Hello and welcome to the Empowered Communication podcast. My name is Meredith Holley, I'm usually joined by Megan melon and I miss her this week but she is taking a well deserved holiday break. And I am also but I wanted to drop in and just share a little note about what I was thinking about about the holidays. Were right in between Christmas Solstice Solstice, Hanukkah holidays, and the new year right now when I'm recording this and I've been thinking about Empower communication and ego. Most of us are taught that ego is a bad thing that egos arrogance, ego is something it's domination over another person. That egos something to avoid. You don't want to be a go testicle. You don't want to do something out of ego. But really ego is our sensitive points. Ego is what separates us from another human. It's what defines who we are our preferences. It's our vulnerability. Pema children describes ego as a room that has everything that is our favorite thing in it, it has everything we love, the temperature is the exact right temperature, the food is the perfect food. Everything in the room is to our preferences. And the only problem that happens is when we start to see the outside as a threat to our preferences. So we start to hear the neighbors through the wall and we brick up the wall we smell smells under the door and we barricade the door. And pretty soon we're trapped in a room of ego a room that is set up for our preferences and for what we love. And also it becomes a trap if we aren't able to engage with outside world if we aren't able to be in spaces where we experience some discomfort with our ego. But we also experience difference. And we experience somebody else's ego, somebody else's preferences. And I was thinking about this with the holidays, because so many of us visit family or friends. And we're in these big groups of spaces where everyone's egos are kind of bumping up against each other. And we have political conversations that feel charged or religious conversations that feel charged or personal conversations with people that we haven't talked to in a long time and they feel charged. And for a lot of us The holidays are hard time because we've lost people or we've lost relationships that felt comfortable that felt secure in our egos not as a bad thing. But as a beautiful thing. We've lost experiences or even versions of ourselves that kept us insulated and safe in this room where the music was our favorite music and the temperature was our favorite temperature. Or we've lost people and experiences and versions of ourselves. That actually didn't feel good, that felt abusive, or that felt threatening to our egos. I was out walking my dog the other day and I came across this the stray dog who was terrified, and my neighbors and I were able to get a hold of her and and find her collar and take her to a safer place. But the whole time she was running away from us and fighting us. And I was just thinking about how much that is like ego how much our egos are just this little animal that's trying to protect itself from even people who are trying to help us. Even the people who love us even the experiences that might be challenging for us, but good for us. And I was also thinking about how sometimes in the holidays, that's okay. Sometimes we want to lay on the couch and binge Netflix for hours and hours. Sometimes we want to sleep in late. Sometimes we want to wear our jammies for weeks on end. Sometimes it's just okay to treat our bodies and treat our souls with the kindness that we would treat a scared animal and treat our egos with the love and with the care and with the attention that we would give to you know a baby or a puppy that is just scared and that we love. So for a lot of us you know the holidays are triggering for our egos. The holidays are an uncomfortable time where we reflect back on what the year was, whether it met our expectations or not. How well we did during the year how much of how many of our goals we accomplished um who we really are. And sometimes I think it's just okay to let that go and let our egos feel vulnerable and let them feel soft and just care for ourselves. We don't have to push ourselves to do things that stretch our egos all the time, sometimes we want to. But other times, we just want to be kind to ourselves and give ourselves a break. I think sometimes the reason that we associate ego with arrogance is that when we are very triggered when we haven't protected our egos when we haven't cared for ourselves, and we feel like we've been pushed too far we do lash out at people, we become arrogant, in order to protect ourselves. And we engage in meanness and sarcasm and making fun of other people to kind of build up a shell around ourselves, to protect ourselves and to protect our, our soft, vulnerable, little animal egos. And I think if we can take this time, wherever you are, to care for yourself, whatever that means for you. And to care for your ego to do do something that is your preference, do something you love. And if it's hard to tell what you love, because you've been in a high control relationship, or a high control work environment, or high control religion, if it's hard to tell what you really love, and what your ego really is, that's okay to just take a nap, just do something, eat a cookie, do something that cares for you that you could imagine doing for somebody else who you loved. So I hope everybody gets some beautiful time off, I hope that if you are pushing yourself to be in an environment, that doesn't feel nurturing to your ego, that you can take a step back and say maybe I'm allowed to leave this environment, maybe I'm allowed to go do something even for a little time that I love that cares for me, that's my preference. And I think that one we can do that, that contributes to health for everyone, we, we kind of get into like a double bind, where we're taught that caring for ourselves is selfish. And arrogance is ego. And those are two ways that we build up rooms of safety around around ourselves around our actual ego, right. And so I think that there are healthy ways to remove ourselves and create boundaries. And there are healthy ways to identify our preferences and care for our preferences. And I think that when we can engage in those, we can be more empowered. And you can feel when you're more empowered in your body, like you can know in your body that you're more empowered, because your ego is cared for because it's, it's more like like your body feels safer your body feels attended to. It's that feeling of listening to a song that you love. But you hadn't listened to in a long time, like that feeling of relaxing in your body and knowing that something's for you. I think that we can always attend to that. And when we do, we have healthier ways of interacting with other people and communicating with other people and enforcing our boundaries in ways that are not mean and that are not arrogant, but that are just caring for ourselves, and based in love for ourselves and for other people. So I hope everyone is having a beautiful winter. I hope whatever you celebrate that you celebrate something, even if it's just yourself over this holiday, and I hope that we bring in a wonderful new year and I know whatever the new year brings, we're going to be strong enough to encounter it, even if it's hard. And I think that you know there's room for being triggered in our egos, and there's room for caring for ourselves after we've been triggered. So, Happy New Year, everyone may or New Year be empowered and full of connection.