. She begins by inviting us to look to the past to discover the roots of our patterns, the things we learned and integrated that either support us or bury us in a mire of self-limiting beliefs and behaviors or supportive and positive ones. What story are you telling yourself and others about your past? Can you see your old story play out in front of you? We are memory based creatures and what we remember consciously or store beneath our waking mind rules our lives in ways many of us find baffling. But she arrives to remind us that, to make a shift, we need to tell new stories.

On a daily basis I encounter people who are frozen in fear. 

• They want to date but fear getting hurt. 
• They long to quit their day job to pursue their passion but fear failure. 
• They yearn for connection but fear rejection.
• They want to speak and live their truth, try something different, ask for a raise at work, take the next step in their relationship, go to a movie by themselves, or try a new exercise class but their fear of being embarrassed, what other people might think, judgment, or just plain not being good enough keeps them clinging to their comfort zone, unable to embrace or navigate change.