How to lose the ego fight against having an easy life

Choosing to swim, and facing downstream

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I recently reconnected with the core ego belief that life is hard. I saw how this belief still shows up for me sometimes. Thankfully, I no longer let it take hold. Not for long, anyway. I remember how my life can be easy — and how there’s nothing more that I need to do or learn or be, to feel worthy of that reality right now.

An easy life doesn’t mean that only positive and pleasant things are happening. It just means I don’t resist whatever is happening. I move in harmony and in total agreement with the natural current of life, rather than opposition or objection to it.

A few months ago, I decided to organize my first in-person offering since before the pandemic. It had been years since I held my last women’s retreat. I was more than a little rusty at holding space for a group. It brought up all kinds of insecurities. 

My inside voice was frenzied: Am I still effective at facilitating? What is my core offering? Is what I am teaching interesting? I’m so out of date; who am I to do this?

I relaunched myself with an offering called “Money, Power, and Purpose: True Abundance Activation”. It was a living laboratory for my foundational body of work, Regenerative Purpose, to co-mingle and play with more recent investigations into the nature of money — and how our current relationship to money is largely devoid of spiritual understanding.

The workshop was electric and inspiring. As I prepared for it, there was lots of activation energy. I explored new and different modalities of offering, and expanded my thinking about things that I had written in Regenerative Purpose (originally published in 2019).

Even as it was happening, I had the thought to take this offering on the road and bring it to people in cities. Two participants in that initial workshop came from Singapore and they both wrote glowing testimonials. With Singapore being an urban hub for progressive thinking, it seemed like a natural next setting.

I already had a clear vision that I would take my workshop to Singapore. But then, strangely, I got amnesia about this. That amnesia lasted many weeks.

Somehow the idea of traveling to Hong Kong got into my head, and I started trying to find a location for my workshop there. I reached out to friends with Hong Kong connections and got messages back with suggested venues and introductions to locals.

I held onto the idea of Hong Kong for a few days. I sent out some inquiries. But the responses came slowly, and they held little energy. There was no aliveness. I could put on my workshop in Hong Kong, but I saw it would take a lot of “doing” energy. 

The thing is, I know how to make things happen. I have lots of practical execution skills and decades of experience spent project-managing the shit out of my life. The list of tasks and next steps was already unfurling in my mind. 

Ten years ago, I would have taken the items on that list and started ticking them off one by one. But this time, I noticed the deadness and flatness of the energy on this path, and I stopped myself. This is not the way I work anymore: pushing; forcing; demanding. I don’t want to position my personal will against the flow of universal energy. That’s a recipe for suffering.

Instead I chose to change the scene in my movie. I turned my attention towards Singapore as a possibility. It was as if I suddenly remembered my vision about Singapore after a period of forgetting what I had seen.

I texted my friend Julie, who lives in Singapore. Life responded to this action by bringing me the complete opposite feeling that I had with Hong Kong. 

Later the same morning, Julie and I were chatting by phone, no scheduled meeting needed. We talked for half an hour. I went to the sauna with a friend. By the time I checked in with her afterwards, she had already identified two potential venues and copied me on the emails she had sent to them to find out pricing.

The next day, she had free time in her usually full schedule to spontaneously check out a new space that hasn’t even opened yet. The tip came from a former client who’d seen her Instagram story, asking for leads. As soon as Julie saw the place and heard the founder’s story, she knew this was the place for my offering.

There was a quick follow-up with the venue owner. I found out that the official launch date for the place is one day before the workshop, and that the topic of money and purpose is deeply resonant with the space creator’s own journey. 

In other words, it was clearly aligned. It all came together shockingly easily. Less than a week after texting Julie, my flights were booked and the event was published. All of this happened with minimal effort and zero stress from me.

Can you see the part of you that’s in disbelief? For me, that part was screaming loudly, “No way! This can’t be.” And I shushed it, saying, “Yessss, life CAN be this easy.”

There’s always a universal flow of energy that’s moving around and within us. We are in it, and it is in us. This movement of energy is a constant; it’s a built-in feature of reality. We only need to be present to connect with it.

Yet so often, we are rigid in our thinking about reality. We have the thought that “this is what I want” or “this is the way it should be.”

Because of the ego’s fixed agenda, we find ourselves swimming upstream. Against the flow. Against Nature. The mind thinks it knows better. So we end up following a preconceived plan, and we stop noticing what’s actually happening. We lose presence and disconnect from what’s real right now.

Why do we do this? Well, it’s just what egos do. The ego is on a constant mission to find flaws with reality so that it can give itself a job to do, to resolve that thing. The basic thought powering this activity is, “It’s up to me to make this happen.” This is how identity makes “me” valuable and necessary.

If this self-important “me” starts driving the struggle bus round and round, in a loop, it only takes one sidestep to overturn the repetition of that reality. It seems simple, but it’s not easy, because of our attachment to striving. This addiction can grip so tightly that we unconsciously favor dis-ease over ease.

Ideally, it’s a balance. We don’t want to make life harder than necessary. And we also don’t want to be a piece of deadwood, passively adrift in the stream. We want to consciously choose direction and take action — this is how we participate in co-creating reality. We are alive, so we’re swimming. But we can choose to swim downstream, if we pay attention to how the current is moving.

Swimming downstream means aligning personal will with divine energy. It means using personal power to serve a divine plan. In doing so, we are engaged with life and we also have a sense of ease. 

To be able to see which way the current is going, we have to develop receptivity — one of four core purpose qualities of Regenerative Purpose. 

We often think of receptivity (as it relates to purpose work) as receiving financial support and resources. But receptivity is just as much about taking in the calls and the codes of divine guidance — the kind of guidance that brings us into higher purpose alignment. And when we are standing in the stream of that alignment, then support can flow freely.

Life gets easier and easier when we increase our receptivity. There’s a cascade effect in this. If we pay attention to signs and synchronicities that are shown to us, we start to get more frequent pointers of divine direction. And if we receive and appreciate the gifts that are offered to us, we start to notice more gifts coming.

To unite personal will with divine will, we must move, then listen. Then move, and listen again. If we move without listening, we are missing humility. If we listen without moving, we lack agency.

When we learn to move with the flow of life instead of against it, reality changes. This is scary for the ego because — boom! there go all the merits we’ve attached to the effectiveness of personal doing. These merits suddenly lose their point value. 

But it’s worth giving up all those points. Swimming downstream, along with the flow of universal energy is such a joyful experience. Life moves easily, with less resistance and less suffering. And that’s when things really get interesting.

True Abundance Activation is happening on Saturday, July 15, 2023; 9am to 6pm; River Valley Road, Singapore. Details and registration.