The Anxious Ego

Our egos can be so sweet. They're like 4 year olds. You can always read a 4 year olds' emotions. If they're happy, you know it. If they're scared, hungry, itchy, you know it.

Similarly, you can always tell when a human ego feels out of control, or afraid, or in lack. Well, sometimes you have to learn to read the clues. The basic rule is that whenever feelings such as bliss, Joy, Life, Love, Trust, Certainty, Oneness or Self-Aware give way to feelings such as distress, victim, anger, fear, doubt, separation or denial, that's your ego in charge. And most of the time when your ego is in charge it is out of control.

This is actually a good thing. Human egos weren't designed to be in control. They're like the younger brother who was never meant to be king and thus didn't get the training. Or the court jester, or maybe the cook, or a scullery maid. The scullery maid might have fantasies about being royalty – what a lark, not having to clean, good food! But if the scullery maid all of a sudden found herself in charge of not only the whole palace, but the whole kingdom, well, she might find herself a bit out of her depth.

If that metaphor doesn't work for you either (what's so wrong with a scullery maid becoming king?), imagine if you were all of a sudden president of the United States. Movies like "Dave" aside, what would you do in Barrack Obama's shoes? If you didn't have a cabinet or aides to help you figure it all out? Feel just a tad bit overwhelmed?

So imagine, for a moment, that you are your ego, and you all of a sudden find yourself trying to manage a human life. It's a pretty big job, especially an adult human life, with all its responsibilities and obligations and dreams. And what tools do you have? What skills? A bunch of adrenaline-based emotions and the ability to keep your human body safe. Granted, most of us have had training from the moment we were born, or at least started walking, on how to do human life with the ego in charge. Think of every rule you've been taught, every principle absorbed, every delineation between yes and no, good and bad, right and wrong. That's all training for the human ego to be able to run things. The human ego also has the advantage of being like a tremendously powerful supercomputer which can take in all that information, process it, and turn it into predictions, expectations and decisions about what to do, think and say.

But, still, it wasn't meant to be in charge. It was meant to keep you physically safe. Every time something unpredictable comes up it goes on alert. It has to scramble to get back in control. You might know some people who spend most of their time trying to get in control in one way or another. Even when it does feel in control there's the nagging doubt, or awareness, that the control is fleeting. So it works harder, tries to get a better handle on the rules, does everything it can to prevent that feeling of out of control so it won't have failed its job. Even if its job isn't to control your life, its job is to keep you physically safe, and it figures if it's in charge it's going to keep you emotionally and socially safe, too. Which, by the way, is impossible. Especially if you have the spark of Divinity in you, which you do, which wants you to evolve and experience Life.

So who is meant to be in charge? You are, your Divine human. That's the part of you tapped in to all those lovely emotions I listed up above - Love, Trust, Oneness, etc. You are the one that can experience being in the moment. Your ego doesn't even really exist in the moment.

And this is why the ego can seem so sweet. It really is trying its best to do the job. It's just forgotten what its job is supposed to be.

For me the most poignant ego moments come when I've been fully centered in my Self in the present. I've been immersed in Love, Wholeness, Trust, Oneness with everything around me. From here everything feels fabulous, exists both in infinite possibility and also in perfection just how it is.

So it can come as a disappointing shock when I find myself feeling less than again. It could be less than perfect, less than whole, less than appropriate, less than anything. It can feel like I've failed. Why can't I sustain the bliss? Why do I always have to return to lack?

If I catch it quickly enough, while I'm still feeling some of that grace of connection with my Self, I can recognize what's happening with a sort of bemused, benevolent smile. Ahh, I've slipped out of the moment and my ego has stepped back in to take over, and it doesn't know what to do.

It's as if I have suddenly found myself standing on a platform in Michael Phelps' body having yet another gold medal hung around my neck. My ego has absolutely no idea what it did to deserve this. And, what's worse, it has no idea how it will ever be able to make it happen again.

The human ego doesn't know how to do bliss. It can do happy, with the expectation of losing happy any moment. Egos don't know how to do at-one-with. They do competition. They don't know how to do Love. They know how to do need, and longing, and desire.

So they send out distress. They express their doubt. You begin to feel lack again.

Of course, being in the moment and bliss aren't the only times the ego loses its footing as master of the house. That's just the time when it's the sweetest, because then the ego has actually had the experience of letting go. It has had a chance to go be that 4 year old again, with only 4 year old responsibilities. And it takes it a while for it to remember, or reengage, the elaborate structure of controls it created to handle being in charge before.

That is a great time to take a deep breath, slow down again, and appreciate both the ego, for being transparent and for trying so hard to do the job you gave it of managing your life; and to appreciate yourself, because you just stepped out of time for a moment and connected with your higher self. You just suspended judgment long enough to feel Love. You came into yourself. How cool is that?

So your ego comes back in and freaks out. That's okay. Next time it will take longer for it to start you into lack again. Time after that it might be even longer. And if you remember, right then, to slow down again, and embrace your ego like you would a little child, you may be able to get back to that feeling of grace right then, in a way which will help bridge the distance between being in time and being in the Now.