We all have an ego. It comes with the body we're given. My definition of the ego in my work is that of the personality and all the quirks and weirdness that go with it. The ego is needed and necessary. How we show up in the world matters. It's how we interact with and engage with the world around us. It allows to connect to each other. It's an important part of who we are as human beings.

The ego is a wounded bird. It learns in childhood that the outside world has expectations about how it should show up in the world. Those expectations begin to shape the ego as it starts to put some effort into protecting itself from those around it by conforming to the expectations of others. This is a typical part of childhood for almost everyone. Parents, intentionally or unintentionally, pass their pain onto their children. Their children pick up that pain and dutifully carry it with them into adulthood where they begin to figure out how helpful or harmful that pain actually was.

So begins the process of healing that many adults go through. Not everybody that heals picks up or uses spirituality as a means of healing. Some seek out professional help, others just continue to modify themselves to fit in the boxes they find themselves in. Some change completely as life shows them who they truly are. Many more never heal at all, staying stuck in painful cycles that they never find a way to free themselves from.

Spirituality was the platform I used to heal myself. It was the first thing I ran into when I searched Google looking for a belief system. Traditional religions didn't offer answers, but spirituality did. The more I explored spirituality, the more I saw the principles contained within it had been twisted to fit the constructs people found themselves contained within. The ego gets layered over these principles, they become twisted, and ultimately lose their intended meaning.

Non-judgment becomes "judgment lite", which is disguised as discernment. People defend their ability to not like people and things or to create separation between themselves and others.  Non-judgement is exactly that - it is the release of judgment. To fully be able to do this you have to understand what it means. It doesn't mean give up your preferences. It doesn't mean you can't make a choice. It means you allow the experience to be neutral by understanding that it has no inherent meaning or value of its own. (Check out existentialism for more on this idea.) When we understand that the experience is neutral, we don't have to object to it or argue with it. We can just leave the experience where it is. Our engagement with the experience becomes optional. It's a choice. The choice is based on our desire or lack of desire to engage with or do anything about the experience itself.

Non-judgment is founded on the idea that experience isn't ours. It doesn't belong to us. It's not part of us. It's just a thing that happens outside of us, even if it is happening directly to our physical forms.  The experience is inherently neutral, meaning there is no prescribed way to perceive an experience. You can find this in everyday life. For some weddings are sad and funerals are happy, but that's not how they are intended to be. That is not the prescribed way those events are meant to be perceived, but that doesn't prevent them from being seen that way given the right circumstances.

If experience can be very subjective, then judgment can't be absolute. Not all deaths are bad. Not all marriages are good. So our judgment of weddings as good and funerals as bad isn't necessarily true and it's not absolute. It's subjective and changeable. Judgment is therefore selective and based on personal experience, pain, and personal preferences. It is not based on an absolute judgment of experience as being either always good or always bad. Every experience works this way. Every experience is subjective. Interpretation is up to the individual that is interpreting the experience.

When we judge an experience, what we we're really doing is creating a subjective meaning or interpretation of the experience that may or may not be true for the person standing next to us. It may not be true for anybody but us. The ego likes to tell us that our judgment of the experience is the only right judgment of that experience. That's what causes arguments. Is the story true? No. If our judgment was the only right judgment then it would be an absolute truth. To be an absolute truth it cannot be changeable based on circumstance and all 8 billion people on the planet would have to agree with you. The only absolutes we can all agree on are birth and physical death, even taxes aren't necessarily a given in all countries. Not everybody agrees the world is round. Not everybody believes that gravity is the only reason we're not floating right now. Not everybody believes in climate change, God, science, history, or weather. Everything is open to interpretation. Such is the subjective nature of judgement.

What makes everything subjective? The ego, it's wounded nature, and need to be right. Perception or interpretation of experience is partially based on how we want to see the experience, which can have nothing to do with what actually happened. The interpretation of experience gets twisted to fit what we need it to mean in order for us to be okay. The ego wants to protect itself and so sometimes we make up meanings of experience that are simply comfortable and easy to deal with. This is how lawyers do their jobs - they twist the experience to make it mean whatever it needs to mean in order to defend their argument. If lawyers can do it, why can't we? The reality is that the more pain we're in, the more likely we are to have a really funky interpretation of experience.

I refer to pain as the funhouse mirror of experience. Pain takes our perception and messes with it, causing us to see things that aren't even there. They weren't in the experience. They didn't happen. They aren't going to happen. But we see them anyway and those things cause more pain than anything that really did happen. This is the ego at work - doing what it does best - protecting you from pain.  

In spirituality we use a phrase from the Hermetic Philosophy that says, "as within so without". When we hold onto pain and it begins to morph how we see the experiences we're having, it shapes how we show up in the world, the decisions we make, and ultimately creates a future based on the pain. If our inside world is painful, the outside world will reflect that, which it does, all the time.

As we heal the inner pain the outside world wants to shift too. When we allow ourselves to show up differently how we respond and react to experience changes. The ego wants to keep things the same because it's easier to protect you from what it already knows. So, if we want to keep things the same, then we can't change how we show up. One of the most painful things I see people do to themselves is not honor the healing work they've done by not allowing themselves to change how they show up. Healing is made harder when we hide the work we've done from the world around us.

The first five or so years of my healing journey was hidden. It was an internal process that I only really talked about online. I hadn't yet changed how I was responding and reacting to the people around me. I hadn't blown my own cover yet. It was at this point that I decided it was time to show the world what I had learned. It took a few years of trial and error to figure out how I wanted to be and what that needed to look like. But after a few years, I had completely changed how I showed up in the world. It was then that I took the risk of pointing out to my family the difference in my behavior. The result was that how they treated me also improved. My relationships with the people around me changed for the better.

Spiritual ego has us believe that as "spiritual people" we are somehow better than those who are not yet on the path. The English language is awful for making it sound like it's a competition or that one is better than the other. There is no good way to phrase it in English that doesn't sound like we're insulting each other in some way. Using phrases like "still asleep" to refer to those who have not yet changed their perspective, makes it sound even worse. 

Of course, one of the most fascinating pieces of spirituality is that "awakening" is only recognized by those that have done it. We can pick out those that haven't done it yet, but the reverse is not true. You have to know where you are, to know where you came from, to recognize the difference. If you don't have context for it, you can't see it. This leads into a conversation about duality. These constructs of "awakened" versus "sleeping" are dualities. You can only see the duality once you've experienced both things. The same is true with all dualities in our world. We cannot understand dry until we've experienced something wet. That is the nature of duality. The world works in a system of balance - equal and opposite. For every positive extreme there is a negative extreme. For every positive emotion there is the equal and opposite negative emotion. In order to acknowledged the duality you have to have experienced or have awareness of both sides. If we banish the extreme negative because we don't like it, we won't be able to understand the extreme positive. It will no longer have any context.

When we first start in spirituality we hear all about "creating your own reality". Immediately that makes everybody want to banish all the stuff they don't like. They only want to see the positive. When they can, people will go live in a field, a bush, or a cave to escape everything they don't like.  The only way they can manage themselves is by closing themselves off from the world or "protecting their energy". This is an ego self-protection mechanism that comes into play when people are not yet ready to deal with their lives as they are. They run away and hide and claim they are protecting their energy because they don't have the means to manage themselves within the experiences they are having. Why not? Because spirituality becomes more about controlling and changing the outside world than it does about healing the inside world. When spirituality has been shifted to focus on controlling the outside world while avoiding the inside world, this is what it looks like.

Having said that, I too went through a period of wanting to close myself off from the world. I wanted to run away, but I couldn't. I had two kids to take care of. I didn't have the financial means to leave. My circumstances forced me to have to figure out how to be in the world I was in and that meant learning how to manage myself instead of trying to change my circumstances. If you're currently feeling trapped in your circumstances, then this is for you. Learn to manage yourself in the experience or deal with your inner world and stop worrying about what's happening around you.

The more I started to recognize the ego in spiritual concepts, the more I started looking for where the manipulation occurred. Why did the construct get twisted? What are people avoiding? What's the human construct that people are tied into? What's the fear behind taking on the spiritual principle fully? That led me to explore a lot of philosophical constructs because those things offered ideas that would allow the spiritual principle to be unwound. Philosophies like existentialism offered a way to see things that made living fully in those spiritual principles possible.

What other spiritual principles do you see people trying to live from and struggle with? Where has the ego gotten in the way? Can you recognize it? Challenge yourself to find ways to fully live within the spiritual principles that you've come across and let me know how it goes by sending me a quick email or reaching out on Messenger. I'd love to hear from you!

Love to all.

Della