A balanced, stable person has a healthy level of ego. Without ego we couldn’t exist on Earth, it´s our scaphandre here. It helps us to achieve our goals and gives us a great protection. What happens however when our ego becomes too big? What are the consequences and how can we balance this out? I will examine these questions from the perspective of emotional losses.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions

Probably there isn’t any single person on this planet who hasn’t experienced or won´t experience any significant emotional loss in the future. It´s natural and inevitable. We were born with the ability to cope with this experience and to grow with it. For whatever reason however we can decide not to face with our losses and continue our life as if nothing had happened. It´s a turning point at which the space between “us” and our ego starts diminishing.

An unresolved emotional loss generates a lot of inner tensions that with time will shift our love to fear. The more unresolved emotional losses we have the more fearful we become. The ego that had a perfect „shape” and „size” before perceives this change as a threat and starts growing to give us a stronger protection. In order that the ego could grow, after a while it will take room from us, from our true-self. The authentic-self will be pushed more and more into the background.

Both the ego and the true-self has its specific role. At optimal circumstances the ego is our vehicle and the true-self is behind the wheel. The soul-self is a natural leader, it has the map with all of the necessary information that shows us where we should live, whom we should share our time, money, energy with, what kind of career we should pursue. The ability of the ego is limited in that sense.

In case the ego-self gets to the wheel and the authentic-self is pushed to the back seat we can expect heavy consequences. We end up being at places where we should´t be and where we don´t want to be.

Here are some indications that we identify ourselves with the ego-self instead of the true-self:

• We have desires and goals but for some reason we never follow through them. The direction is missing.
• Our life is a struggle, still we have a strong fear of death.
• We are depressed about the past and anxious about the future. We find it difficult and painful to be present. Deep down we know that we are at wrong place in life. Instead of facing with the reality we live in a fantasy world. Meanwhile real life just passes by.
• Our life is stagnant and most of the time we feel discontent. We sense that something holds us as a hostage.
• The relationship with ourselves and with others are shallow and meaningless.
• Letting go is difficult. We became rigid and fearful of the smallest change.
• We often behave arrogantly, still our self-esteem is low and we have many insecurities.
• We are easily triggered, manipulated and misled. We can´t distinguish between compliment and flattery.
• When everything goes well we feel prideful, when it gets bad we feel ashamed.
• We can´t go with the flow, we often try to control the outcomes of our life by manipulation.
• We are in a constant „doer” state. We can´t enjoy silence and the time alone.
• We blame the outside world for our discontentment. We are stuck in self-pity and victim mentality.
• We don´t trust our intuition. We seek outside ourselves the answers to our questions instead of going inward. We completely forgot who we are. This level of disconnection causes a great deal of emptiness which can lead to addictions.
• We don´t love ourselves because the self we have been trying to love is a false character. It´s not only fake but many times the personality that we chose not to stand out from the crowd is unloveable.

With healing comes the ease

If we are lucky enough, at some point of our life we realize that we got lost. It doesn´t matter how far away we went, how chaotic our life became, our deepest desire is the find the path that is meant for us. But how we can get there? The ego-self isn´t the right tool, the true-self that remembers the whole plan has been sleeping for a while. If unresolved emotional losses distracted us from the right track, grieving, healing will be the solution.

How does healing look like?

Healing is real, raw, there is nothing mystical about it. There isn´t any outside force that is going to fix us, we are our own healer. We can get support and inspiration on the way, but healing is solely our decision, it´s a solo journey.

For healing we need to create a space where we can be calm and peaceful, where we can let us feel the feelings. This is grieving in a nutshell. In a stressful environment we can´t heal. The emotions, we need to encounter with, might be quite intense and turbulent, especially if we buried them long time ago. It`s important however that we don´t try to numb ourselves or to divert our attention from any pain that comes up. For proper healing we need to feel these emotions at their purest, rawest forms. If we hold on, we will experience that even the heaviest and strongest emotions, such as anger, fear, joy, sadness, shame, guilt etc. will vanish after a while, they won´t stand the test of time. Only love will be persistent and eventually the essence of our healing.

As we let our emotions come to the surface to be neutralized, the inner tension will be reduced, and the ego will finally be able to relax. The authentic-self can come to the front now. With enough courage and faith in ourselves we are one step away to experience life from our individual perspective and to create our own Heaven on Earth. 

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

 Marianne Williamson