The paradox of the ego

We use the word ‘ego’ to describe the focus on ourselves. If I want a lot of power for myself it is called the ego. If I get angry fast people could say my ego is big. So it has to do with ‘my’ and ‘I’. However it is interesting to notice that this ego does the complete opposite when we talk about changing something to make our life better. In those cases mostly we try to change the things around ourselves; other job, other partner, other place to live etc.. So then the ‘my part’ suddenly is not so much there anymore. And this is not so strange when we look a bit further into this; when we need to change ourselves it means that we have some flaws and this is hard for the ego to accept. And thus the ego is about ourselves (my and I), however when we talk about changing things the ego tends to avoid ourselves.

Meditation is about bringing our attention to ourselves, to understand our thoughts, to improve our awareness. When meditating the correct way it should give us more awareness about this ego and thus we can improve this part.