What if the ego needs nurturing, too?

We talk a lot about the ego as something to overcome. To kill. To transcend. To let go of. All in the name of "Spiritual Enlightenment." But I wonder what happens when we mistake egolessness for wholeness.

Some of the things I hear people say about the ego are honestly quite shocking. As though having an ego is somehow a failure of spiritual development. As though the more we can diminish the self, the more enlightened we become.

When I use the word ego here, I'm not talking about arrogance or an inflated sense of self. I'm talking about the part of us that knows itself as an individual, the “I” that moves through the world, makes choices, has preferences, boundaries, desires, and a sense of identity.

This is something I was reminded of while reading Clarissa Pinkola Estés' Women Who Run With the Wolves. In her telling of the Seal Woman story, Estés explores the relationship between the ego and what she calls the deeper Self, or the soul. The ego, she suggests, has a very practical role. It helps us learn the world. How to work. How to relate to other people. How to distinguish one thing from another. How to care for the body and how to function in the world we were born into.

In other words, we need it. But we can lose something when the ego becomes too involved in running the whole show. Estés describes the ego as a small island within the much larger psyche. It has a purpose, but it isn't meant to be the leader of everything. And this is where I find the distinction so fascinating. Our modern world has framed the ego as a problem but what if the problem begins when the ego becomes the only part of ourselves we know how to listen to. Because then a sense of self can become a defence of self.

A healthy sense of self allows us to say:

This is who I am. This is what I need. This matters to me. I know where I stand.

We can have our own opinions, hold our boundaries, pursue what matters to us and make choices that reflect who we are. We don't need to apologise for existing as individuals. But something changes when our sense of self becomes something we feel we have to constantly prove.

Suddenly, being wrong feels like a threat to who we are. Rejection feels like evidence that we're not good enough. Someone else's success makes us question our own. We become preoccupied with proving that we're intelligent, desirable, successful or worthy.

And life becomes less about living according to who we are and more about protecting the person we believe we need to be. I believe this is what makes the ego so exhausting. Not having a self, but instead having a self we are constantly afraid of losing.

And perhaps this is why I keep coming back to the idea of "Being in relationship with oneself". To me, the answer has never been to starve the ego into submission, nor to feed every demand it makes. It has always been to be in relationship with it. To understand what it is protecting and to notice what it is afraid of.

And then, to give it enough security that it doesn't need to spend its entire existence defending itself. Enough security to be wrong. To be disliked. To not be exceptional. To say I don't know. To take up space without needing to take over the room.

Enough security to have a voice without needing to be the only voice.

Reading Estés has deepened this for me. I believe that the deeper task isn't to become egoless, but to develop a relationship between the ego and something larger than the ego. A self that can participate fully in the world without becoming imprisoned by the world. A self that knows who she is without needing to constantly prove it.

A self that can say:

I am here. I matter. I have a place in this world.

And also:

I am not the whole of it.

Maybe that's what balance asks of us. Not to abandon the self and not to worship the self. But rather, to know the self well enough that it no longer has to fight so hard to be safe.

The surrender of the need to defend it.

Xx Pascale