EGO from h.koppdelaney, Flickr.com
Four weeks ago I joined a community from all over the world to explore the hypothesis that we are an aspect of an evolving universe, and our participation is essential in this evolution.
That’s a very big thought to wrap our minds around, and maybe it is just another way we humans make ourselves so self important. On the other hand, in the midst of a dysfunctional world, it is a meaning maker and motivator. At least it is for me and for hundreds and thousands of others who are waking up to this new story for humanity.
In the process of consciously evolving we discover more about how we resist our growth. In the 25 yearsI worked as a Gestalt therapist, with the whole person and the unfolding creative process, I never met anyone who wasn’t almost equally divided between the desire to grow and the resistance to growth; between the love of expansion and the compulsion to stay small. I came to the conclusion that this tension within the self is part of the human condition. It’s what defines who we are at this stage of our development as a species.
It is ego that keeps us small. And our collective challenge is to transcend the limiting cage of ego which separates us and keeps us self involved rather than focused on the greater good of the whole.
Psychologically, the ego has an important part to play in helping us grow an identity so we can function in the world, it alerts us to our boundaries so we can protect ourselves from intrusion, and it defends against pain. Yet ego also has a pompous and self deluding nature. Think about the typically strutting ego, the one who pops up when we’re hurt or upset about something: self righteous, self justified, blaming, judging, even vindictive. We quickly leap into blaming the other person, or society, or life, for not being how we want, or not giving us what we want. We’d rather be angry and self righteous than feel our pain about the way things are, or to empower ourselves to change what we don’t like. We defend against our pain so we can keep the status quo going, yet more of the same means more pain. Our culture is very intolerant of pain, there are few places to safely express it, let it go, and heal ourselves.
I saw this very clearly recently on my first visit to a chiropractor when I could no longer ignore the fact my body was out of alignment. I had no idea something in my body had been out of alignment most of my life, nor how the body valiantly makes adaptations so we can keep going and not have to feel our pain. We go on adapting and adapting and adapting until we literally fall over!
At the end of the treatment I experienced the support of my spine and skeleton in a way I could never remember feeling them before. It was a revelation to me. Ah, so this is how it feels to be fully supported from within! I had been looking to psyche and spirit for a support which was right here in my body all along!
I have found Eckhart Tolle’s term, the painbody, to be very useful in better understanding the accumulated emotional pain which plays out through our unconscious behavior. I’d always thought of the painbody as energetic or vibrational and knew it is carried as a contraction held in the body, but because I wasn’t feeling physical pain, I hadn’t realized it was right here in the physical body. I feel deep gratitude to my loyal body which has labored all these years to keep going and to protect me from pain, despite the fact it didn’t have the full power of alignment and flow.
We are creatures who expand and contract, expand and contract. Like a woman in labor, we are birthing ourselves into the next stage of evolution.
We expand when we open to the flow of divine inspiration and express ourselves, and yet self expression takes us into the unknown. When we fear the unknown, or when others around us fear our expansion, we contract again. When we consciously choose the deeper archaeology of healing, we enter voluntarily into the contraction to release it. Ego, is frequently not very pretty: change is often inconvenient and involves loss as well as forward movement; stepping into the unknown can be scary. This process of liberation is not for the faint-hearted
Contraction is held in the body and we learn to adapt and live with pain by stuffing it down, with food, alcohol, tv, overwork, consumerism, or any of our other pain avoiding, self comforting strategies. We numb ourselves, fully encouraged by the consumer culture, and we adapt to greater and greater levels of pain, until something gives and we have a health crisis. When you multiply this into every person on the planet, you can see how the structures eventually collapse as they are now doing.
Most of us on a spiritual path spend years taking three steps forward and two steps back. We experience the most beautiful expanded state of consciousness only to return again to resistance. We want to grow yet we shun the labor pains which would open us to our fullest potential. We keep coming up against the wily strategies of ego which capture us into the safety of limitation and self delusion, again and again. We settle, we compromise, we choose the safety of habit. I can see how this has played out in my life, can you? It is part of the human condition; a cause for self compassion rather than self recrimination.
In these last four weeks, as part of the Integral Enlightenment community, I have been challenged to see ego everywhere and more clearly, in myself and in others. I see how it does its job of accommodating and helping us to fit in and stay safe. I see how it can capture me back into playing small and talk me out of fully taking responsibility for my liveliness, or full commitment for being an evolutionary agent of change and a vessel for divine creation. I see the self delusion and wily avoidance strategies in others too. It is like seeing through a mass illusion, whilst being still entrapped in it.
This is an uncomfortable process, yet it also has the scent of liberation in it. As soon as ego is seen in the clear light of consciousness, I am no longer controlled by it. There’s a space of awareness now which provides the opportunity to step out of limiting thoughts and patterns as they arise; to make transparent what was murky. I am my own liberator and I am the key. To hold this key is true freedom.
Imagine dropping the limiting patterns which are keeping you from feeling fully alive: a physical symptom, a self limiting belief. Drop them like the shell of the chrysalis which has done such a great job of protecting and nurturing you as you grew. Now you don’t need that old chrysalis any more. Imagine fluttering away as the beautiful butterfly you are.
You may enjoy the 22 Days of Transformation audios which are available now, or perhaps you’d like to join the next 22 Days of Transformation learning community which starts on May 31st. Go to: www.awholenewworldcoaching.com/22days.html
Rose Diamond, May 13th 2010
We have to come and truly love our own and other’s limiting forces… I enjoyed your sharing, Rose.
Thanks Lianne, yes, it is a challenge isn’t it? I’ve been leading some planetary healings on Sunday mornings, for the Gulf and elsewhere and coming to see we have to even love those who destroy life because to do anything else is to add to the problem. It is a heroic challenge.