Your Ego Is a Wild Horse - And Grief Is the Pen It Can't Escape From

I've been a closeted channeler for many years.

Not because I doubted what was coming through. Because I had a deep fear of being judged. A really deep fear. And it is a strange thing to call yourself a channel when you simply are one — when being intuitively guided, catching the little nudges, hearing the whispers that clearly do not come from your everyday lived frequency of consciousness, is just how you have always been built.

Nothing walked me through that fear like my son's exit from his body.

‍Weston began coming through within twenty-four hours. And still — even as a lifelong channeler — it took me a good three months to trust that what I was receiving was actually him. That is how deep the doubt runs when the stakes are your own child.

What I did in those months was write. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I was so open. Cracked all the way open, in the way that only that kind of loss can do.

One of those journal entries is the one I want to share with you.

The entry

It begins with a prayer I'd copied down from somewhere because I loved it — lead me from the unreal to the real, lead me from darkness into light, lead me from death to immortality. And then this came out of me:

‍I feel like I've been abandoning myself in my grief. Before I can become the channel to open and meet and write the book, my ego has got to get out of the way. I am facing the wrath of Mary. The fear of death is the love of the body.

‍And then the Magdalene frequency answered.

She said the sacred is wherever you are, when you meet it with your heart. She said there is a deep fear in me because I do not trust myself — which is why I want to talk about everything. Seeking validation. Not sharing to help another see, but asking, do you see what I see? Am I right? Do you approve of me?

Then she said the line that undid me:

Doubt is the door the devil enters most. Because doubt seeks the external, and there are plenty of masks the devil can wear to keep you from ever facing your doubt. And what is doubt, really? The ego questioning experiences it did not create.

The ego only exists through grasping and resisting. Wanting and not wanting. It is never satisfied. And when your awareness turns toward the one thing it cannot metabolize — death, contact with the mysteries of grief — it thrashes to keep you on edge.

And then:

How do you tame a wild horse? Not by force. That will only make it more violent. You tame it through love, through patience, kindness, compassion.

And my love, your ego is no different. It is an addicted wild horse forced into a pen, the pen of grief, a pen there is no way out of.

The pen

Sit with that image, because it does something.

The true dark night is the place of no return. The pen. The death. The diagnosis. The loss that shatters the illusion of safety and the fantasy of control.

‍And here is the mechanism of suffering: when I identify as the wild horse, I feel trapped in the pen and I go mad. I thrash. I bleed. I scream.

But when I witness the horse — when I feel the helplessness and the fright rather than becoming it — something else becomes possible. I can no longer run. I can no longer numb. I can no longer fake it or force life to be anything other than what it is right now. So I can either keep thrashing, or I can surrender to the greater love that has always held me. Even here. Because I am that love.

Only something greater than the ego's strategies could ever corner the ego into stillness. Something it cannot finagle its way out of.

Grief is that thing.

And the point was never to destroy the ego. We need the ego while we are in a body. The point is to redeem it. To sanctify it. To love it so completely that it surrenders into partnership — not disciplined into submission, but loved into surrender. So that its wild, free majesty is never tamed out of it, only turned toward the soul.

Then and only then can it be free to be ridden. Not to run wild on its own. To be of service to your heart.

Weston

Then my son dropped in. ‍

Mom, you are now shifting your mindset to love. Home is where feelings live.

I asked if he meant home in the soul. He said: The soul is what the ego feels, but through the eyes of God.

I asked how trust gets re-established once it's broken — because in this horse story, trust is broken. He said one word.

Grace.

The horse ran. The horse caused the mess. And the horse judges itself for it, feels shame after it has been seen — or after it knows it has been seen all along, through the eyes of God.

I thanked him for the metaphor. I told him it had done something inside of me.

He said: It tames the wild horse, mom.

And when I asked about heart-brain coherence being ego-and-soul coherence, he said: Yes, mom, it's the whole point of the game. ‍

The confirmation, and the seam

Here is where I want to be honest with you about what I know and what I believe.

‍Some time after that entry — this year, I think — I read something about Mary Magdalene comparing the ego to a wild horse. I cannot for the life of me remember the book. My memory has not been the same since losing Weston. But when I read it, it blew my mind, because it was the same message I had already received.

I am not going to tell you that proves anything. I don't know that it does. What I can tell you is what it was for me: a confirmation.

And when I mention the wrath of Mary, what I mean is the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, where she names the seven wraths the soul must pass through. Seven layers. Which are, I have come to believe, seven ways we tame that wild horse in us.

What I actually know is this: I don't know anything. I only see about one percent of reality, and my brain is busy deleting everything it doesn't think belongs in the story of me. But the messages I receive — from my son, from the Magdalene consciousness, in meditation, about God — are consistently, relentlessly about one thing. Love without exception. And to truly be in love is to offer forgiveness.

Forgiveness is everybody's birthright. And every time we are forgiven, we take a step closer to taming that horse.

What grief showed me about myself

Grief brought me into such clear awareness of the BS that had been running underneath my life. And that is a gift. A brutal one, but a gift.

‍One of the first things I saw was how much I would lie about stupid things. The stupidest things. My inclination was just — to lie. And I thought, what is that?

‍I didn't chase the why. Or the how, or when I started. None of that matters, and the quest for it just takes you on a whole other quest. The point is that it bubbled up into my awareness. I noticed it. I felt the energy of it. And then: what choice am I going to make in this moment?

‍Every time I choose differently than the reaction would have chosen — every time I don't let the wild horse take me for a ride I'll feel terrible about later — it eases and erases the experiences that cause me to judge myself. Which is what creates unforgiveness. We put ourselves in these loops when we are out of our own integrity. ‍

Three ways to get present without meditating for hours

Most people won't sit for hours. I do, and I love it, but that's where my practice has taken me. Here is what you can actually do:

‍The 5-4-3-2-1 game. At a red light, instead of picking up your phone: five things you can see, four you can hear, three you can feel through touch, two you can smell, and the one thing you taste in your mouth. It brings the senses present.

Your hands and your feet. We walk on our feet all day and never notice them unless they hurt. Same with our hands. So stop. Open your palms. Notice tingling, warmth, whatever is there. Take three breaths in through the nose and out through the mouth, still feeling your hands. Then breathe into your palms. Notice what you're noticing — and then ask what else you can notice that you weren't noticing a minute ago.

‍Name it to tame it — out loud. When feelings overwhelm, say them. Anxiety is here. Grief is here. Out loud, because the story inside our head sounds so much worse in there than it does when we say it to another person. Often when I say it out loud I can hear how absurd what I've been thinking actually is. And notice the pleasant ones too. Joy is here. Peace is here. Contentment is here.

‍Grief will hurl you into the body whether you were living there or not. So feel how you feel. Acknowledge it. Breathe through it. Cry when the tears come and stop when they naturally stop. Tend and befriend what's here.

‍Then release the resistance — which is what releases the suffering. ‍

One more thing

‍ Know how loved you are. And know that you can love and tame the most wild, unwanted, unloved, resisted parts of yourself.

‍When we befriend our own ego, the mask falls away. You no longer have anything to protect or pretend about. And then you get to just show up in your complete authenticity — which releases that fear of judgment I told you about at the start.

‍Because the worst judgment of all is the judgment we bring to ourselves.

‍So let us stop doing the things that cause us to judge ourselves. Sit in the anxiety of not doing the thing. And then feel how good it is to live inside your own integrity.

Be so kind to you. That's where everything starts.

Grieving Awake is available now. Discover your sacred sensitivities at joyasosnowski.com.