Your basic heart is pure. Then interference accrues. Static takes over. The individual, the seeming owner of the body, starts to feel frail and unprotected. This is you. Admit this.

Then the entity known as ego steps in as your defender, and you become resistant to love. You embrace the fear of being offended. You are en garde. You are ready to duel at the drop of a hat. No one is going to take advantage of you. No one is going to get the better of you. Ego won’t let that happen. At these times, ego rules the roost. It is like you are the King or Queen, and others must be prepared to kiss your feet, or else, you deign in heart: “Off with their heads.”

You hold on to believing that you are in the right and that you must fight to prove it. You become self-righteous when you are, in fact, defeating yourself. This is what is meant by shooting yourself in the foot. This is what is meant by sabotaging yourself. This is what is meant by cutting off your foot to fit the shoe. This is nailing your foot to the floor. This is trying to hold life in place, and, you, right or wrong, in the forefront, a supreme being who can do no wrong and must defend himself to the end. This has been your practice on more than one occasion. Yes, dear ones, you may feel another is slandering you, yet it is you slandering your True Self.

You are your own ego. Ego isn’t a creature outside you. You make ego a big part of your team. You have primed ego to fight for you when it could be for you to apologize for taking such great offense. It is not a wonderful thing to put ego before all else. Instead of saying you’re sorry, you do a song and dance about being wronged.

Now, don’t misunderstand Me, sometimes you are not treated right. Sometimes you acquiesce too quickly in your perceived need to stand out as the good guy, the patient Griselda, the epitome of patience, the most patient of all in the whole wide world. I do not tell you to offer your head to be cut off. I tell you that you don’t have to enter the fray. You do not have to fight to the end. Why would you want to?

There may be action for you to take, a decision to make that you have to make. How much distress are you willing to swallow within your portfolio of how kind and pleasing you must be. You know what I’m talking about.

Sometimes you have to withdraw. You don’t have to be a saint, you know. The focus is to be on what you are to accomplish that is beyond your little self and also beyond the little self who sits opposite to you when you both are out and out opposed.

It is not that you have to maintain harmony at all costs. Harmony is not to be an expense. Harmony can be offered nevertheless. Certainly, rigidity is not part of harmony. Something has to give. You can’t be the only one. You can give only so far. On the other hand, contrary to how you see it, you may well not have budged enough.

At a minimum, there has to be common courtesy. Certainly, common courtesy starts with you. This is not asking too much, is it? There is rough terrain that you travel through. It can be desert. It can be arctic. Yet you don’t just sit there and swelter or freeze. You don’t have to put up with everything any more than you have to make a fuss over everything. There is a time when it is up to you to pull the curtains on certain theater in your life. Not everyone wants to be your friend. Like it or not, sometimes dismissing another is the course of action to take, not because you want to, but because this is the spot you find yourself in and, most likely, led yourself to out of false pride aka ego.