Understanding what our “ego” is and how it works will increase our happiness and deepen our understanding of our suffering. When hearing someone talk about “the ego” we might think it is something related to inflated sense of self or arrogance. However, ego is more closely tied to our self-perception, our mind and our natural defense systems.
Perception is the ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through our senses. So self-perception is the interpretation of our self through our senses. Being objective and open in this area can be very tricky.
Our self-perception is the base of our sense of reality, protected by numerous self-defenses and is usually a very sensitive and stubborn area of our mind.
The definition of ego at the simplest level is our “sense of self”. Its important to note, that our sense of self is developed over time and is not always accurate. It is closely intertwined with our belief system and our past experiences. Ego and your awareness of it isn’t something to fear or to avoid. It is something that should be explored for better understanding of our true self. This “new” understanding will help us suffer less throughout our lifetime.
Our Sense of Self
Our ego comes from
- our self-perception
- our belief system (possibly broken or dysfunctional)
- our need to identify with our individuality (our need to feel special and unique)
Our ego is often at the heart of our suffering, our negative thinking and our bad habits or behaviors. From a very young age, we are taught that we are special. We are told that we are a beautiful, unique snowflake and we should be proud of our differences. These early thoughts feed our ego and take us down a path that feeds seeds of self in our subconscious.
Think back to some of your earliest childhood memories. Our early memories often relate to times of achievement, independence, pride, recognition.
Remember that our perceptions and memories are often wrong. So our self-perception and self-awareness can be completely off base! This is especially true if we have not been taught how our mind and its defense systems work. As we become young adults, our upbringing, childhood experiences, and society-influenced values can take us down a path of “false self” very quickly.
The False Self
Fact: Over 90% of our daily decisions are made automatically (by our brain), WITHOUT our awareness.
Think of times you have driven or gotten a ride to a place you have been many times (work, highway or route). And you get there and do not remember any of the detail of your drive. Its almost like you have blanked out the 30 mins you were driving. Scary, right? Maybe you were thinking about something that happened to you recently and were deep in thought.
Its no wonder that sometimes when things happen to us, we don’t know why we feel or react the way we do – it’s automatic. Your brain/subconscious took care of all the detail for you. But did your brain make the right decision for you? Did it consider all of the differences in this specific situation? Enter the “false self”.
While we are one physical person, we have multiple parts that make us into a whole being. Body, mind and spirit have often been used as a way to explain the different pieces of our whole self. Our ego operates within the mind portion of our being. Our ego does and can interact with our body as well. Think of when anger or fear are triggered. What happens to our heart rate, blood pressure, heightened awareness?
Picture your ego as a mask over your self-perception (or a fog). Many people mistake the mask/fog of their ego as their true self (the layer underneath). This is when we forget who we really are and begin to get “off track” in our lives. We ended up making decisions based on our ego’s needs and did not consider our true self or long-term impacts.
The ego (our false self ) can cause us great suffering (if we allow it to). We have a choice to believe the sensations, feelings and emotions our ego creates or to simply observe what we feel (without reacting). We must remain mindful and keep our awareness active to not fall into the traps of our ego.
The ego is often the part of your mind that stirs up doubting questions. Its the part of you that makes you feel negativity, worry and fear. Its fairly easy to spot most of the time. The ego will typically redirect attention back to yourself. Ego is often the little voice in your head that you have to negotiate and reason with.
FACT: Your ego (false self) will blatantly LIE TO YOU. It loves blame and can shift your entire view and perspective to support made-up stories playing over and over in your head. It does this to support the star of the story… YOU!
Don’t be scared or startled by this. Be open to it and learn from it. This understanding will help you shut down the self-torment playing in your head.
So how do we get it back in control when our false self is tormenting us?
- Calm your mind with mindful breathing
- Don’t make any important decisions when you are upset
- Gently and tenderly talk to and care for your ego as you would a little baby
- Gently shift focus off of yourself. Become the person serving, and not the person needing to be served
When we are very young, we begin to build and feed the needs of our false self. We feed and nourish it until it becomes strong and a natural part of us. Before we know it, our false self becomes more of us than our true self.
Our ego (our sense of self) and our false self (the mask) are very closely related and often work together. Our ego is the foundation of our false self.
Self Serving (Needs and Wants)
Its easy to learn to recognize our ego. Our ego is often fragile, defensive and is almost always self-serving. The ego wants to be fed and reassured. Our ego will fight to survive and will trigger intense physical symptoms if it is threatened.
It is very important to know that the ego cannot be satisfied. It will always want more and will always try to trick you into feeding it until the next time.
Its important to remember that cravings cannot be satisfied. This pattern will continue until you start to lose the ability to recognize it as your ego. Your decisions, patterns, memory and even viewpoint will automatically shift to support it (without your awareness). It sounds a little scary, but dont fear it, just try to recognize it in your own life.
Life’s energy is not self-serving and is the opposite of ego (selfless and about connection). Interestingly, society rewards ego-based living and encourages self-serving values like personal power, success and independence. However, the more we feed our ego and independence, the more we will suffer.
Quite the paradox, isn’t it?
This is why it is important to understand how to reduce the ego’s power over our thinking and our patterns/habits.
Survival Instincts
All living beings have natural, built-in instincts. Many of these instincts are related to survival. Our mind and our brain’s automated processes often work to feed our ego. It triggers the reward circuit in our brains and triggers dopamine production. Our brain loves this reward system!
Deep within us, our ego believes that if we are stronger, more independent and more successful that we will be more desired by others. This desire from others will allow us to reproduce more easily. But is this really our goal? Does it apply all of the time? Of course not!
So what is the goal?
The goal is not to completely remove our ego. Its about simply recognizing it and not reacting to the feelings and sensations it creates. To coexist with it in a healthy way. To reduce unnecessary suffering caused by our ego.
Lets look at:
- How to recognize our ego
- How to reduce our ego’s power over us
Common Patterns of the Ego
There are a number of common patterns that cause suffering in our life. The more we can easily recognize these patterns, the more we can reduce reacting to them and ultimately become happier and more satisfied.
Our habits tend to feed our suffering or our happiness. Mindfulness around our habits, thinking and our attitudes will help us feed the right seeds in our mind. Hint: we want to feed healthy, positive thinking so those thoughts appear more in our lives.
Needing Acceptance, Reassurance and Recognition
Society has always rewarded those who achieve and excel in society’s values. This could be success in your job, success in wealth, being skillful in something (like sports or artistic talent). Or it could simply be being better at something than someone else.
These are all examples that feed our ego. We reward kids this way at a very young age. Unfortunately, this behavior feeds the need for needing more acceptance from others. This becomes the unhealthy habit. Eventually, we don’t even think about it anymore. We just do it.
Remember, cravings cannot be satisfied.
The need for acceptance can also come from family dysfunction. When you were growing up, perhaps your mother or father were not present or were gone a lot. This could have been due to a job, divorce, dysfunction or a variety of other reasons. This absence of a parent caused you to crave their love more (because you were lacking it). Later in life, you might still need reassurance and acceptance due to lacking this love and attention as a child. As we get into relationships, this “abandonment issue” can impact the needs or expectations we place on our spouse.
Both examples are directly related to ego. Know right now that these are lies from your false self. You do not need to crave acceptance or reassurance. You have all that you need right now. Stay focused and be present in the moment. This is one of the greatest gifts we have and can give to others.
But knowing this and being able to feel it or stop your mind from tormenting you is a completely different matter. But we can learn and practice new, healthy thinking to free ourselves (via self work).
Hurt Feelings and Jealousy
Hurt can be the feeling of rejection, jealousy, broken trust, being excluded from something, being criticized, talked down to, disrespected, being judged, misunderstood and the list goes on and on. All of these are tricks of our ego (which bruises easily).
Something happens that makes us feel less important or reduces what we feel we deserve and it hurts our feelings. It might come from a relationship, job, family or friends. Our ego can be quite sensitive.
A good exercise when you feel this way is to live by the practice of not taking it personally. This is one of the famous Four Agreements from Don Miguel Ruiz’s book. Often, our hurt is due to some misunderstanding (based on a wrong perception). Maybe the other person is not good at communicating or has sensitivity in a particular area.
Another one of the “Four Agreements” is don’t make assumptions or let your mind run off with made up stories.
Its not the other persons fault. They are who they are and are on their own journey of learning. They are saying, doing or thinking what they think they should be, from their perspective. We need to be understanding and compassionate with others and their journey and their learning (its different from yours).
Your false self wants you to react like a child throwing a tantrum. Try to understand and be compassionate toward the situation, the other person and yourself. Try this:
- Calm your mind
- Stay anchored in the present moment
- Observe don’t react (listen and learn)
Needing to Be Heard or Seen
Needing to be heard almost always can be traced back to part of your life where someone important to you did not give you the attention you wanted. This can make you feel alone or lonely – no matter what you do. Maybe they weren’t present when you did something you were proud of. Or you wanted to communicate to someone important to you and they weren’t there.
Its up to you to be mindful to deep insights that will help you understand the root cause and transform it to release it. To learn that you really don’t need the attention anymore. Connect with your inner child and talk to them – assuring them that they will be ok.
Mindful breathing can bring deep insights to things that are buried deep in our subconscious. It might have been something small or it could be something major that happened many times in our life. You might not even remember, but its in there and mindful breathing can help get it out.
Know that this pattern is a trick of your false self that will only bring suffering. It is driven by a feeling of not being heard or a feeling of not wanting to be alone.
Instead of focusing energy on the issue or fear, practice being present for yourself and others. Don’t feed or overcompensate for these missing/lacking feelings. Doing this will only bring more of the negative thoughts and feelings. Instead invest in a little self work to transform and release the negative emotions through understanding, compassion and love.
Pride
Pride originates from the ego but can be defined in two ways:
- Taking great care and quality in your work or effort
- Getting a deep pleasure with one’s own work or value
The pride in #2 can lead to feeling that you are better or superior others. Being full of this type of pride can lead to other unhealthy behaviors like judgement, stubbornness, being critical and over-independence.
It is important to reduce our pride and place more appreciation on others than ourselves. Its great to have focus on the quality in ones work but only if it helps elevate OTHERS. To do something and seek recognition ties directly back to feeding the ego which will only lead to our own suffering.
To help with pride, practice giving without being recognized. Give more of yourself without getting anything in return. Volunteer your time and your skills/talents.
Social Status and Success
In modern society we are all very familiar with seeking financial success and social status. These are lies that make us feel better about ourselves and cause us to compare ourselves to others. These are lies straight from the ego.
ZERO happiness comes from seeking society’s values. Its important that we focus on life’s values and our connection with it.
As I have said in the past, ask any rich man on the last day of his life if his seeking money was worth it. Every one of them will tell you that they would give it all away to live just one more day.
Sadly, many people get caught up in seeking the comforts of modern society. It is expensive to live in great comfort. So instead of simply focusing on happiness and satisfaction in the present moment, people seek out money to pay for their comfort. This is a vicious cycle.
The more you work for money to become happy and free, the more unhappy you will become. Another one of life’s beautiful paradoxes.
Ego’s Connection with the Mind
There is no doubt our ego lies to us. It fights to survive and tricks us from deep within. We lose ourselves through the years of the lies we tell ourselves. We cant tell where the lies end and the truth begins. The “mask” of our ego is tightly intertwined with our mind and our feelings.
We often will feel very deeply when our ego is involved. This can be sensations of pain or suffering or it might even come in the form of passion or excitement. Be careful with what you believe or feel as “intuition”. At times of turmoil or suffering our minds are not in the right place for us to see clearly.
Letting Go of Ego
Beginning to let go of our ego and recognize it for what it is will help us get closer to our true self and our purpose. Use the following practices to reduce the strong grip of the false self and ego:
- Observe the Ego (instead of reacting to it)
- Let Go of Self-Serving Thoughts/Actions (including negative thoughts about self)
- Become More Present (for yourself and others)
- Work On Compassion (of self and others)
- Make Things More About the Other Person (than about you)
- Work On Reducing Fear-Based Thinking
- Become More Vulnerable (let go of holding back)
We must practice quieting our mind to calm the storm in our heads. The more we practice positive habits and healthy mental nourishment, the more the turmoil will settle (that our false self has gotten us into).
Begin building a daily practice of mindful breathing and morning ritual. You will quickly see the benefits. You can easily do it!
Wishing you peace and love,
Until next time…
—
Greg
