Recording: How to Handle the Pain of Ego Death

For my last talk of 2017, I felt like talking about the pain of ego death.

Dissolving the unconscious ego can be surprisingly painful. It’s particularly painful if a person doesn’t know that that is what is happening, and they are usually doing a lot of intentional resisting. Even when someone does know they’re releasing their ego, a lot of unconscious resistance goes on. That, by itself, can be quite intense. For some people–particularly those with trauma in their background–this pain can be almost crippling.

However, this pain–despite its intensity–is not a bad thing. It part of the purging and purifying process, and a lot of the intensity has to do with our attachments–how much we hold on to the false sense of self we’ve had our whole lives. The pain tends to lessen when we surrender to the change, but lessening doesn’t mean that it is not still powerful and difficult to experience. Most people have a low threshold to emotional or psychological pain. The physical and energetic sensations can be startling too, particularly when there is nothing physically wrong with the body.

Because having lots of mysterious pain can be startling, I wanted to talk about how to handle these pains and why losing the ego is, after all, a good thing.