from Jamie's post

What do you wish to rise above?

Blocking my feelings. Running away, refusing, numbing, avoiding, dismissing and denying the truth of how I feel, my real experience.

Rejecting my truth. Being stuck in old habits of trusting others over myself, looking to them for validation, searching for external answers, methods, strategies, techniques, permission, love, and approval. Resisting my wholeness, my worth. Denying the path, the experience, the practice, the purpose, the calling. Stubbornly walking in the exact opposite direction of true north, refusing to see or accept myself as I really am.

Self-hate. The petty, hateful, critical voice and behavior of ego. The smashing myself to bits.

Attachment. Clinging, resisting, practicing too tight, collapsing into grief, resisting the truth of impermanence, rushing after, reaching for, and grasping at what I want rather than being with what is.

Hope and fear. Both keep me from being fully in the present, which is the only place I can relax, be content, find joy–be fully alive and awake. If I am afraid, I am not in the present but rather am rejecting it, and if I am hoping, I’m reaching for some other time, some other circumstance, rather than connecting to reality.

Judgement and aggression. Inability to forgive, to let go, to relax. Attraction and aversion rather than acceptance. Desire for vengeance, retribution, justice, and punishment.

Discursive thinking and habitual patterns. Obsession with and attachment to things that no longer serve me. Things sticky, stuck, deeply rooted, old, moldy and musty, rotten and wrecked.

Ego. Dissolving this is most likely the key to rising above everything else.