Universal Wisdom:  You are responsible for you own pain and suffering. Not, of course, for the behavior of others that creates harm or pain. That is their own business. But it is happening all of the time––pain and suffering are being created. All over the world, in all kinds of relationships. It is a condition of being in human form.

You have to be willing to look at your interior life, how you have arranged your beliefs, how you see yourself and others, how you see yourself in relation to yourself and others. You have to be able to look at this and decide if it is in your best interests to function this way.

It is important to make this examination from a place of stepping back, to look at it objectively. If you are looking at it subjectively, with a lot of emotional attainment to it, then you will get tangled up in the history that made it. Your defense mechanisms will engage. This is a function of the ego, to protect what it sees as its identity, its special place in the world, the things that make it unique.

Your ego has gotten a lot of mileage out of holding up suffering as a badge of honor. You have not suffered any more or any less, any deeper, than someone else. Everyone has a story that travels along with their life. Is your ego telling your story, or is it your spirit? The ego has the limited perspective of this lifetime only. Your spirit is connected to multiple dimensions over many lifetimes. It lives in a bigger context. It is not so attached to any one event, certainly not to the ego’s story. Do you want your life to be defined by the ego’s tory, which is fundamentally a soap opera made for daytime tv? Or do you want to be living one glorious chapter in an epic saga stretching over millennia? This is the choice you get to make.

We are talking about stepping into the bigger picture. The story of where you came from and where you are going, traveling the infinite arc of your soul’s path. When you step back from the ego, onto this path in the Universe, you will be able to let go of attachment to the outcome of any singular interaction. Travel your soul path. Let your spirit free of the confines of the ego.

The ego has its purpose. That purpose is to move you through physical existence. Its purpose is not to define the journey or the path. Your journey is the movement of your spirit. The path is the manifestation of soul.