The ego doesn't announce itself
It arrives as a reasonable complaint. He didn't listen. She never acknowledges what you do. They take you for granted. Every one of those sentences may be true, and every one of them keeps the eye trained outward, on the other person, where the ego prefers it. Sufi thought, rooted in the tradition that gave us Rumi, Hafiz, and the poetry of longing that still gets shared at 2 a.m. when someone's heart is breaking, begins from a different premise. The self is the first relationship. Until you have some reckoning with it, the others are just rehearsals.
