You are as equally deserving of love, honor, and respect as any other human being. You are no better, no worse. We all have our strengths and our flaws. We all have our own perspective on the world, shaped by our experience and how we have learned things.

In order to achieve this sense of equality, simply put aside negative ego. The ego will make up stories to tell you that create a feeling of more than or less than. What you need to do is to train yourself not to participate in those stories because, until you do, they’re just stories. Your participation makes them real. That means not arguing with them, not trying to suppress them, and certainly not taking them as truth. Just focus on something else.

Your thoughts, more often than not, have no bearing on reality. You are not your thoughts. Your thoughts are not truth. They’re just noise. They are often ego-generated resistance, which serves a number of purposes, but from a spiritual point of view, offers you the opportunity to strengthen your spirit, to help you grow and evolve. When you choose to move through the fear-generated resistance, it is, quite literally, resistance training.

The most effective way I have found to disengage from the negative ego is meditation. It will help you learn to observe your thoughts without participating in them. It will give you that sense of peace that comes from not having to be caught up in what’s going through your head all the time. Meditation will help you see that your needs are equal to the needs of those around you.

Here are some meditation exercises that might help you:

Focus into the body feel rather than the stories.

Scanning your body to shift away from thoughts.

Mindfulness.

You can also practice, when the stories in your head bother you or take you out of an equality mindset, focusing on only verifiable information. What can you see, hear, smell, taste, or touch? Everything else is assumption – a story. Act on verifiable information. If someone hasn’t told you what they’re thinking, you don’t know what they’re thinking, or what their motivations are.

Just remember that you are as equally deserving of love, honor, and respect as any other human being.

This post is part of a series called Monday Message, based on that day’s reflection from 365 Days to Enlightenment (authorized versions are currently out of print, working on a new edition). Check back next Monday for another one! You can also sign up for the Daily Message on my mailing list if you’d like to receive a new reflection every day. I also often post them to Instagram, if that’s a medium you enjoy.