Telling stories...changing stories...am I changing

A recent realization...

I've been laboring (yes it feels like laboring) for the last several years, trying to become more compassionate and more loving. I've been working to change my career from a business guy resting upon his ego to a compassionate doer of something good. I ended my business career two years ago. I worked for a non-profit for a year. I spent a year doing nothing but contemplating, wondering, investigating, trying to meditate, probably spending most of my time testing my narcissistic potential. I made a decision for a new path in work (become a counselor), something that would most certainly change me from being the ego-centric business guy I once was into the loving, giving soul that I wanted to be.

The problem would seem to be that instead of really changing, I've traded one ego in for another one. I find myself judging (mostly in my mind) the people who do what I used to do, who live the way I used to live ("selfish, money-centric people"). I'm grasping to rationalize my decision. I'm struggling to justify my new self....my new ego. So it would seem I may not have really changed that much. Maybe my act of trying to change was misplaced or misunderstood. Maybe I didn't understand what it meant to change.

So, what have I learned? Perhaps an old lesson that's been told to me in many different ways (as in "you can't run away from your problems" or "changing what you have or what you do won't make you happy"), but I never fully understood. It would seem that altering my environment can only be a vehicle for helping me to change internally. "Healthier" environments may make it easier for me to be myself, but if I behave and think in the same ways, I won't have changed at all (e.g., I'll be a judgmental do-gooder instead of a judgmental business guy). So real change may only come from how I understand and relate through my soul and awareness. Are my spiritual pursuits an adjunct to my life or are they at the center of all I do (in which case it won't matter what I do. I can be a spiritual business guy, a spiritual counselor or a spiritual short order cook)? Do I understand and react from my ego or from a place of spiritual awareness? These would seem to be the important questions for me today.

So, my current pursuit is probably building the next generation of my ego, an ego of awareness (aware Jim), and I guess I'll see where that takes me.