How the ego keeps you from dancing with the unpredictability of life
Countless guides and coachings talk about the ego. Yoga tries to recognize the ego and gradually isolate you from what you seem to be, to come back to what you are at the core — without the ego. It is interesting that it has mostly only been said that it is necessary to free yourself from the ego, but nobody really seems to reveal how this should be done. To really understand how to work towards your true self, you first need to understand what the ego is exactly.
In the cambridge lexicon ego is defined as follows:
your idea or opinion of yourself, especially your feeling of your own importance and ability.
So it’s like a scaffold that you’ve built yourself over time. We grow up in a world where you are taught from the beginning how to behave in order to be accepted. It’s like a manual, to be conform, to survive. And if you train some of the sub-points of this manual very well, it could even help you to have a good career. So you have been building this scaffold around you since you were little, and the older you get, the thicker this scaffold becomes, and slowly but surely your light, the light of yourself can no longer shine through. Every day you continue to tinker with your scaffolding, you lose touch with yourself, you become the scaffold, a human-made construct that should help you to live safely. Don’t you want to make it more permeable again? — Not at all, people know how you behave now, know your scaffold. It is stable, it also does not provide any information about how it looks inside of you. And since you are so constantly busy enlarging and maintaining your scaffolding, you no longer know anything about your inner self too. Do you even remember that it exists?
After a few years you are very satisfied with your scaffolding, people appreciate you, you have a high reputation. To reinforce the reaction to your scaffold a little bit, you start to show it off, maybe a Rolex, maybe a visit to the cosmetic surgeon, because what would people think if your scaffold weren’t up to date? Then who would you still be?
If someone asks you who you are, you describe the features that your scaffold has, like a veil, a mask that has covered your entire being, without realizing that you play a role. A role that you have come up with in your head over the years. You are this role so much that every single reaction of your self is attuned to it. Like a bouncy ball — thrown from corner to corner in every unpredictable situation, without knowing what is actually going on, without control. Despite the scaffolding completely powerless against the pitfalls of life. And one thing can be said clearly: The more inflexible a scaffold, the more damage it suffers if it is thrown by the opposite.
Because one thing should be said to you, life does what it wants, it cannot be controlled and as much as you prepare for all eventualities and want to protect yourself, it will turn out differently. That’s why you have to stop listening to your trained reactions, you don’t want to be a lost bouncy ball. Much more you want to dance with life. Life is not safe, life is adventure and with a rigid structure, with a stiff mask, your innermost light will never be able to dance with the spontaneity of the universe.
Consequently one of the most important thing in the beginning is that you have to become aware of your construct which you built so eagerly for all those years. You don’t have to bomb it directly, be gentle with yourself. Nothing is more scary than to question your own safe shell, your reliable cocoon, so be proud of every little blink you take, of every little step towards your inner light. So start to observe yourself, your reactions, your feelings, your words. Instead of ignoring, watch yourself like a mother watching her child. Be patient, be gentle and be forgiving for inappropriate aquired behavior. This is the first step, and a step which is indispensable in order to go to the next step — the elimination of unserviceable behavior patterns.
