I long thought that life had no inherent meaning — that we assign our own meaning to it. That may be, but here’s a good purpose to assign to it: Rediscovering the love that connects all of us to one another and to the universe.

As babies, we have no ego; we are directly connected to our caregivers through the same heart-to-heart love energy that connects us to the loving intelligence of the Universe. Call it God’s love that we come to recognize as love between one another. Or call it the creative nature of the Universe. …

Rumi, one of humanity’s all-time greatest poets, wrote:

Come, return to the root of the root of your Self.

Once you get hold of selflessness,

You’ll be dragged from your ego

and freed from many traps.

OCD is one such trap of the ego.

In the same poem*, Rumi wrote:

Why suffer at the hands of things that don’t exist?

*The Root Of The Root Of Your Self, by Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

OCD exists to the degree that we cede power to it. Long-time sufferers may have ceded all power to it. As one takes back that power, OCD withers…

The other night, I had an out of body experience (OBE). Or I dreamed I was having one; it’s hard to tell. For a long time, I have been interested in having OBEs while simultaneously afraid to experience them. The fear cam from a vague idea that when I left my body unattended, demons or some sort of malevolent entities might try to get in, maybe possess me. Seems pretty paranoid, but then again, the whole concept of an OBE is a deep delve into the unknown.

I no longer have that fear, and perhaps that’s why I was finally…

The theme of my OCD was fear of losing myself; fear of not being me. Fear of death. But I was confused about who “I” was. Having so much concern and energy tied up in maintaining that false sense of self kept me from noticing my true self. Because I thought that my mind and body was my only real self, I lived in fear of of losing who I was. Beyond that fear lies freedom.

The ego is created by the mind to protect itself. Over time, we build up a false sense of identity based on circumstances of…

You are not your name; if you change your name you will still be you. You don’t become someone else when you change your job, so you are not your job. You are not your hobbies, likes or interests; it’s likely that those have changed since childhood, without eliminating you. You are not your political ideology or your beliefs, even your religious beliefs; you exist independent of them. When you look in a mirror, that’s not you either: your body ages but still you remain you. And you are not your OCD.

It is tragically limiting to identify your self…

I have written about OCD blocking the flow of qi, life energy, in your body. Chakras are energy centers in your body, through which qi flows. The seven major ones each have a color associated with it. These progress in the order of a rainbow from your lowest to highest chakras. I had always wondered why the color green was associated with the heart chakra. Why not red for love? An answer occurred to me as I was driving through the lush green landscape of the countryside. Green is the color of life, the life of the planet. …

Think of yourself as a newly sprouted tree. You’ve overcome a lot just to break through the surface of the ground. Just as a seed has all the information, all the potential to grow into a tree with deep roots and countless beautiful branches, your fully realized self already exists in potential reality. Your job to get there is to ascend your energy up the trunk of your tree.

You don’t want to be held back by keeping some of your energy for growth entangled in old habits and emotions from the past. …