What do we do with the ego?
by Kyleigh Baker, LMFT
Please enjoy this blog I wrote a couple years ago. It’s a little outdated, but many of my thoughts are the same!
My ego historically likes to flee from anxiety, grief, pain, and the reality of death—all particularly hard to do during a pandemic. When our survival systems (fight/flight/freeze) are employed, the ego usually takes over; so, many of us during this time are likely triggered into ego patterns that try to guarantee a sense of control, security, & esteem. But is that bad? What even is the ego?
Some call the ego the false self, the small self, the defined self, the narrative self, the self-image that camouflages the “true self” with labels, evaluations, definitions, judgments, analysis. It’s the mind structure that perceives separateness & compares, categorizing the world with notions of “good” and “bad.” According to Rev. Thomas Keating, the ego’s purpose is to give a sense of control, security, & esteem. Often people think when someone has a lot of EGO it refers to the inflated (good) sense of self, but it’s also the self-critic and self-hatred. Our self-image, for better or for worse, is the ego. It’s not only the story we tell ourselves, but also the narrative of our life that we’re identified with. It’s the self that’s fixated on identification: I am blonde. I am an Enneagram 7. I am a hard-worker. I’m spiritual. I’m a therapist. I am anxious. I’m loving. I’m an empowered woman.
As far as I know, real spiritual work doesn’t involve hating or destroying the ego. It’s seen more as a tool or instrument that we learn to acknowledge and eventually/repeatedly dis-identify with as we contact our truest essence– what Eckhart Tolle calls the formless self/ what Deepak Chopra calls the field of possibilities, creativity, intentionality, and power/what Richard Rohr calls your True Self in God. Whatever it gets called, I understand it’s this place of deeper freedom, love, peace, surrender, and contentment: a life flow found deep within and beyond our bones that is the Life Source itself. It’s not a place of BEING God, but of being inseparable from God. In that way, the “self” we have defined and “loved” sort of falls away. The I-Thou relationship with God dissolves and the false self can’t survive there in boundless Love. I’ve personally only had these unitive experiences sparingly and infrequently, so I speak from it not as an enlightened and highly experienced spiritual person, but more as a secondary/tertiary (or 100th?) mouthpiece for those who’ve I’ve been lucky enough to learn from. Mystics long before me have laid out a path that has been life-changing for me, a path that therapy/coaching alone could’ve never taken me, and I wish to share that with others as I continue to learn to experience it myself.
So if we want to contact our True Self, do we have to break up with the ego?
No…and then eventually, yes. We want to befriend the ego as a means to access our True Self, but definitely not the end. As I dove into this spiritual work, I was confronted with this rude awakening that self-love wasn’t fulfilling, which aligned with much of what I read about the journey. I think that’s because that “self” we learn to “love” in places like therapy, self-help books, bibliotherapy, instagram accounts, and coaching is the ego, not the True Self. Unfortunately, that’s where most therapy/coaching goes & ends: self-love. The kind of self-love promoted often looks to me like acquiescence which I don’t think is an actual act of love. But I digress. It’s not either/or. I think it’s a bit of a dualistic trap to move from criticizing/hating yourself to praising/loving yourself and expect nothing beyond that. It is a delicate dance: learning what the ego is up to (thoughts, feelings, behaviors, patterns, etc.) without overly identifying with it OR shaming oneself for enjoying what it offers. After all, the ego is trying to get our needs met- to feel loved, belonging, connection, safe, worthy, acceptance, control, empowerment. Those aren’t bad things!!! But the ego can be a little tough to satisfy and gets rigid in its graspy-ness/neediness if we don’t move beyond it. Richard Rohr and others have indicated that before we can successfully “break up” with it, there has to be enough ego intact. IF the process were linear and alliterated, I imagine it might look like this:
find the fragmented ego -> familiarize & fulfill the ego -> forfeit & forego the ego
I definitely used thesaurus for help on that one.
And it’s imperfect because I don’t think the ego is actually “fulfillable” nor can we live in a perpetual stage of egolessness, but I’m not exactly sure on that one. Here are some examples of what I mean. It’d be ridiculous to expect a starving homeless person to surrender their obsession with food unless they had enough first. The luxury of being able to “fast” food comes with having enoughness.
I really believe that certain ego fixations won’t yield without our attention and mindfully integrating them to some degree, in actuality or imagination. That doesn’t always mean we get what our ego wants– I’ll share more about how I’ve learned from Organic Intelligence (the theory behind my approach to therapy as a clinician) to use imagination when it comes to unreachable ego fantasies at another time. For me personally, a sort of benign example is that I had developed a fixation on restaurant-going as soon as I had a stable income after a childhood of unstable income and fast-food. I observed my fixation on buying food out and got curious about what was underneath it, which I surmised was providing a sense of security for myself. (Without digressing too much, I recognize the societal privilege that helped me become economically stable to get this need met this way.). So I began mindfully enjoying buying food out and, slowly, that resource of being able to provide for myself began to integrate. My fragmented ego received nourishment from that mindful enjoyment and I became less obsessed with needing to eat out. Present day, the impulse to eat out feels more flexible, like it’s a real option vs. a fixated NEED. The need for security was symbolized in the act of buying food where I wanted to and that felt REALLY GOOD for my ego. It felt healing to my young self who often didn’t have access to healthy food, and seldom any.
Had I not observed the impulse around restaurant-eating, there might’ve been different outcomes. I could’ve 1) denied my ego without giving it any attention, observation, self-compassion 2) continued to compulsively eat at restaurants, keeping the ego in control– rigid, demanding, and inflexible—while using self-love to legitimatize it or self-hate as an attempt to abate it.
In either of these options, I might’ve missed the gift of healing that the restaurant impulse was bringing to me—I say ‘might’ because we are complex beings with infinite outcomes/possibilities, so that ego need for security/self-provision probably could’ve integrated a million other ways.
So I hope my point is clear: it’s difficult to let go of something that’s fragmented/broken. That’s why self-love can be a helpful step on the spiritual journey; but when the tool is taken as the path itself, I think it gets precarious. If the goal is to eventually move beyond the small self and into the True Self, befriending the ego is part of that process. That involves self-care, self-compassion, self-awareness, and most notably, self-observation.
While the ego isn’t bad, when we’re unaware of it, we can get stuck in patterns that ultimately aren’t from a place of true freedom, peace, joy, ease (True Self) but from unmet needs for control, security, & esteem. I like Ram Dass’s quote, “Like a dictator, it [the ego] offers us paternalistic security at the expense of our freedom.” So like a little child demanding attention, we might try looking inward and ask what the ego needs and then mindfully enjoy either meeting that need in reality or imagination.
My daily “ego work” (in process!!) has involved self-observation, presence practices, meditation, sensation awareness, and enjoyment. Here are tools I’ve used for each that I hope supports you:
Self-observation: This is the most helpful when it’s full of curiosity and self-compassion. My favorite tool: The Enneagram. Learning the patterns of my personality has helped me see and own the tendencies of my ego (e.g., security-oriented, flee from pain, hyper-activity, etc.). Without continual inner observation of our beliefs, thoughts, desires, behaviors, etc., Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault says “we will never move beyond the egoic narrative self with its endless stories that most of us mistake for the seat of our personal selfhood” (Heart of Centering Prayer book).
Presence practices: I practice a simple scan of the environment everyday, using all the senses I can. I let my eyes go where they want to go, let go of thoughts/evaluations of what I see, and notice the present environment. This mindful practice is the foundation to everything else (thank you, Organic Intelligence)!
Meditation: I’m a novice Centering Prayer practitioner (day 97 to be precise) so I can hardly speak to this. However, this simple and profound practice has definitely deepened my experience of non-attachment—meaning, my ego might get graspy for something but I am more easily able to let it go (obviously not always!! It’s just getting easier!). I’m told we need meditation practices (specifically self-emptying/objectless awareness types) because they invade unconscious programming at a depth that conscious work can’t. Most meditation practices can be helpful, but I’m particularly weary of practices that reinforce the ego and seek “mystical experiences”– thought processes, emotions, reactions, desires, imagery in the mind, “messages from the heart,” etc. Again, not bad, but shouldn’t be mistaken as the end goal for transformative ego/spiritual work either. Bourgeault says we fall prey to self-delusion when the “mental witnessing presence thinks it’s keeping watch but blindsided by its unconscious impulses.”
Sensation awareness: this one’s tricky & takes time & patience. Humans are neurobiologically focused on what’s wrong in order to stay alive. Thus, tension, stress, anxiety, fear, etc. are more readily felt in the body. It takes practice of attention to BE in our bodies with unconditional presence and to tend to what feels pleasurable (the non-intense, non-addictive kind of pleasure). My spiritual teachers talk about this practice being especially important because it helps break the bonds of identification/labels/attachments. We might start with the question, “When I feel peace, how do I know that experience in my body? When I feel joy/relaxed/calm/content/accepting/love, how do I experience that in sensation?”
Enjoyment: as I’ve already chronicled, mindful enjoyment can be a helpful stepping stone in working with the ego. Once there’s more observation happening, which is where traditional therapy/coaching can actually be helpful, you have a little more awareness of what your ego needs—acceptance, love, belonging, security, etc. While insight alone doesn’t usually transform us, I’ve found mindful enjoyment of what I observe in myself to be immensely helpful. As one of my teachers Steve Hoskinson often says, “The job is enjoyment.” Enjoy the thoughts, feelings, sensations, etc. without taking it too seriously! Enjoying getting that need met can be healing and helpful to move on from it.
As one final linear summary of my example:
Ego seeks to meet a need for power/control, security/safety, or esteem (e.g., security/assurance it can provide for itself & stay alive)
Ego finds symbol of securing that need (e.g., buying food at restaurants)
True Self OBSERVES ego’s pursuits and fixations and gets curious (e.g., incessantly going to restaurants). Instead of judging it harshly OR overly identifying with restaurant-going, thus avoiding the self-hate/self-love dichotomy, she wonders what this “need”-turned-fixation is about.
With presence and mindful enjoyment, the impulse to eat out becomes less intense, less frequent, and less insistent that that’s the only way to feel secure
With the ego being a little more intact, the ability to surrender the need for security becomes less scary, more doable
I hope the process outlined for working with the ego is helpful! So what do we do with the ego? Do we befriend it or break up with it? Both! Neither! All! I’m kinda confused, too, don’t worry.
With love,
K.B.
