Claire Nuer, founder of Learning as Leadership, said “Learning about the prison of our ego takes a lifetime, but the shift, the decision to leave the prison, requires just one second. Once we really see what we no longer want, sensing it at a cellular level, we see very clearly that there are two contexts we can choose to create: one of destruction or one of humanity. Each time we have a decision to make, we can assess whether we prioritize a humane or a destructive context. Life becomes much simpler and clearer.”

The only way out… is in! This is our life’s work. It is not our career, our family, and it is certainly not any possessions we have accumulated or lost. Most of us live ego centered lives and are caught in a struggle between DOING and BEING. This struggle often manifests itself in feelings of alienation and emptiness. We said before that identifying our ego is the first step to awakening to our true self. With the mind made ego in control, 99.9% of our decisions are reactive and unconscious. Dreams and life events bring us face-to-face with our ego. Then we have a choice. Hermes over 3,000 years ago said, “as within, so without.” That ancient wisdom is the core of shifting our ego.

Self reflection and deep immersion retreats mentioned in the last blog post are powerful tools to help identify and face our ego – but these must be experiential by nature. Knowledge is gained only through direct personal experience. We must know our ego sufficiently to be fed up with its control over our life. You see, the ego eclipses our true self. The quest to transcend our ego starts with our HEART… nowhere else. To begin outside the heart invites the ego to block our progress. Our goal is to transcend the ego and then to give the ego its proper place in living in our world today. Transcending the ego reveals our true deeper purpose.

After facing our ego, our experiences generated feelings of disgust and horror, awakening and awe, along with more than fifty other feelings in between those polar opposites. Shifting our ego into its proper place requires going through (not around) those feelings. This takes internal drive and motivation to stay focused. We say there is a dual focus.

First, we must become the observer of ourselves critically aware of our thoughts, words and actions. Are we seeing our feelings, reactions and behavior in everyday life transform? Critical awareness is used to achieve a clear understanding of the motivations driving our thoughts, words and actions. This motivation becomes an intention the drives us unconsciously. Our task is pretty simple with critical awareness: to discern whether our thoughts, words and actions everyday are egoic or non-egoic.

Second, we need to let go of previously unconscious ego-driven intentions that drive our lives. In order to shift the ego, the key is to accept life’s perfection as it is. Give up expectations for anyone or anything to be different than who or what they are. We are not at all saying to become secular or removed from doing our part in our family, communities or the world. We are not promoting a continual navel searching lifestyle. We are also not saying that everyone is perfect as they think, speak and behave today. We don’t control, cannot force, and do not own others’ lives. We are responsible for our soul, mind, emotions and body. Letting go of the fear and expectations of specific outcomes for self and others shifts our ego.

Claire Nuer went deeper still with why we must shift our ego when she said, “if I look at my own behavior today – with my colleagues, my daughter, my husband, mostly with my husband – when I know that I am right, or when I fear that somebody is going to "make me wrong," what do I do? What do you do? Every day in subtle ways we "kill" each other with our thoughts. We kill with our anger, our prejudices, and our strong attachment to being right.”

Tonight, before you go to bed, assess where you destroyed yourself or others by leaving the ego in charge. Make a commitment to do a little better tomorrow. Also, assess and remember where your thoughts, words and actions shifted in a positive way, creating humanity in those life moments. Each day, as we observe ourselves and commit to be a better human BEing, the cumulative effect shifts our ego.

Retreats are a powerful way to identify and face your ego.  Effective ones are structured to get you out of your day to day grind and comfort zone, where true learning really occurs!  But instinctive egoic reactions are often an obstacle to making the time to attend such retreats.  Predictable excuses include, “I want to go BUT I simply do not have the time” or “I feel guilty spending so much time and money on ME.”  Our favorite excuse is “I do not need it. I have participated in similar workshops before.”  People indicate that they have taken the Myers-Briggs Tests, participated in Relationship workshops, enrolled in Leadership groups, done Personality Eneagrams, and the list goes on and on. 

The simple truth of the matter is that unlike the above mentioned techniques, deep immersion retreats are fundamentally different in several ways:

• The programs are designed to compel individuals to take an experiential and holistic path to develop one’s awareness (NOT an intellectual path)
• They deeply immerse the individual in a highly customized program of self reflection over a two week period aided by skilled practitioners with follow-up after the retreat
• They guide you through the gut wrenching process of returning to your heart and deep feelings which cannot be covered up by your ego. 

These retreats should not be confused with a 1 day or a two day, quick fix, one size fits all intellectually-oriented workshops that have become the fad in our world today.  Remember the intellect is the domain of our mind-made ego!

Having made many of these excuses at some point in our lives, we felt it was important to share our personal experiences with you.  The unavoidable truth is simple – investing two weeks is a small price to pay for finding the path to balance, peace and happiness in your life.  This point is even more poignant if we add up the many months and years one spends on urgent but unimportant activities that lead us towards stress and unhappiness.  Your partner, your boss or your family should understand and respect your decision to make such a commitment if YOU have the personal courage and conviction to do so.  Make no mistake: the only obstacle here is your own “know it all” ego, which wants to avoid a frontal confrontation at all costs so that it can continue to run your life in a manner it sees fit!

Anik attended a two week retreat at the Casa Betulla in Switzerland (www.casa-betulla.ch).  The retreat is located in Tegna, a small village in Ticino surrounded by shady birch trees.  The English translation for their name is the harbourage.  In the past harbourages were places where tired travelers could stop for a rest, recover and get fortified for the next part of their journey.  Today, Casa Betulla fulfills this ancient need in its own special way for a person’s life journey.  It offers individuals a secure competent place as well as integral care for the body, soul and spirit.  Here individuals can not only relax, but also calm down and regenerate from the strains of every possible life situation, while finding customized support for discovering their own inner path.  The Betulla’s idyllic garden invites you to rest and the river’s Maggia and Melleza are a wonderful place for peaceful walks.  The morning group meditation followed by a nourishing breakfast is the perfect way to prepare for the day’s inner work.   The day’s work is tailored to each person’s unique situation whether it is a relationship crisis, work predicament, marital separation, mid life transition, illness, or the death of a loved one.  This includes the appropriate individual tasks complemented by different integral body-work therapies aimed at supporting and developing the process of building awareness. 

The first step at the Betulla is to remove the incessant technology and media distractions to calm the mind of participants.   This is accomplished through an enforced “technology and media fast.”  No cell phones, no internet access, no television and no newspapers!  The purpose of the retreat is to turn one’s attention inwards, and the retreat staff well know that this is an impossible task without the “technology and media fast.”  Anik found this to be a powerful way to “unplug” from the daily distractions of the world that he had become accustomed to.

The mirror exercise is one of the tools utilized at the Betulla designed to help an individual connect with their inner wisdom.  The exercise involves sitting comfortably for 30-60 minutes at a time facing a mirror. The purpose is to look at your own reflection and begin to see beyond the physical façade, the perceived flaws, the face we show to the world and to begin to get a glimpse of your inner wisdom.  The process continues by engaging in a dialogue with your inner self by posing questions and then listening attentively to the answers.  Anik likens this exercise to having the opportunity to engage in a deep authentic dialogue with the wisest person in the world (without the interference of your own ego).  Try this with a difficult question or two that you are facing now. You will be amazed by the results.

For those who are interested we would highly recommend a retreat at the Casa-Betulla, the location is spectacular, the staff highly skilled and compassionate and the prices are reasonable.  The experience at the Betulla is well captured by a guest - “I have taken off my façade and found myself after a long journey.”

For more information please email to info@casa-betulla@ch.com

 

Lane attended a retreat with Learning as Leadership (LaL) held in Sausalito, California in 2001.  Originally founded by Claire Nauer from France, their programs have been running for over 30 years.  Designed to address every participant’s unique situation, the personal mastery program leads you through a process of self-discovery that is attuned to surfacing life-altering professional and personal development needs.  No matter which needs exist, the core of the program brings you face to face with your ego. The program has a strong foundation in experiential processes conducted individually and in groups.  Every retreat participant is assigned a personal coach that begins their work before you arrive and continues long after the retreat itself concludes.  You remain at the retreat 24 hours a day to help prevent the outside world from entering into your space.  You are removed from work and family and also removed from technology as a contractual condition for attending the retreat.  This was imperative for Lane because without this condition constant interruptions would have been a given. The staff filled every waking moment immersed in a progression toward discovering his inner workings.

 

The retreats are held in a beautiful bay or ocean-side setting away from city activity.  Water, nature, your candle lit bedroom, and walks play a crucial role in setting the environment. The seagulls become your non-judgmental friends.  The sail boats become soft reminders to continue to go forward with the hard personal work. The coaches show intensity, compassion, and respect in bringing the truth of you to you.  And they show adeptness at helping you chart and then act on a path forward.

 

As the retreat opened, Lane immediately began intellectualizing the roughly two weeks to unfold.  To his dismay, the staff refused to lay out a concise process, supported by the requisite volume of tools that would achieve the conclusion of personal mastery expected.  Lane’s spouse and also his CEO had suggested that he take this retreat to find out why he had been “playing it safe”.  What a confusing piece of feedback for Lane, especially given all the hard-fought, stressed-filled success achieved to that point.  The struggle to intellectualize the retreat continued for a couple of days.  The exercise that turned off the intellectual processing for Lane was constructed to bring him all the way back to early childhood. They used this exercise to begin the construction of Lane’s “egosystem”.  Coming to grips with three life events were heart wrenching and deep drivers of behaviors in Lane’s adult life: an alcoholic and violent father, an idolized big brother drafted to fight in the Vietnam War, and the death of a parent at age 10. There was no safety at home, no big brother to protect Lane, and then he became the “man of the house” at age 10 to protect his younger brother and mother.  Lane had no need for email or a phone of any kind by day three of the retreat!

 

Several exercises and coaching sessions that followed the realization of what had been driving Lane to “playing it safe” led him to also identify the shadow side of the “aloof” defense mechanisms that had been created along the way. The staff’s carefully customized experiences along with journaling revealed how his early childhood patterns and subsequent life events had developed ineffective survival techniques, unconscious beliefs, and behaviors.  It truly revealed a humbling and astounding picture of Lane’s ego!

 

For those interested in the highly valued Learning as Leadership personal mastery retreat held in the North San Francisco Bay Area in the USA, you can find more information at http://www.learnaslead.com. One attendee of the Learning as Leadership retreat summed up the value of this experience: “I went to Learning as Leadership for better self-understanding and now I am continually challenging myself. I have to ask ‘am I doing this to satisfy my personal ego, or to support my team and my company?’.”

We recently concluded our first Online Unity Quest Conference in partnership with the Global Dialogue Center (www.globaldialoguecenter.com). 

We utilized GDC’s state of the art virtual technology including video and interactive tools to bring participants from Palo Alto, Mendocino and Mount Shasta together in a conversation about their own Unity Quest. 

We were deeply impressed by the authenticity and the quality of this group’s conversation and wanted to share some of the insights we gained from these sessions:
• The group provided a strong validation for the need and relevance of the Unity Quest topic in today’s busy world.
• The two part modules of 90 minutes each coupled with the GDC’s state of the art interactive virtual technology was optimal for both content delivery as well as in-depth dialogues.
• We discovered that online conference is vehicle that appears to be ideally suited for our UQ conversation. Participants felt comfortable in sharing deeply personal experiences with each other within the context of the pseudo anonymity offered by the online environment. 
• Unlike face to face group sessions, the online environment also fostered a level of refreshing honesty in the interactions - Group posturing did not even make a single appearance!
• We found that the value of the online session to each participant is directly correlated to the amount of interactive discussion and engagement.  With this lesson in mind to we need to limit the number of participants for each session to a maximum of six people to ensure the quality of these conversations.
• The participants found the visual content and the audio dialogue valuable and also requested the development of a third module – perhaps a face to face session.  We are investigating this jointly with the participants of this group.  More on this later as it evolves.

Needless to say, the group’s feedback was very helpful in adding to and re-arranging the content of our material for future sessions.  Jason, Octavio and Jeffrey thanks for participating in and continuing to shape our UQ journey.

FACING YOUR EGO

“Ego intervention” will become a common phrase in our western society, we predict.  Since we began addressing what the ego is and how to identify it, the inevitable has happened with our readers: each person, like us, has had the arduous experience of facing our ego-monsters.

A newly appointed President of a start-up company transformed from a selfless servant to the company vision into a self-serving, above-it-all, defensive personality.  This happened almost overnight and shocked the other co-founders of the company (which included one of the authors).  In the confrontation that ensued, there was an outpouring of compassion to help this man face his ego.  The intervention lasted two solid days. We saw a normally mild-mannered man transform to an angry, aggressive, defensive, and then withdrawn personality.  At no time in the first day was his true self anywhere to be found.  It was confusing to see blindness where there had been sharp clarity.  It was agonizing to see how lost, removed and distraught he was as no one was willing to let him continue in ego, it would mean the end of the start-up!  At the end of two days, he left the company, frantically searching for the reasons why he was so misunderstood and hurt.  He was removed as President and is going to a retreat to seek his answers.

A conversation struck up with a high tech company CEO on a long flight turned into an authentic sharing of the common experiences of fighting each other’s personal ego monsters.  The discussion turned even deeper as the content of our online Unity Quest dialogues was shared with this individual.  Soon, he shared how distraught he was over situations brewing in his own life.  This executive had one of those “ah-ha” moments, realizing that engaging his executives in a UQ dialogue could be immensely helpful to them, as it had been for him on this long flight.   A workshop is being scheduled as a part of the executive team’s leadership development to aid them in their own Unity Quest.

Our true, higher self is very creative at taking advantage of our awakening to ego.  Dreams deliver unconscious messages, symbols and stories meant to illuminate where we need to look for the ego.  Life events that seem “synchronistic” bring us face to face with our ego often mirrored in others.  In facing our egos, we had to discover the truth: “as within, so without” (spoken by Hermes Trismegistus over 3,000 years ago). Every person who we react strongly to is a teacher who mirrors an aspect of our ego that is up for review.  The more painful the event or situation, the more powerful the potential lesson about our ego.  Dreams and life events are the warnings, the teaching, to be understood… or you will keep experiencing the same pain over and over.

• Can you think of a time when your dreams symbolically identified aspects of your ego?
• Can you remember a pattern of recurring events that helped you become more aware of your ego?

Like the executives who are either checking into a retreat or pulling themselves and their team out of the day to day grind, facing your ego requires immersion that can only happen out of your normal environment.  There are too many defenses, negative reinforcements and ego-supporting cues in your everyday world to honestly face your ego. You see, your ego eclipses your true self. It guards and obscures your reality. Your ego defends its existence with every tool at its disposal.  Going past this formidable ego requires compassionate, frank, truthful reflection facilitated by others who have no agenda other than to support conscious awakening.

Your ego is a monster.  Don’t make the mistake of thinking any less.  Surrendering your ego allows your true self to begin manifesting itself in this world.  It is a constant cycle of learning.  We have continually found that progress leads to tests of our ability to sustain awareness of our egos.  Even today, Anik and Lane help each other spot where our ego diverts, distracts or deters progress.  We remind each other to spend time in self-reflection.  Our path is to transcend ego is leading to our deeper purpose: to fully manifest our true higher self in this world.  We’ll talk more about that in a future article.

Be brave!  Invite a trusted friend or ego-challenger into your life.  Facing your ego is one of the most intense, difficult and consuming experiences of life but it is also the most rewarding first step that ultimately leads to a more balanced life, peace and happiness.

Identifying Your Ego

There is one thing all egos have in common: they don’t want you to get too close to them.  Our egos are masters of illusion.  We have been asked numerous questions on how to identify when your ego is in control.  You have to be able to identify your ego before you can dislodge it from it’s central place in your life.

In psychoanalysis, Ego is described as the division of the psyche that is conscious, most immediately controls thought and behavior, and is most in touch with external reality.  Indications of a “big Ego” are an exaggerated sense of self-importance; conceit and pride in oneself; unwarranted self-esteem.   While a generic definition of the Ego is helpful, it tends to take different shapes and forms in each individual. 

The first step on the path to evolving your state of consciousness is to recognize the form your own ego takes.   Without this recognition, no progress is possible - as the maxim goes before you can solve a problem you need to recognize the problem.  Identifying the form of your Ego requires you to look inwards not outwards, a capability we have to consciously cultivate.  Remember, the only way out is in! 

There are various approaches to identifying the form of your own ego ranging from self-reflection to guided psychotherapy sessions to retreats.  We discuss a few simple approaches below that can help you get started with the process.

1. Personality traits when taken to extremes often become the formative elements of your ego.   Strong will and intelligence can easily lead to the shadow side of control, manipulation and judgment.  The ability to emotionally detach from situations can guide you to the shadow side of inability to trust others.  The incapacity to give and receive love can escort you to the shadow side of hate, anger and self loathing.  The tendency to hold fast to static positions, whether the purpose be to safeguard possessions in the world, to defend a system of thought or to cling to fixed values is another strong indication of being motivated by fear/loss and resistance to change.  Take a piece of paper and articulate your personality traits and then objectively ask yourself which traits have become the formative elements of your own ego. 

2. Another simple way to identify the specific form your ego takes is to contemplate your identification with external things.  The ego wants you to believe that you are only something based on a value put on the external.  Your possessions, job, social status and family role are some key dimensions of the external.  Your Ego wants you to identify yourself with these things in order to feel whole.  If you tend to describe yourself as an executive, a doctor, an engineer, a nurse, a policeman, an environmentalist etc then your ego is strongly associated with your profession.  You may tend to describe yourself as a father or mother, a Christian, Buddhist or Muslim, etc., perhaps indicating that your ego is strongly associated with your family role or social status respectively. Pay attention to how you describe yourself when you introduce yourself to new acquaintances.  Have a close friend tell you how you introduce or portray yourself to others in different situations.  You might be very surprised to hear yourself.

3. Your physical posture and style of breathing also provides important clues to the form of your ego.  According to Karlfried Graf Durckheim “Rigidity in our posture is an indication of excessive self will and persistent self control.  The ingrained bad posture of many people is caused by shifting the center of gravity too far upwards.  This can be seen in those who are dominated by the habit – chest out, belly in, where the drawing up of shoulders is a sign of tension.  This often is a sign of arrogance and overemphasis of one’s own person.  Such a posture is the defensive and protective mechanism of the person who seeks above all to safeguard the ego and to hold secure its position in the world.  Shallow exhalation in breathing is often a mistrust of both life and yourself.”  Look in the mirror at your own posture, how do you stand, how do you sit?  Pay attention to your breath, count the inhalations and exhalations, is it deep and regular or is it shallow?

Put it all together on a single piece of paper, what do you see?  It is often easier for others to identify the form of your ego than for you to do so. Share what you see as your ego with those close to you.  Compare and contrast their description with your own assessment.  The picture of your ego now begins to appear…

What really is your ego? 

We held events in the San Francisco Bay Area a week ago and a common point of discussion turned out to be confusion over the definition of ego.  No surprise to us, as Unity Quest is focused on two men who have to face their ego in very different times.  What was a surprise is how many people were thinking egotistical behavior was the only way to identify the ego.  If it were only that easy!

The ego evolved out of the evolutionary process that formed modern day humans.  The ego is a fantastic survival mechanism.  It operates out of experience and causes lightening fast reactions.  The ego is so fast that the developed mind hasn’t got a chance most of the time to stop the reactions.  When we needed security and safety, food and water, warmth and health, the ego served to store the experiences that helped us conquer, live longer and thrive. The main function of the ego is to protect to survive another day.

Now we come to modern day western civilization -- meaning any time after 1000AD let’s say and certainly in the developed world.  Much of the population is not hunting, farming or finding itself in day-to-day survival mode. Even with the economy struggling to sustain a recovery without government life support, humans are not in a life or death survival situation.  But, the ego still operates as if it is. 

The ego has become a mental image of who we are as individuals, an image we will go to any lengths to protect.  This function of protector of our “self image” cuts us off from others.  This ego, being mind-made, is extremely efficient at filtering out thoughts, words and actions that challenges our sense of self while reinforcing the experiences that validate our self image.  The ego is the chatter in your mind that keeps feeding you messages that cut you off from others.  The ego, being a creation of the mind, is not in touch with your heart.  Love is not the home of the ego.

To quote Eckhart Tolle - Albert Einstein, who was admired as almost superhuman and whose fate it was to become one of the most famous people on the planet, never identified with the image the collective mind had created of him. He remained humble, egoless. In fact, he spoke of "a grotesque contradiction between what people consider to be my achievements and abilities and the reality of who I am and what I am capable of." 

The ego is an illusion.

As a construct of the mind, it can still serve us to filter out real dangers and behaviors that are not ones we choose to experience. But, for nearly every soul walking this planet, making the ego the central part of ourselves is a grave error.  We need the discipline to identify how our ego was formed, own its effect on our daily lives, and then learn how to dislodge it from it’s central place in our lives. In Unity Quest, we write about waking up to the enormity of how the ego is unconsciously controlling our lives. 

Our message is simple: as long as the ego is in charge, you will continue to believe that you are an individual cut off from the truth of just how connected – and interconnected – you are with every living thing.

Mid-Life Crisis – Friend or Foe?

 

If you missed your mid-life crisis, don’t worry.  Your ego will soon be big enough to cause it!  Life changes are meant to serve as catalysts for transforming our current state of consciousness but they are rarely viewed as such. The first phase of profound life changes tend to occur between the ages of 35 and 42.  This is especially true for individuals who have primarily defined themselves through their professions till that age.  Another wave of mid-life change occurs between the ages of 42 and 56.  This is especially relevant for parents who have predominantly defined their lives and relationships in terms of raising their children.  As the children leave home, these parents can experience feelings of abandonment, lack of purpose or even find there is little in common without the children in the mix.

Until we reach these stages we predominantly tend to seek fulfillment by defining ourselves externally – be it through our relationships, our professions or our children.  As we enter our mid to late thirties and forties and the specter of our own mortality begins to emerge through the passing away of parents or other loved ones we find ourselves deeply unsatisfied with the status quo.  This uneasiness often prompts existential questioning of one’s careers, relationships, purpose in life and brings us to a fork in the road. 

This fork leads to two paths.  One path leads to a “train wreck” – broken marriages, embarking on serial changes of all consuming jobs, a relentless pursuit of material acquisitions and expensive toys.  The one common theme on this path is the continued seeking of the self in the external world. 

Another path leads to an inner introspective journey, striving to reach balance and inner peace.  If this inner journey is undertaken seriously and with discipline then it manifests itself in the external world as rewarding and revitalized relationships and also as fulfilling professional career choices. 

If we are open to learn from these gut wrenching moments of our mid life crises we begin to experience realizations best described by Vitvan the Gnostic teacher “that by putting our trust in impermanent external objects our reward is without exception disappointment, disillusionment and ultimately loss”.  Through these realizations and experiences we gradually begin to experience higher states of consciousness. At these moments in time, we begin to increasingly treat objective events as ephemeral and transitory.  For the few whose world view begins to transform, they begin to trust something much more enduring. Their own Unity Quest has begun.

In Unity Quest, we see that learning only comes through experiences, as that is what gets imprinted in our consciousness.  Conceptualizing and thinking driven by our mind-made ego cannot alter our current state of consciousness. This approach only serves to continue the meaningless search for seeking the self externally (in this case through external knowledge) and leads to knowing more about subjects (religion, spirituality etc) rather than knowing the subject itself!

Mid-life crises are the first experiential steps to bring you closer to knowing your true self.  But we often find ourselves lacking the discernment to choose the path to awareness (having spent the bulk of our adult lives worshipping at the altar of our mind-made ego)!  Unity Quest book discusses the life change processes in a compelling story format and provides practical messages that are helpful for both men and women in today’s world to begin the journey of transcending their mind-made ego.

Dear Quester's

We would love to hear about your impressions and reactions to our book.   Please also feel free to share any personal experiences that you feel would be relevant for other readers.  

The purpose of our blog site is to create an ongoing dialogue with a community of like minded individuals.