As the ego tries to pull you away from your spirit or true self, it wants you to take on a false identity with concepts that may include your role, status, possessions, job, appearance, etc. You become that role, that status, your possessions, your appearance. If you lose what you have identified with, you feel destroyed because that is who you think you are. Wayne Dyer stated, “Ego, the false idea of believing that you are what you have or what you do, is a backwards way of assessing and living life.”

The ego can also encourage you to find an identity through a religion, political group, gang, or cult. It uses our desire to feel accepted and significant as a way to lose oneself within a particular group. You find yourself stripped of your intellectual and spiritual freedom as you are entirely indoctrinated into this other belief system.

We spot our ego showing up every time we judge someone, which is basically comparing their worthiness to our own. We all catch ourselves doing this. We size people up as either inferior or superior to ourselves, which is a way we measure our value and relevance in a situation. However, the act of comparing ourselves to others gives them the power to determine our own self-worth.

If we feel someone is superior to us, we measure ourselves as less than equal and are left feeling insecure and possibly jealous or envious. Conversely, if we judge someone as inferior to ourselves, we assume we are above them. The ego loves this because it results in either a feeling of self-righteousness or arrogance.

The spirit doesn’t care how you measure up against others. It only cares that you are true to yourself because that is all that matters. You accept people for who they are without judgement, expectations, or comparisons. You just do you.

Two of the most common tactics employed by the ego focus on scarcity and striving. Scarcity is the ego’s way of telling you that there is never enough. You spend your life striving to have enough or become enough. This goal is impossible to achieve because the ego is aided and abetted by our consumer culture and will convince us that there is always more to acquire or accomplish. This lack of satisfaction can lead to greed and depression because you will realize that no matter what you have or do, it will never feel like enough. There will always be a feeling of emptiness and lack. Unfortunately, some people go through their entire lives feeling this way. Wholeness and the satisfaction to know that you are enough can only come from the spirit. Corporations hire marketing experts and make billions when they exploit our ego-based beliefs by telling us that we will be envied by others and find happiness if we buy that designer handbag or that fancy car. The spirit knows this is crap and doesn’t fall for it. Sure, we may experience superficial moments of happiness there, but it will soon pass, and you will be thinking of the next purchase. Unlike fleeting moments of pleasure, true joy is lasting joy and comes from the spirit and is expressed through a strong sense of knowing that you are enough, just the way you are.

The ego does not like truth because the ego is your false self and thrives on illusion. Truth is the domain of the spirit. It’s crazy how fast we can allow any random situation in life to go sideways and cause all kinds of drama in our head when our thoughts are based on assumptions. Rather than act on an assumption in a way I would most likely regret, I’ve learned to objectively think about what is going on and determine what is true and what is not. After deciding what the truth is, I will either do something about it or let it go. The great Stoic philosopher Seneca said, “We suffer more in our imagination than we do in reality.” When we are facing a challenge, it’s easy to let our imagination go wild and conjure up all the “What ifs?” that will make us crazy and stressed out. The more logical approach would be to figure out and focus on what we can control and let go of what we can’t control.

Another name for fear is False Evidence Appearing Real. Remember the fear-based ego is your false self and will do what it can to keep that illusion going by distorting the truth. The spirit humbly seeks the truth. Many times, it’s not about the story but our narrative of the story. Confirmation bias is a term used when we selectively conform facts to fit our beliefs while disregarding the truth. While the ego tries to support a reality based in illusion, the spirit only considers facts to find the truth in a situation. Barack Obama said, “Increasingly, we become so secure in our bubbles that we accept only information, whether true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that’s out there.”

Ok, I just told you about the common egoic traps of identification, comparison, not enough and beliefs vs truth. Those aren’t the only dirty games the ego plays. In fact, the hardest to spot and most dangerous trap is found in the wounds we bury deep in our psyche. Pay close attention to this one. It’s a beast!

Often, the past events and relationships in our lives trigger us and need to be examined. Many times, we are triggered because of an unhealed wound that just got poked. We all have them. Ram Dass said, “If you think you are enlightened, go spend a weekend with your family.” These wounds stem from raw emotions left over from being bullied, rejected by someone you loved, pressured from overly critical parents, whatever. Our thoughts are a reflection on how we think about the story. Our emotional reaction to a wound reflects how we feel about that unpleasant story from the past. Either way the negative thoughts and emotions that are oozing from an unhealed wound will lurk around in our psyche and cause mental suffering until we face them honestly and scrub them clean. Don’t try to stuff these feelings because what you resist will persist. The negative feelings that we store inside our psyche build up pressure and cause suffering until we release them. Carl Jung referred to this “Shadow” part of us as repressed feelings, concepts, and thoughts we have about ourselves that we don’t want to face. The source of these wounds will be uncovered when we go deep with the unpleasant feeling and embrace it rather than avoid it. Each time we honestly face and examine our wounds, we release its energy and lose our identification with it. Eventually it will no longer have power over us. This entails deep self-reflection and is usually not a lot of fun, but it is the only way to heal.