I want to say something that took me a long time to say to myself, deep inside, where I say All The Things (rarely without a filter or anybody in there to stand up for me, which sometimes sucks):

 

The Ego is part of you.  You cannot separate yourself from it, anymore than it can remove itself from you.  It is perhaps your clearest (and loudest; that thing has some serious volume) indication that there is work to do, that there is a choice to be made.

 

And that choice involves stretching our awareness beyond the limitations of our (totally understandable) dualistic thinking to include all realities.

It is the nature of the mind to rise and fall into and out of all thoughts, perceptions, positions and protections.  Entiendo?  Ego is your nature.  If you’re human, you have an ego.  We are perhaps the only species that experiences this thing, this inner surgeon which is in constant pursuit of dividing things, putting them in boxes marked Good or Bad or Right or Wrong or Pretty or Ugly.  Her scoupel is sharp and she’s ready to use it.  Damn, is she ready to use it!

But the ego is a gift, truly.

Disregarding the ego as something that does not belong in you, has no purpose, or is the bummer asshole guest at the party inside you which is your Soul Celebration (note to whomever makes holidays: can we please have Soul Celebration Day?  No work and no school in honor of this most important thing?  I mean, really.  Flag Day is a holiday.  Give us this.) is another way the ego wins.  Why?  Because the ego’s sole purpose is to convince you that you are not whole as you are.  That there are parts of you (and everyone, and everything) that can — and should — be avoided, surgically removed, shamed, hated.  The very desire to separate or be “better than” the part of you that is ego is the ego getting what it wants: Division.

I once met a guy at a party who seemed to get it.  As we talked, I saw that he clearly had an interest in things of an esoteric nature, which of course my judgey mind admired.  I listened to him, and eventually, I smiled to myself when he said, after listing some of the things he was interested in, that he was working on, “Disliking the ego.”  I completely understood what he was referring to, but my inner dialogue couldn’t help but ask, “So, what you’re saying is, you’re working on disliking yourself?”

Of course I knew his statement was not one of self-loathing.  Of course.  Because I also know what it’s like — basically every day — to be aware of some of my more unseemly qualities/thoughts/patterns/beliefs/reactions, and want to get all Kill Bill on them and five-point-touch destroy them into oblivion.  But the thing is this: the ego is not something to overcome.

Pain, confusion, judgement, self-loathing — any way you name the ego or her tendencies/qualities/actions/inactions — does not change the fact that she exists because you exist.  You cannot remove her from you like you can remove an unseemly or pre-cancerous mole.  The challenge she provides is to remind you that you are not your unseemly thoughts/actions/judgements/reactions.  Nor are you your beautiful/patient/compassionate/forgiving “self.”  The ego in-action is the mental function that tells you to identify with one thing or another; that this thing is right.  This person is good.  This experience is worth having.  This thought is okay.

We often forget that just as much as we’d like to not identify with the things that feel icky about us, ego is the thing that tells you it’s better to identify with the stuff that feels good.  The problem is not good/bad.  The problem that creates suffering is identifying with the results of mental function in itself.

Try this: Imagine for a moment that all of the things you’re thinking and feeling while you’re reading this are a big cone.  At the top of the cone is all the myriad things you’re experiencing, all in a jumble, right now, swirling.  It’s a bit chaotic, eh?  Totally.  Just take stock of all the things you’re thinking and feeling about what you’re reading, all the connections you’re making, the things or experiences or people you’re being reminded of.  Really feel it and its textures.  Let it feel juicy in there.

Then, subtly, beyond that, move down into a slightly narrower part of the cone, and try to become aware of the feeling tone behind all your thoughts and feelings, i.e. the emotions that are coming up for you.  We all have them, as we are emotionally connected — even on an unconscious level — to everything we ever experience.  These emotions live largely in our bodies, so tune into that thing and really feel.

Moving down into an even more focused and narrow part of the cone, notice also your positive/negative associations with those feelings.  (For instance, loving = “good” feeling; judgement = “bad” feeling.)  Just notice.  Expand your awareness to simply notice all the thousands of things you might be feeling in these moments of focus and awareness, all of your associations with those feelings, all of your assignments of Good/Bad/Right/Wrong/Pleasant/Unpleasant.  You might be judging yourself for feeling those things.  Just notice that, too.

Then, let yourself move, ever so slowly, down through the funnel of the narrowest part of this cone of awareness.  So very gently, at the tippiest tip of this ever-narrowing, ever-quieting cone of awareness, notice the part of yourself that is aware that you’re judging/feeling/thinking. Notice the part of you that is aware that you are aware.  You might notice a very still quality to that awareness, to that part of yourself that is simply observing yourself having the human experience of having a brain and body and a life full of associations.  Notice your awareness.  Marinate in it for a few moments.

That?  That’s who you are.  Pure consciousness.  Pure awareness.  Pure spirit.

 

Feels good in there, right?  But not good in the normal way we feel “good” when, say, we feel proud of ourselves for something, or when we’re on vacation and relatively free from the mundane responsibilities of life.  Good in the way that is expansive, full of possibility, and free of the constraints of constantly having to decide what’s right and wrong, okay or not okay to feel.

Simply put, the ego is simply the actively noticing part of ourselves, The Judge, the part that is oh-so-human, and necessary for discerning and sometimes saving our lives as we navigate in a world with other humans and decisions to be made.  But beyond that, we exist purely as the consciousness that is aware that we are aware, that includes all things, all possibilities, and is not taken prisoner by identification with any of our very natural judgements of the world we live in or the things we experience or feel.

The ego is a work-a-holic.  But thankfully the ego, by jumping around naming and labeling all things all the time, does the judging for us, and leaves the true us to be free to do other things, like expanding, sensing, experiencing our Divinity.  The ego, in all her humdrum, reminds us that deep inside is our awareness of the active ego, and the choice to be still.  Inside of our awareness of the ego, there is the opportunity to simply notice the ego doing her job.

And thank-fucking-god we have the choice to take respite in our pure, expansive, still and utterly luminous Soul.

 

 

Also, here are some links related to this topic that I love:

1) Kira Ryder, my oh-holy-amazing yoga teacher, in a TEDxTalk that will leave you feeling like you just spent $577, 998 soul bucks on yourself.
2) This interview with Jeff Foster will blow your effing mind.  It’s long, but it answers a lot of questions.

 

 

 

Some months ago, I was in a fire.  Like, a real, legit, smoke-detector-going-off-while-you’re-in-the-shower-visiting-your-friends-and-no-one-else-is-home house fire.

At first, I was in shock.  I stood around, helpless and feeling responsible for being the one to turn on the furnace that caught fire in the first place, and while my friends looked around at their charred lives — piles of smoke-damaged clothing, broken and burned furniture, no walls where there were once walls — I could only look at them and think, I’m so sorry.  I kept looking down at my hands covered in soot and the black of what remains when things go from being made of plastic or wood or fabric, but through the incineration of fire turn into one thing: black, oily residue.  And the smell: I can’t even.

I swear to god it covers everything, that black matter.  It seeps into the lines of the skin on your hands.  It becomes part of you.  There were moments looking down at my soot-covered hands that I worried I was made of the residue of the fire; that I, too, was destructive.  A mean voice from some old hard-wiring scolded me, telling me over and over again it was my fault, that I did this.  The weight of that responsibility and all that had melted and curled from the heat of the flames felt like it was hanging from the skin of my arms, from my hair, from the pajama pants I’d thrown on in haste, still wet, as I raced around my friends’ home trying desperately to grab everything I could that seemed vital: their computers and my camera equipment, a guitar and a mandolin hanging dangerously close to where the flames erupted from the furnace, and a copy of the Bhagavad Gita that had been sitting innocently on the coffee table.

It is a feeling of true and utter helplessness to be able to do nothing but stand, terrified and with soaking hair, while a structure that has been a home to people you love goes up in flames.  To be the only one with answers as to how and why.  To know you’re not responsible, but to also know that, if something or someone has to be responsible — if that is the only way to bring peace or understanding — that you will gladly accept it.  A furnace can’t be sorry for your loss, but a wet human in flannel pajama pants can try.  I wanted so badly to be that solace.

But obviously, this is an impossible load to bare: the weight of someone else’s world shifting before and beneath them.  It’s like death, where truly, all you can say and be is sorry.  Sorry for loss, for what you are helpless to change.

*

At first, for me, I did not and could not even think about myself.  To do so felt incredibly selfish.  (In some ways, it still does.)  I dutifully made phone calls to rearrange myself and what remained of my trip.  I called my mother.  I acted on the clarifying effect of it all; I anchored myself to some people, and stepped totally away from others.  But all of it, at first, seemed rote.  The way you repeat your phone number or address when you’re a child and your parents want to make sure you know where you live or who to call if there is an emergency.  I acted and spoke out of survival.  I went to the nearest Target to buy clothes that weren’t charred and that didn’t smell like something had died on them.  I used baby wipes to scrub my hands and arms of the dark matter of incineration as best I could.  I bought a burrito from Taco Bell.  I drove into Berkeley and, thankfully, had a friend waiting for me with a couch and a six pack of beer, and for a little while, escaped from the harsh reality of having been choking on smoke and the vulnerable heat of a home on fire just hours earlier.

But slowly at first, and then all at once, the terror of it hit me.  The morning after the fire, on an air mattress in San Francisco, I burst into tears and had to be held and stroked and shhh‘d until I could breath again.  That same afternoon, in traffic trying to leave the city, the claustrophobia of the cars and buildings was like being confined in a house on fire again, and I had to put my head between my knees and breath through my tears and gasps for breath to remind myself I was not about to be burned alive.

Devastation never leaves you.  The experiences of terror and fear and loss live in your body for long after the actual events have subsided.  It is a fact of embodied reality, and it’s nothing to hide from.  Slowly, like everything, it all comes back to breath.  The only way to actually move through something is sometimes as simple and difficult as breathing: to will life to enter your body, and to be willing to release it, in its time and natural rhythm.  It is an experience of living and dying, repeatedly, over and over again.  So this is what I did while I could do nothing else: I breathed.

*

Over the days and weeks after I returned to Portland, I came to understand the gift of facing a literal wall of flames — of imminent and sure destruction — and what it means to decide, in a split second without even the chance to think, what must survive and what can perish.  It seems now (as it did then) so harsh and unfair to have to make such decisions.  For someone who thrives most when there is plenty of time and space to process, fire is not my natural element.  I am a creature who needs to swim, to sink, to move slowly and purposefully, as through water.

But in facing fire, I came in contact with real fear; genuine, life-threatening danger.  I saw what it looked like to be an actual victim of disaster, and not just the tiny dramas and made-up stories of victim-hood I (like most people, I think) live with almost daily.  I was deeply humbled by the experience, and for weeks after the fire, I was heartbreakingly aware of the sweetness and fleetingness of life.  Of beauty.  Of safety.  Of a tribe of people who had energetically circled around me in support of my one perfect and unique life.

The profundity of it took my breath away.  I was in tears almost every day.  Every day, I was grateful, so very grateful.

And strangely, in facing actual threat, I came away with a deep and resounding knowingness: I am safe.  I can feel it now as I type, and remember myself in those days, and the centeredness of recallibrating from an experience I’d hoped to all that is holy and good I would never have to know.

I also came away with a knowingness that it was no coincidence that I’d ended up in an actual fire.  AN ACTUAL FIRE, you guys.  It was like I’d gotten a karmic bitch slap from the Universe, and the message was this:

Take inventory.
What goes, what stays?
Now do the work.
I fucking mean it.

*

I’m saying all this because (in my familiar dramatic fashion) it feels like my life is on fire again.  There is no actual fire, dudes.  No one is a victim.  But I’ll be really real with you: I have no idea what the fuck is going on.  It is a constantly nagging, deep background refrigerator hum of whatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuck.  Between moments of Yes, YES, YES!, there are moments of looking around at the structures built for us, to keep us in check, in line, believing that the way most of us do things is the way it’s just supposed to be.

It seems like this is the way things are: there are a whole bunch of paths, and we are mostly told to choose one.  There’s a lot of poetry and fist-bumping and pretty pictures with quotes on them and collective YEAH! going around about carving your own path ‘n shit, but the fact is that it’s hard.  Really hard, you guys.  And I am among what I’m sure are billionnnsssss of people (and especially women) who are like, “Wait.  Hold the phone.  WHAT IS GOING ON??!?!”  There are (thankfully) so many of us deciding this is not how we want our lives to be, that we do not want to be acting out of survival, which is inherently fear-based.  Did you hear me?  I’ll repeat that:

Survival thinking and being is inherently fear-based.

It is based on the belief that in order to thrive, we must suffer.  That suffering is a natural part of living.  We have accepted, along with a whole slew of other shit, that this is just the way life is.  We do jobs we don’t like.  We are in relationships that are not fulfilling.  We live in houses full of things we don’t need.  But we are never asked — never forced — to really and truly decide what, if any, of it matters.

 

If your life was on fire, what would you choose to save, in a split second, without thinking?

 

You guys, I am tripping out on how hard we work to create lives we don’t really even want.  We work so hard to hold it together, when really, it could all burn and we wouldn’t really miss it.  And what’s really, tremendously, face-numbingly difficult about this is that there are no maps.  No one really sits you down when you’re a kid and says, “So, you precious thing, here’s the deal: you have gifts, and it’s okay to use them.  You deserve to be valued and to survive in the world based on the fact that you, and no one but you, is you.  There are jobs that need to be done, yes.  But suffering is not mandatory.  And so, here’s what you do to live out your greatest purpose. [Insert sage elder advice here.]”

In fact, most of us are just coming to learn that this kind of suffering is not mandatory.  It is a huge, colossal shift in the consciousness of this generation (and world) that people, and especially women, are finally raising an eyebrow or a fist in opposition to the belief that life made up of being stuffed into too-small spaces, living too-small lives, expecting and accepting far too little for ourselves.

And this is beautiful.  This is HUGE.  But beyond awakening, there is action.  And since there are no clearly-laid-out courses of action, no Here’s What You Do When You Realize Your Gifts plan of attack or school you can go to to truly develop the gifts and skills of your soul, what do we do?  What do we do when we still have to pay rent, and buy groceries, and shoes and cell phone bills and, damnit, there is just not enough time in the day, because we are working 8 (or more) hours, commuting, surviving, and we have nothing left at the end of all that.

We are starving from the inside out, and there is so little out there to tell us this is not the way it has to be.

*

I don’t have answers.  I have windows, whispers, glimpses here and there into the All That Is reality: that we are divine, born to thrive without suffering, that we are whole and worthy and astoundingly beautiful.  That life can (and should be!) full of us recognizing ourselves, as if everything around us is made of a sparkly fucking mirror of Truth, reflecting back to us our goodness, our innate specialness, and our deservingness of our deepest longings.

Since I don’t have answers, I’ll leave you with this, which I scribbled in my journal this morning, and which I’m going to spend a lot of time with today.  A quote from Sally Kempton, in her book Awakening Shakti:

“Truly focused intention carries within it the seed of fulfillment.  It is a truth that applies to every human endeavor.”

 

Here’s to believing in the seed of fulfillment, you guys.