Permanent Zen Blog: How to Balance the Ego with the Heart
In a world full of giant egos wanting more more more, it is refreshing to find people with balanced egos who want more powerful experiences and less stuff. This article will go into six powerful strategies that have the potential to turn the tables on our overreaching egos while also contracting our souls into the here and now.
1.) Cultivate an ego interdependent enough to enjoy the journey:
“The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.” –Friedrich Nietzsche
Life is a journey, and the best way to enjoy that journey is to become someone who can immerse themselves in the experience in an interdependent way. An ego dependent (or codependent) upon things going a certain way in order to enjoy the journey, will rarely ever find joy. Similarly, an ego overly independent and focused upon itself being perfect or the center of attention, will rarely find joy. But an ego with the capacity to understand that it is merely one ego in a vast sea of egos, one self in an infinite cosmos of interconnected selves, and one dewdrop on Indra’s Net, will have the capacity to discover immense joy on the journey. This is because the ego, the self, becomes balanced with Soul and the truth of nature and the cosmos (interdependence) becomes manifest.
2.) Cultivate a soul powerful enough to empower the ego:
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what this world needs are people who have come alive.” –Howard Thurman
We live in a culture of victimization. As such, we live in a culture filled with victims. Most of these victims are unaware of their victimization. Like Noam Chomsky said, “The general population doesn’t even know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.” Indeed, they are so dumbed down by political propaganda and anesthetized by advertisements spewed out by a product-first person-second consumerist machine that they can’t even think straight, let alone live healthy lifestyles. Worst of all, they don’t realize that only they have the power to transform themselves into heroes. One way of transforming ourselves from victims into heroes is to cultivate a soul powerful enough to empower the ego. This is a top-down approach to empowerment. It requires daily practice, consummate discipline, self-affirmations, and a fake-it-until-you-make-it attitude, but it is possible. And in a culture of victims, we need more heroes, even if they are faking it. Better a victim faking heroism, than a potential hero remaining a victim. And besides, there’s always the chance one could accidently become a full-blown hero. Like Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
3.) Cultivate an ego robust enough to serve others:
“Just as one candle lights another and can light thousands of other candles, so one heart illuminates another and can illuminate thousands of other hearts.” –Leo Tolstoy
Service to others is the height of being a compassionate human being. Ego tends to serve itself, but we can flip the tables on this propensity and use the ego as a tool to serve others instead. It is both very easy and very difficult. The sycophants living unsustainable fear-based lifestyles are our greatest obstacle. But we cannot allow their unreasonable disregard to dissuade our reasonable courage. Stay strong. Keep the oxygen mask on yourself. Help others secure their own oxygen mask and then teach them how to keep it on. And maybe, just maybe, there will be a future for us all. Like Marianne Williamson said, “As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people the right to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” When we want others to become more conscious of their lives, it is both in order not to become tyrants ourselves, and in order that new possibilities might be opened to the liberated conscious of others and through them to all humankind. Like Mary Oliver said, “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell others.”
5.) Cultivate a soul playful enough to enlighten the ego:
“In all chaos, there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order” – Carl Jung
Playfulness is highly underrated in our culture. Work is ridiculously overrated in our culture. As such, we are surrounded by overworked and depressed people. Work hard, play harder is one way to remedy the situation. But that only works if the work we’re doing is soul-work. Soul-work is difficult to come by in a world built upon work that ensnares the ego into thinking it wants things that it doesn’t actually need. The entire infrastructure of our materialistic, dog-eat-dog, corporate man-machine is built upon the idea that competition trumps cooperation. This is a glaringly dangerous cultural myth that must be transcended if we are to survive as a species on this planet. By cultivating a playful soul we are more likely to fall into work that nourishes our souls. This is because playfulness opens us up to our own unique creativity and capacity for personal fulfillment. One of the keys to happiness is keeping the passion, love, and joyful exuberance of life in the moment: carpe punctum (seize the moment) leads to carpe diem (seize the day) leads to carpe vita (seize the life).
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To overcome the root cause of depression or anxiety, Reiki in New York, as well as Spiritual Counseling can prove to be powerful solutions.
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Namaste!