Exchanging Ego for Soul: How to Remember Who We Are
My kids recently lost their great grandfather. It was an open casket. Before the visitation, I told my kids that even though they’d be looking at their great grandfather’s body, his soul was not there.
Have you ever noticed that the body never really looks like the person did in life? There are many reasons for this, but the most important one, to me, is that a body isn’t really anything without a soul.
I told my kids that just like our car is important to us because it takes us from school to piano to baseball and home again, our bodies are just vehicles for our souls. They are, at their best, functional for us. At worst, they can be the very things that keep us from embodying love, which is our greatest calling.
On earth, we focus so much on our bodies, on our human forms. We exercise and diet and hang mirrors everywhere, and even if we’re not looking at our literal bodies, we’re thinking about satisfying cravings, elevating ourselves, getting ahead, and winning. This is all living from ego. What do I mean by that, and why does it matter? Let’s get into it.
In order to reach full consciousness, to live in the energy frequency of unconditional love, we have to retrain our human selves to learn to live from the soul. This is what I mean when I say, Unbecome, Remember, Return. Most human beings walking around don’t remember their soul because it has been so covered up by our own human conditioning. Our egos get us “ahead” in the world.
Our souls make life worth living.
MY TELL-ALL MEMOIR
Sleeping with a Stranger is officially available everywhere books are sold, in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook. Since the book’s launch, I’ve been amazed by how it has been received. From being named a best seller by USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, #1 on Amazon and Barnes & Noble Top Ten to incredibly personal and touching reviews from my amazing readers, it’s been such a wild journey!
If you’ve been following along week by week, we just spent the past month talking about embracing the darkness. We sat with the trauma and looked our fears directly in the face. Next, we’ll talk more about limiting beliefs and how to shed those. But now, we need to understand the difference between our souls and our human bodies. This is an important in-between, because before we can truly let go of our limiting beliefs, we need to understand why it’s so important to do so, and how our ego, much like our limiting beliefs, keeps us grounded and held back.
Now, I don’t know if it’s possible to live 100% from the soul, or if it’s even recommended. Maybe those monks who fast for days and days and days have figured it out. But one of the most beautiful things I’ve experienced from living more from the soul is that you’re never done. It’s like learning and growing and healing. You never get to stop. In fact, stopping would be a kind of death.
And this kind of soul life is much more peaceful. The things that bother the ego or work up the ego, don’t bother the soul. The soul truly knows that everything that is meant for it will come. It trusts the timing of the Divine. There is no lack. There is no missing out.
While the ego represents self-protection, the soul represents openness.
While ego makes you fearful, soul makes you wise.
While ego makes you self-centered, soul makes you generous.
When I lived out of ego, I worked 14 hour days and was obsessed with the grind. Now that I live out of soul, I trust my desires and literally dance in the rain.
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Maybe my own experiences resonate, and you’re following along with that, or maybe this soul and ego language sounds like some new age bs. But the idea of soul and ego isn’t a new thing. Here’s an excerpt about soul and ego from almost a century ago:
The soul is a true reflection of the Spirit, and is therefore pure. When the soul becomes identified with the body, it converts itself into the ego. In a worldly person, the ego is the guiding principle of all thoughts, feelings, and aspirations.
One must learn to differentiate between material desires and soul desires. The pure soul loves the wisdom and bliss experienced in the union with the absolute, omnipresent, omniscient One.
The ego loves name, fame, pride, greed, body-attachment, and all perishable qualities. When the ego succeeds in persuading the mind to like the perishable comforts of the body, the mind becomes spiritually blind and no longer prefers the imperishable joys of the soul resting in omnipresence.
From Inner Culture, May 1939.
It can be sudden, or it can happen gradually. But at some point, you have to be done with the negativity that comes with living into ego. The process of ego death is painful, but it always leads to the peace and abundance that comes from living into soul.
In many ways, I think we’ve become too comfortable with negative emotions. They become constant companions instead of signs that we’re out of soul alignment. Bitterness, resentment, shame, anxiety…these aren’t natural byproducts of being alive but our inner guide (God) showing us that we are not in alignment with our desire, our core energy.
It’s your brain (your mortal, human thing) mismatching with your soul (your eternal, God thing).
We’ve trained ourselves to endure negative emotions. We’ve been conditioned to believe that uneasy feelings are normal. We’ve been taught to suffer rather than listen to our inner knowing. We’ve been told this makes us tough. Resilient. And this is how our ego breaks in. Because we’re more worried about how we seem than how we feel. We’d rather be perceived as strong than feel safe.
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To get back to a simple idea that might crack this whole ego v. soul conversation open in your own life, I want to share something with you. During the very beginning of my time in the darkness, I read a book that was, I’ll be honest, a bit heavy and dense. But it really began my transformation in seeing the separation between ego and soul. Here’s just one of the many simple, incredible pieces of wisdom it shared:
We grow up believing we are thoughts. Those thoughts we think - that’s us. But we are not our thoughts, this book explains. We are the ones observing our thoughts.
This really helped me in beginning to separate ego from soul. In what ways am I believing that I am my thoughts? Where do my thoughts differ from my soul, my essence?
Want some practical ways to dig into the difference between soul and ego in your own life, as well as the title of this book, helpful journal prompts, and other resources? Join my course The Path Back to You to get started. Click here to learn more.
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