Mental activity is the driving force for every motivation and life energy. This energy body is beyond the mere physical and involves the understanding and directing of life energy. It is the place where the mind reflects and conscious thoughts are made. Within this body beliefs are challenged and impressions are stored.
The energy body is filled with beliefs that have been imprinted into your subconscious mind from the moment of conception. They come from experiences, parents, authority figures, cultural beliefs and from your immediate environment.
When you were born, you were dependent for survival, caregivers, most of the times your parents provided for you. With brain waves in an altered state of consciousness to learn how to exist in the world, we soak up everything around us. That’s how you quickly learn a language and social norms.
It’s also how (without conscious choice) we internalise the voices of the people we’re around the most. Those voices give us the concept of who we are (based on the concept of who those people have been told they are.) Their beliefs become our reality. Their past becomes our present. Their perspective is our truth. This is called conditioning.
At the same time, the ego is being formed. As children the ego is in an ego-centric state. This means there is no other. Only self. Everything people do is because of us. We don’t have the level of awareness to understand outside forces cause people’s behavior. We personalize everything, believing fully in the limited version of ourselves.
Then we enter a school system where we are not taught how to think, we are modelled what to think. We face an authority figure in the front of the classroom and then we receive what we call grades. A comparison. Constantly. We buy into these comparisons and labels of “smart” “dumb” “gifted” and whatever else. The ego is always there, completely unconscious, absorbing these labels. Then we start to label other people just as we’ve taught to do. Of course this ego based living is miserable and painful, but it’s all we’ve seen the people around us do. So for a period of our lives we live this way, sleepwalking.
At some point, a small voice inside of us starts whispering to wake up. To do the work. We might not hear it that way. Sometimes it comes through sickness or trauma. Sometimes it’s just a series of small awareness’s. There’s this inner knowing that we may not be who we think we are. And that is the first step in journey to returning to who we actually are.
When we understand there is a voice in our mind constantly telling stories, we begin the process of understanding that these stories are not reality. They are just the internalized voices and beliefs (often from others) that we believe to be true.
Your beliefs are nothing but an accumulation of other people’s beliefs that you have made your own.
This inner voice is our "ego".
The ego wants us to be safe. This is not a bad thing, unless we don’t have awareness. Ego is simply attempting to protect us from pain and make sense of who we are. The issue is that it does this based on our past. It’s constantly attempting to keep us safe by repeating that past. Repeating the past is familiar and the space where ego will always attempt to keep us.
To stop the cycle of living our past, we need to witness (heal) the ego.
Ego is created in childhood (past lives / karma) from the internalised voices of others around us.
The ego is not "bad" or "good" it is just a function of the mind that helps us makes sense of who we are and what we experience. Our egos cause suffering when we are unconscious of the reality that we have an ego driving our behaviour.
Ego's Purpose is:
- Have a sense of self identity based on what other people have told us about ourselves.
- Protect us from pain we've experienced in the past.
- Keep us in the familiar, predictable patterns because what the ego can predict feels safe.
- Keep us addicted to the thoughts and emotions we have experienced since childhood.
- Validate our unconscious beliefs about who we are and who others are.
- Protect the inner child from things that are too painful to acknowledge.
The Ego's Favourite Stories:
- I am not good enough / worthy / un-loveable
- Things should be easier or faster
- Comparison stories (I am superior or inferior in some way)
- Things will change for me when others people change.
- Things are black and white and right or wrong. (no room for flexibility / non-duality)
How to heal the Ego or awaken the Ego (awareness of the Ego)
- Self-observation: observe what you think, how you speak and how you respond to situations every day. Do your beliefs support you? How is your body reacting in certain situations? Do you feel pain, tension...?
- Practice being conscious: any time you are in the present moment witnessing the ego, the ego relaxes.
- Allow all thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations without judgement (this is self-validation and re-learning this is therapy for our ego)
Signs your Ego is healing:
- When you feel defensive, you've started asking yourself "why"
- You realised there is a steady stream of false stories constantly going on in the mind.
- You are beginning to understand people's behaviour is how they feel about themselves.
- You have started to take full responsibility for your emotional state
- You are beginning to see you create your own experiences.
Your beliefs or stories:
All YOUR BELIEFS that make an object, person or situation negative will cause a host of negative emotions that can lead to rejection, avoidance, denial and in extremes; to violence, anger and resentment.
All YOUR BELIEFS that make an object, person or situation positive will cause you to want more and, in extremes, can cause illusions, fantasies, addiction and dependency.
As you may have realised, both extremes, positive and negative, lead to unpleasant end results, while being balanced and aware of both sides in everything leads to stillness, focus and success.
For example:
The person on your left can see only the bad, while the person on your right can see only the good. The person in the middle can see both parts of the same situation.
Dependent on the programming, upbringing, experiences YOUR beliefs can be completely opposite to that of others.
The list of examples here can be as long as you like: opinions about relationships, opinion about education, political oppositions, religious wars, health care, music, movies, beauty, countries, landscape, art and so on.
The people, who do not share your beliefs, challenge your perception of the world. Therefore, these people are generally disliked, avoided, confronted, opposed or even hated. It’s as simple as that.
Therefore, it’s not important to fight over who is right or whose beliefs are better, but to recognise that your beliefs are not reality but a protection of your ego.
Ego's healing (Ego work) allows us to:
- Navigate the world with peace, clarity and grace.
- Fulfil our purpose
- Accept criticism and praise while also not internalising them as "truths"
- Form deeper, meaningful, conscious relationships
- Understand that our thoughts are not reality and we are not our thoughts.
- Find humour, joy, creativity and play.
- leave survival mode to access empathy
- Forgive ourselves and others.
For practitioners the following questions will be a key to determine:
- Which areas are stressed with unhealthy beliefs.
- Which beliefs prevent the patient from getting well.
- How many areas of life are challenged by unhealthy beliefs
To TRULY HEAL a patient, we have to look into each of the following areas of life and help a patient to:
- Become aware of the beliefs that cause stress.
- See that there are other ways to judge the same thing, situation or person.
- Recognise that many beliefs are not reality
- Help them to find the benefits in what they call bad.
- Help them to find the drawback in what they belief to be good and bring them back into balance.
This returning to balance is a process that needs to be trained constantly. Realising that we are operating from past conditioning.
Further studying but not required: (Highly recommended though 🙂)
Book: How to do the work by Nicole LePera