I’ve been talking a lot about Ego these days—with my clients, on Tik Tok, with my friends and family and with my spiritual advisors. Yes, I have spiritual advisors. If reading that triggered you to judge me, that’s your Ego saying hello.
Among these conversations, I’ve come to realize that not everyone has a clear idea of what the Ego is. Many people, and even thesaurus.com, conflate the concept of Ego with the behaviour of arrogance. While it is correct to label unchecked hubris as a tell tale sign of Ego, they are not one and the same.
The Ego is our identity—our persona, our sense of self—and our ability to navigate and grow and change our relationship to our sense of self. While arrogance, pride, megalomania, and narcissism are all aspects of Ego, so too are self-loathing, shyness, insecurity, and altruism.
Think about it like champagne and sparkling wine. All champagne is sparkling wine, but not all sparkling wine is champagne. All arrogance is Ego, but not all Ego is arrogance. Sometimes sparkling wine is champagne and sometimes it is prosecco; sometimes you have one glass and garner a light buzz and sometimes you drink a whole bottle and suffer a headache for days. Sometimes Ego is arrogance and sometimes it’s self-deprecation. Sometimes it overtakes you and sometimes it only appears for brief moments or in subtle ways.
This means that the person you know with the strongest Ego might not be the most prideful or hubristic but, instead, the most self-deprecating. Or, another way to look at it:
Ego is as equally the celebrity who boasts that they’re the “greatest in the world” as the celebrity who feigns “who me?” every time they win another award.
Ego is the persona—the perception and pull of how you need to be seen in the world.
Ego is a person's attachment to the story of Self. It is static, stationary, not fluid.
One easy way to recognize our relationship to our Ego is to consider the things—the people, behaviours, and beliefs—that we judge. Judgement is how the Ego maintains control. By identifying, “I am not that,” the Ego defines what it is. Judgement of others, and of ourselves, is single biggest clue that our egos are in play.
But—“Kelly!” You might say. “Aren’t some of my judgements valid? I am not like X, Y, or Z. They’re a terrible person doing terrible things in the world.”
Yes, indeed, they are. However, judging people for their offences serves no purpose other than to keep us small and stuck. We can be discerning of others’ behaviours without judging them—without condemning them. Condemning others only reinforces the oppressive paradigms we seek to transcend.
There is no way for us to know that we wouldn’t act the exact same if we had been born in their shoes and raised under the same circumstances. Transmuting judgement into discernment, by recognizing the parts of Self and Other that we condemn and therefore refuse to acknowledge as valid (aka real), is what sets us free.
“The only thing scarier than accepting who we are is accepting that we don't know who we will be when we let go of the things that have made us who we are today.”
To be in a human body is to cast a shadow. As I have hinted at above, understanding our egos is of the utmost importance because, collectively, it is our poor relationship to Ego that keeps us stuck in matrices of oppression.
It is tricky, though, to navigate your relationship to your Ego. Your Ego will labor mightily to create and maintain coherence, vigorously defending against dissonant stimuli—possibly including this very essay. “Nope,” you might say. “My judgement is righteous and I plan to hang onto it.”
If that is you and you want to continue judging others, that is what it is. I honour and respect your path. I only ask this—the next time you choose to judge or condemn yourself, take a moment to step back and ask, “Who does this judgement serve? Me? The collective? My future or my past? The present moment? My soul or my ego?”
Self-Deprecation Can Be Ego Too
wonderfully expressed Kelly! I love your metaphor of ego as sparkling wine, brilliant <3