10 Insights about Ego Energy to Promote Wellness
Our ego is exerting a profound influence on our human and spiritual wellness—for better or worse. However, its impact is hidden from us by our limited understanding of what it is and its purpose, which is ultimately a positive one—our survival. This article seeks to remove the ignorance and darkness about it that empowers unhealthy ego energy to undermine our human and spiritual wellness. And replace it with insights that shine light and truth on this very important part of who we are and our humanity.
10 Insights about Ego and Ego Energy To Promote Our Human and Spiritual Wellness
By Dr. Nickolas Martin
If you’ve had a psychology class or read a book that touched on ego in the likelihood you got a very limited, very superficial, and very incomplete description that weakens your ability to understand the extremely important influence that ego is having on your life, humanly and spiritually. By the way that’s not the fault of those courses or teachers because they were only intended to give us a basic understanding of ego, not everything. Unfortunately, if we get the impression that we pretty much know everything there is to know about ego, we are missing a great deal about it and what it’s doing to our life. So, knowing something about ego is as good as knowing nothing about ego, because what we know can be misleading. It can lead us to minimize the effect ego is having on our lives and cause us to miss the destructive impact that ego can be having on it. Weakening our ability to understand ourselves, each other, and God. Even though we are normal, intelligent, and spiritual beings, our ego energy can be leading us towards a lesser version of ourselves and a lesser version of life. Consequently, the more we know about ego and our ego energy, the more we can remove ourselves from the ignorance and darkness that empowers ego and upon which it thrives, to the truth and light upon which we can thrive.
10 Insights about Ego
1. Everyone has an Ego
There are over 7 billion people on the planet, and every one of us has an ego. Just as we all have a face, a brain, and a heart, we also have an ego. We often don’t realize this due to our ignorance of what it truly is.
2. Ego is an Energy.
Ego is energy, and its main purpose is to protect us, keep us safe, and promote our survival—our daily and human survival. It is serving as the roots for how we will try to survive in this life and hopefully serve us in living a fulfilling and meaningful life. Unfortunately, this effort to survive can happen in some very different and often stupid ways for different people. This requires having a deep and diverse understanding of the ego and the energy that it is. Failing to do this will keep us as ignorant of it now, as we were 3,000 years ago and will be 3,000 years into the future. This will prevent any real transformation of personal and collective human and spiritual consciousness on our planet.
3. Ego Energy is Diverse and comprised of Power, Flexibility, and Vulnerability.
Power involves the degree to which we are willing to exert influence in our life. Flexibility involves the degree we are willing to seek the truth. We do not know and discard the false truths we do know. The vulnerability involves our ability to accept and work with our weaknesses and an imperfect world. Each of these components is brought to bear as we meet the challenges of life, including relationships, achieving our potential and knowing our life’s purpose, change, adversity, stress, conflict, and living genuine happiness.
4. Ego Energy can become unhealthy and imbalanced by life circumstances—not by you, ego, or God.
The experience of living too much or too little ego power, flexibility, and vulnerability are brought about by what life has brought to our door in the form of harmful, destructive, or dysfunctional people we have encountered, traumatic events, impoverished environmental circumstances, or inherited/acquired illnesses, diseases, or disorders which have brought our daily survival into question.
5. Ego Energy is the main source of the stupidity happening in our life—not our intellect, not a mental illness, and not an absence of spirituality.
We have enough intellectual ability to think intelligently and adaptively about the challenges taking place in our life when unhealthy ego energy isn’t getting in the way. The overwhelming majority of us are not being afflicted by the type of mental illness that would compromise our ability to think rationally, intelligently, and adaptively in response to what is taking place in our life. It is not due to an absence of spirituality because of the Love, Life, and Energy—God Is, is always within us, though unhealthy ego energy can cause us to gain some distance from it. When we attribute any of the stupidity happening in our life or those of others, to intellectual limitations, mental illness, or the absence of spirituality, we are getting caught up in misleading explanations and missing the boat. As an example, shooting groups of people becomes a moment of empowerment for those feeling disempowered or an opportunity to express frustration and resentment in a world that is not complying with the shooter’s version of the truth.
6. Ego Energy shapes what can become our “abnormal-normal,” which is the distorted ways of looking at ourselves, our life, our thoughts, our feelings, and our behaviors.
Ego energy is like a prism or filter through which we are looking at things and the nature of the power, flexibility, and vulnerability making up the prism defines it and the distortions we can get in how we see ourselves, our life, our thoughts, our feelings, and our behaviors, which reflect ego stupidity. It is abnormal because what we are thinking, feeling, or doing is unhealthy, even though others can often see it. It is normal, because it becomes so typical of what we think, feel, or do that we often make it out to be normal. By the way taking a pill will not alter or remove the prism—you do!
7. Ego Energy thrives on consistency, familiarity, predictability, and the known, which keeps us stuck in it even when we realize the things we are thinking, feeling, or doing are wrong.
So, we can be stuck in unhealthy ego energy, which entraps us in spending our life surviving rather than living. Particularly if we don’t know what to do about it. Or, we can be experiencing healthy ego energy (which also likes consistency, familiarity…), which allows us to spend much of our life living and not just surviving.
8. Ego Energy can impact our spiritual wellness—weakening our ability to be the Love, Life, and Energy—God Is.
We are always spiritual because we could not exist in the absence of God’s presence in our being. But we can gain distance from our spirituality and not be spiritually well due to unhealthy ego energy, particularly when we embrace ego illusions of separation, inequality, and unworthiness. Unhealthy ego energy weakens our ability to be the unconditional, connective, unburdened and unlimited love that God Is. It weakens our ability to recognize and honor the presence of God in all life forms, be they human, animal, plant, insect, etc. It weakens our ability to undergo the natural healing and transformation that we were designed to experience when being the Energy—God Is. It also weakens our ability to embrace the Divine Gifts we have been given of our life, our ability to create the life in which we are living, our eternal life, and God’s presence within us, every step of our life. Unhealthy, imbalanced ego energy gets in the way of all of that and undermines our spiritual wellness.
9. Ego Energy is healed by You—not Ego, not God, and not Life.
Ego can’t do it, because it doesn’t have an awareness of what it is and what it’s doing to your life, as it doesn’t have an intellect or a capacity for intentionality. God does not work to directly intervene in fixing our ego energy even though we can make efforts to draw upon our spiritual resources to manifest more of the Love, Life, and Energy—God Is, including the use of prayer, meditation, and service to others. Life can bring a powerful transformational event or person into our lives that can shift our ego energy in a positive direction. But generally, they have to be pretty powerful, and you have to wait for them to come if they ever do. For example, a near-death experience causing someone to gain greater perspective and altering or removing the prism I was talking about earlier. You are the one who can heal your ego energy that was needed with the information I can share with you in my programs and books. Because you are the only one living you!
This involves guidance contained in each of my books towards knowing:
1) What ego is and what it isn’t,
2) Tuning into your ego energy, and
3) Replacing ego rooted non-reality-based thoughts with those which are reality-based.
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About the Author
Dr. Nickolas Martin is a licensed psychologist who has worked in clinical, university, public school and private practice settings as a therapist, diagnostician, educator, and consultant for 35 years. He authored Ego Therapy: A Method for Healing Your Whole Self and It’s Your Ego—Stupid!: Fix It to Fix Your Life and has co-authored with Rev. Linda M. Martin, EgoSpiritualism: Awakening to Your Human and Divine Self and The Two Voices Within: Balancing the Energies of Ego and Spirit to Enhance Your Life.
https://www.egoandspirit.info/
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