Antidote to ego..?
I remember feeling affronted when I first started attending yoga classes and the teachers would talk about ego - ‘don’t let your ego..’, or ‘that’s your ego doing that..’ etc. I didn’t think I had an ego problem and thought I was a pretty ‘good’, humble person. Who were they to tell me that I had a big ego?!
But that was my mistake of how I defined the word ‘ego’. And I’m sure I’m not alone. Based on our modern culture and society, many of us have a sure idea of what we think ego is. We interpret it to describe someone who's overly self-important and basically ‘full of themselves’.
But in yoga terms, the ego is actually pretty neutral, with no strong positive or negative connotations. It’s just the way to describe the part of us which comprises our sense of ‘I-ness’, who we are, or think we are, based on our lives so far, in other words, our thoughts, experiences, judgements etc, which may have formed as a result of our age, family background, peer pressure, media bias and a thousand other things.
For example, your colleague might think it’s wrong to live together before marriage. Another thinks this is completely acceptable. Your friend doesn’t like a particular name because he/she associates it with someone they disliked in the past. You love that name, for whatever personal reason you have. Your brother and your boyfriend have totally different definitions of what ‘success’ means. All of these are quick examples to show how we all have different superficial beliefs and internal ’surenesses’ that are only gained from our own personal existence.
And understandably, we’re so wrapped up in this and ourselves, that we think THAT is who we are. Over time we equate this ego-self with our very existence. And we allow it to speak, feel, judge, think for us, even though we often can’t determine where these ‘certainties’ originated. But in yoga philosophy, we are not only our superficial ‘I’. What lies beneath that if you take away all the things that you think make you ‘you’? The sense of personal identity we take for granted is NOT our most fundamental self.
The photo above inspired this thought process and ramble this week. It was taken and sent to me by one of my kind park yogis whose husband had snapped the view of our class from their house. Can you see us?! I absolutely love the enormity of the park, trees and nature around us, making us look completely tiny and insignificant. What an immediate reminder to look beyond ourselves, beyond our monkey mind chatter that tells us who we are, what to think and how to react.
Yoga theorists claim that the awareness we perceive within us, and ascribe to the mind, is actually a reflection of a much more profound consciousness lying virtually unseen within. And they believe that this consciousness is not only inside us but eternal, everywhere, and in everything. Our species, with its ‘gift’ of a thinking mind and our superficial and imbalanced ego, can all too easily become distanced from that. Even our name, the English word ‘man’, has its roots in the Sanskrit verb man, meaning to think or reflect.
What happens if you subtract your 'story'? What is left over is you, one simple awareness-conscious being. And here, in our true nature, the purest awareness, or consciousness, all internal chatter stops.
THIS is what I’m banging on about when I say I couldn’t care less what shape your body is making in class, and whether your triangle pose looks different to someone else’s, or whether you’d rather stay still in child’s pose when someone else is coming into their side plank for the 20th time! Maybe we can practise acknowledging that it’s the ego causing those feelings of wanting to compete (with others or yourself), feeling smug because you did a pose ‘perfectly’, worrying about not doing Downward Dog ‘right’, thinking about the last or the next pose, checking the clock etc etc.
As a last thought, none of this means that the ego should become yet another thing we worry about, think we’re ‘failing’ at or ‘not doing right’! We can work with the ego as we can with the breath, or the body, without judging. We notice how it feels and reacts, we’re kind to it and ourselves, and then we let go. The ego itself is not the problem; it’s our over-identification and attachment to it that is. That attachment deprives us from finding a purer stillness and the truer sense of who we really are underneath.
Thoughts?!
I'd love to hear your comments or reactions, do get in touch if you'd like to waffle back at me. (-;