The Ego is many things, but it is not who you are. We are plagued with an amnesia of the soul. The ego is needed and serves a vital purpose and is needed for survival. My ego kept me safe and built a fortress so that I would not incur anymore psychological or emotional injury. The issue is that the ego took over and does not function anymore in a productive way. It instead limits growth. It controls, compares, closes off self from engaging in meaningful ways with others. It is skeptical and critical and is always on the defense.

The Ego is like 80’s bangs that once served a purpose by attracting a suitor, and gave a sense of unique expression. Sometimes people cling to what once worked for them and have a hard time finding and accepting new expressions.

The Ego is injured. It is the ego that suffers, the ego that harms, the ego that is selfish, competitive, controlling and restricted.

The healed ego is authentic self and knows how to serve you best, as your  helpful assistant and advocate, it’s your instinct and talent, it’s protective and loyal to the spirit. When the order of our being is in alignment it is the spirit that sees, observes and illuminates the intellect and guides the authentic self to purpose and action. The ego can be injured, The spirit can not be harmed but it can be disconnected. When we speak of being authentic we are describing an ego that is healed and is connected to the God that dwells within– Atma.  We are God manifested. God contains you, but you do not contain all of God. All is possible because of the expansiveness of God, it is illumination through us that blasts through any perceived limitation. Our ego is limited, our spirit is not. This is what it means to live in the higher nature of self. 

Depression is when we dwell in the lower nature of the self which is below the reach of the higher self.  It occurred to me that my suffering came from my ego. I was unaware that the chatter in my mind was not me, but my ego. I suffered from a collapsed spirit. Ego took up post in my thoughts, the problem with this is that my intellect was driven by my ego which dictated the direction of my life. Ego can imitate but it is a far cry from the wholeness one gains from living from spirit and devotion. My ego gave the sense that I lived in my head and my body just a machine, I could not get a sense for God or the feeling of connectedness in life and I was often troubled by suicidal thoughts, depression, and low self-worth.

You see Ego has a limited understanding of how to operate the mind, body and soul it can manage basic operations but it has little understanding of what the rest of the vessel can do. Due to this negligence we suffer greatly. It is not bad, it is misguided and trying to do it’s best and does not know how to ask for help. Some of the issues it creates are rigidity within the body, inflexibility in emotions or stuck emotions, black and white thinking, constant comparison, critique and paralyzed will.

We find ourselves to be superior or inferior to those around us. I have uncovered that most of the time I am experiencing suicidal thinking it is directly related to my ego feeling inferior because of embarrassment, shame or overall inferiority to a problem at hand. Once again the Ego does not know how to withstand pain so it defaults to self-destruct mode. The Ego sees a big problem and with its tunnel vision it determines there is no way out and therefore death (not only in the physical sense but in an emotional and spiritual sense as well) is the only way to escape the debilitating pain.