The feelings are real. The stories we build around them are something else.
Your ego is your pathway to enlightenment. The ego doesn’t like being exposed, so there’s this funny, tricky resistance that you have to work around. You have to get a little wily with it, not be so obvious about it, and let yourself see it for what it is. Work with it in a compassionate, kind way. Think of the ego as a little two-year-old. You would take a two-year-old by the hand and walk with it. You wouldn’t be mean to them. Or maybe it’s more like a two-year-old having a tantrum when things don’t go the way they want. You can understand the tantrum without letting the two-year-old direct your life.
We’ve all trained for years to do exactly the opposite. Something happens, we get hooked into the charge, and off we go. We get angry or upset or jealous or disappointed. We feel pummeled or drained and then indulge in it. That’s what Don Juan calls indulging: when you give yourself over to the disappointment, dissatisfaction, depression, whatever it is. Instead, you can stay with it. Sit with it, see it for what it is, and let the transitoriness of it burn away like a cloud. Then you’re back to this clear essence of who you’ve always been. That’s the foundation.
Don’t Waste the Trigger
This is one of the great opportunities that comes with being triggered by life. Whatever hooks you is wonderfully revealing. On the fast path, you learn from every single thing that comes. What gets you? What is an ego trigger for you? Instead of immediately looking outward at the person or situation that caused the reaction, you begin to see the reaction itself as what is worth knowing. Eventually there can even be gratitude for the person who brought it out in you, because now you get to see it for what it is.
The higher you go, the more you get tested on whether it sticks or whether it was just a moment. You can have an extraordinary meditation, go right into the essence, experience that openness and beauty with no mind, and then a few hours later something happens and you’re completely knocked off center. That’s not a negation of the meditation. Now you’re getting a chance to bring that essence into your life. And if you can’t do it yet, that’s okay. You’re not there yet. It takes years to grow the strength and the ability to stay with your own truth when you’re getting knocked around.
This is why it’s important not to be frivolous with insights. There are days when you go into the total beauty of existence for what it is, with no mind, just an openness to the essence. That’s a full-on empowerment from life. It’s a gift. You can dismiss it as a beautiful moment that came and went, or you can hold it close as something that becomes a doorway you learn to go through again. Writing about these experiences can help. You go back into what you saw, what you felt, what you understood, and it becomes internal to you rather than merely intellectual. Someone can tell you these things a thousand times, but then you have the experience yourself and suddenly you understand.
The same thing is true when you begin seeing your ego. You can hear teachings about attachment and reactivity for years, but there’s a moment when you actually catch yourself doing it. You see how quickly you can go from a beautiful state into pain because something didn’t go the way you wanted, somebody didn’t treat you the way you wanted, or somebody you love made a choice you don’t like. Suddenly you’re looking directly at attachment instead of thinking about attachment as a concept.
Love Without Ownership
One of the places attachment becomes particularly clear is in our relationships with other people. We become attached not only to the person, but to our ideas about how that person should live. We think we know what’s good for them. We judge the choices they’re making. But if you love someone for who they are, their life has nothing to do with your judgments or ideas about how they should live it. You’re not walking in their shoes. You don’t know what they’re here to learn. Maybe they’re going to learn an enormous lesson from something. Maybe they’re going to get completely caught up in it. You don’t know.
If you love them, then you love them. Not for how well they’re acting, for making the choices you approve of, or for doing life in the way you think they should. You give them the leeway to live. And then you look at what their choices bring up in you. That’s where your work is.
Judgment is interesting in this way. Somebody behaves badly and our mind immediately starts telling us who that person is. But what if you’re what you’re experiencing is their insecurity? What if you’re watching someone who has no idea who they are, grabbing onto something outside themselves for security? You can judge them for the behavior that comes out of that insecurity, or you can have compassion for the insecurity. That doesn’t mean pretending you weren’t hurt by their rudeness. It means seeing more of what’s actually happening.
Your Opinions Aren’t Necessarily Honesty
This is also where we have to be careful with the idea of honesty. People often think that because they have a strong reaction to something, expressing that reaction is being honest. But your ego’s views aren’t necessarily honesty at all. Just because your reaction is felt by you doesn’t mean your interpretation of the situation is true. You have to detach from your own ego’s view before you can see clearly enough to know what actually happened. When it’s strung around your perspective that came from the reaction that you’re spinning in, then it’s filled with judgements and opinions. That’s not honesty. That’s spewing from a place of reactivity.
Your opinions can become ways for the ego to keep you separate. As long as you’re aligning to them, it becomes us versus them, me versus you. The ego can take something that happened and build an entire narrative around it, and then you live inside that narrative as though it were reality. The feelings underneath it may be completely real. The narrative is something else.
The Feeling Is Real. The Narrative Isn’t True.
That’s an important distinction. You don’t want to take yourself out of what you’re feeling. You want to stay very, very present. If there’s jealousy, that’s real. Don’t judge yourself for it. Sit with the jealousy. Go into the heart of it in yourself. If there’s a feeling of being dismissed or not valued, sit with that. Those feelings are real. Don’t go into the narrative. That’s the thing you want to get away from.
Your body is a much more stable assessor than your mind. Your mind is so unstable that if you keep using the mind to tell you what’s real, with all of it’s hooks and reactions, you’ll just keep spinning out. Feel what the jealousy is like in your body and sit with it. Like everything else in the mind, it’s transitory. Watch the cloud of it dissipate. Then sit with the feeling of not being valued. What does that actually feel like? Stay there instead of immediately looking for somebody to blame or some explanation that will make the feeling go away. It won’t.
If you do that, something very different can happen. You can begin to have compassion for everyone on this planet who feels undervalued and dismissed. You can say, just like me. Just like me, other people feel this. Just like me, people are jealous, afraid, hurt, dismissed, insecure. You sit with that and it opens you into the spaciousness of love rather than closing you into the story of what somebody did to you. This is bodhicitta. This is the path of the spiritual warrior.
When you stay with the body and the actual feeling, it can open you into the field of unity that is the truth of existence. Your ego wants to do something with the feeling, which is why it spins off. It wants an explanation, a judgment, somebody at fault. But when you take control and do something with it simply by sitting with it, the ego starts to quiet down. You aren’t dismissing what’s happening to you. You’re actually experiencing it much more directly.
This is how you learn to handle life as it comes instead of going off into narratives and calling that honesty. Write about what happened. Get real with yourself. Then sit with each thing that came up. Jealousy. Anger. Feeling unvalued. Feeling pushed away. Whatever it is, feel it until the cloud begins to dissipate, then go to the next thing. You might have to catch the same pattern red-handed a thousand times before one layer dissolves, and then you’ll get to the next one. But as you do, you become stronger, clearer and more capable. You get the rhythm of it.
Your Ego Is Your Pathway to Enlightenment
This is why the ego isn’t something bad. Your ego is your pathway to enlightenment. These fears bring you to the doorway that takes you toward fearlessness. The upset itself becomes the doorway into clarity and acceptance of what life is. It’s constant fodder for learning and dissolving and growing and realizing. If you don’t blame somebody else for the uncomfortable feelings, but instead sit with whatever is happening in your mind, you will get through them.
Learn to Laugh at Yourself
And you have to learn to laugh at yourself. That’s a big one. The loosening of the ego can come through laughter. You begin to see that the fabric of ego isn’t as tight as it appears to be. There are holes in it. You can get a little joke through there. There’s this whole gap between the ideas you’re caught in and what’s real, and that gap can become filled with laughter instead of disappointment, pain and judgment.
The endeavor itself is serious. If you’re committed to waking up, you have to really be committed. But the journey itself doesn’t have to be so serious. Meditation, mindfulness and laughter will take you a long way. You were trained into behavioral patterns. You became reactive because the world around you showed you how to be reactive. There’s no reason to add shame to that. See it. Learn from it. Laugh when you can.
You don’t have to know how to do all of this tomorrow. You may go through the same thing again and again. Each time, though, you’re a little closer and a little stronger, a little more in tune with who you truly are and who other people truly are. That’s why it matters to hold close the moments when you see clearly. They begin to give you another way to move through confusion - not with distraction, not with more confusion, but with wisdom.
Eventually you begin to recognize the feeling: This doesn’t feel quite right. I want to know what’s real here. That intent becomes stronger. The possibility becomes more open. And when something hooks you, instead of seeing it only as something painful that happened, you begin to understand what an extraordinary opportunity you’ve been given.
Something has shown you where you’re caught. Now you can look at it. And if you stay with it, you can be free.
The greatest breakthrough I’ve had is transmuting ego pain into silent meditation