You can find a short definition here: Terminology. As mentioned here, we’re all being pulled in two different directions by our human self and being (higher) self. Both have the same goal – to feel happy and safe – but they have very different ideas about how to achieve this. The higher self knows exactly what will get us there. Unfortunately, the ego is a lot louder and more emphatic than the higher self and has biological wiring on its side. Every message from the ego comes stamped with “necessary for survival.” The higher self knows better so its messages rarely feel as urgent. The ego is panicked and reactive, whereas the higher self knows there’s never a reason to panic. This post covers the nature of the dynamic, how to shift it, and how the change will make our life better.
This strength-of-voice discrepancy varies from one person to another. The difficulty level of tuning in to the higher self and overcoming the influence from the ego’s fear is much higher for some people than for others, and where a person is on the spectrum generally correlates with what the soul hoped to learn from its experiences during this lifetime. Sometimes it’s just because the soul agreed to requests from other souls to be the cause for the challenges they needed, and becoming a person who would be what they needed meant agreeing to a painful and very challenging life. This is one of the many reasons we shouldn’t judge others when it looks like they’re behaving “badly.” We don’t know the whole story and if we did, we’d feel very differently about all of it. That’s true regardless of which end of the spectrum you’re on.
If you happen to be a person who actually has a very strong set of values and are consistently horrified and ashamed by your apparent inability to live in accordance with those values, please don’t give up on yourself. This means you are an old soul who agreed to play a role for one or more other souls and/or have something very specific you wanted to learn from this experience. You aren’t bad, crazy, or a failure.
I’m not suggesting that we should excuse or accept choices that aren’t in alignment with the person’s higher self (whether our own or someone else’s). There’s a broad spectrum between “excuse/accept” and “withhold judgment.” After all, maybe the goal of the plan you both made together was to teach one of the people involved how to recognize their own worth and create healthy boundaries, both of which are definitely in alignment with higher self. Remembering the truth of who we all are and extending the compassion and forgiveness that truth enables within us adjusts our perspective and eliminates the need for excessive blaming (ourself or the other). Blaming leads to resentment on one side and shame on the other, both of which inhibit our ability to be in alignment with our higher self. When our higher self directs our action, we are the one who benefits the most.
At the same time, we create an opportunity for the other person to see that there’s another way, turn away from fear-driven reactions, and respond to us in kind. When we act in alignment with our higher self, others benefit to the extent they choose to reciprocate. Of course, that reciprocation is yet another way we benefit so a positive feedback loop is created. If the other person is unable or unwilling to reciprocate, our higher self is far less affected than our ego would be. The ego takes their choice personally and is painfully wounded by the slight. Our higher self This is just one example of how the higher self and ego differ in their approach to problem-solving and self-protection. Our higher self understands that the other person’s actions are actually a reflection of their own inner state and they compassionately withdraw from the situation without the burden of negative emotions about it.
It’s an ongoing struggle, but each time we successfully act from love (higher self) instead of fear (ego), the outcome builds our confidence in the truth we’re applying. Our connection with our higher self also grows stronger, so the struggle lessens and the choices that lead to happiness and feeling good about ourselves become increasingly easier. Once the choices are consistent, there will still be times when we react from our ego, but our strong connection with our higher self will enable us to identify these triggers as areas in our self that need attention/healing and prevent the development or progression of a negative feedback loop.
Our ego is not a bad thing to be gotten rid of. For one thing, that’s impossible. More importantly, the challenge of having an ego to contend with is a big part of why we came here. If our soul didn’t want an ego obscuring our divine essence, we wouldn’t have incarnated. The need to learn how to successfully overcome the dualistic soul vs. ego dynamic and the process of doing so provide our souls with a singular opportunity for spiritual development. Thus, our goal is to achieve the wholeness represented by the yin/yang symbol. In any dualistic relationship, defining one requires the existence of the other.
Taking on an ego strengthens the divine aspect of our soul precisely because its nature is the opposite of our soul’s (fear vs. love) but only if we’re able to fully embrace both. Without incarnation, we only knew ourselves as perfect and beautiful. Imagine if you lived in a place where the sun never set and you never experienced nighttime. You wouldn’t truly understand or appreciate the nature of daytime. If you then relocated to a place that gave you the full of experience of night, the experience of day would expand for you considerably. Additionally, night doesn’t exist only to highlight the beauty of day; night has its own beauty to offer, as do the transitions that exist only as a combination of both elements: if you gave up day or night, twilight and dawn would cease to exist. Day and night only achieve a fullness of “dayness” and “nightness” as part of the interdependent relationship that ultimately defines both. In the same way, the ego we experience as part of incarnation is an opportunity for our soul to expand its soulness. When we’re strong enough to lovingly embrace ego and soul, we become more than we could ever be without the ego and each one we experience becomes integrated into that full soulness we ultimately achieve.
When we decide to embrace the ego, we come face-to-face with a very interesting observation that actually proves our soul reflects our true essence: one needs only to accept that the soul exists in order to understand it whereas the ego consistently baffles us mightily. How often do we find ourselves wondering why we feel something that doesn’t seem to make sense? How often do we ask ourselves why we did something when it wasn’t what we wanted or intended? Even those who don’t believe the soul exists can easily understand the idea of it. In everything else we experience, we understand what comes naturally to us and that we are confused by what does not come naturally to us, so it’s only logical to conclude that our soul reflects our true identity rather than the ego.
For this reason, embracing our soul is a simple act of accepting that it exists. Embracing and integrating our ego is the real work, which includes recognizing the truth of its nature, understanding its needs and how it operates, and learning to work cooperatively with it. THAT is what self-love is actually about: loving our ego and teaching it the one way to overcome fear that’s genuinely effective (and doesn’t leave pain or destruction in its wake).
That process is the fundamental purpose of every incarnated soul, and the first step is cultivating complete self-awareness. When our self-awareness is lacking or incomplete, we live mindlessly with the ego in the driver’s seat, pushed around by its frantic desperation and reactivity and burdened by all of the regret-baggage it accumulates. While our only sense of identity is our ego, we run from self-awareness because we fear what its nature and choices say about who we are. When we remember who we are, self-awareness is no longer something to fear. That began with embracing the truth of our identity as a soul, but complete self-awareness requires learning to understand our ego.
In the next post, I’ll describe the process of embracing our ego/shadow.