The Seasons Of Ego
Just as winter foreshadows the arrival of spring, it is common to oscillate between various states of unconsciousness when asleep in ego. It’s as if the journey of ego is to flip-flop between opinions, viewpoints, judgments, and emotional states, until enough momentum has built up to allow your awareness to even out in the middle and return to the emptiness of zero point.
For those unaware of the patterns running them from within a personal or spiritual bubble of perception, there can be a constant sense of momentary breakthroughs followed by endless disappointments and breakdowns. These highs and lows act as waves bouncing you back and forth from one side of polarity to the next – until a middle ground of eternal openness has been found.
In attempt to help you wake up from this often maddening stage of evolution, I offer you this exploration into the ever-changing seasons of ego. May it be used to help you shine a light of heart-centered awareness to remind you how much more love you deserve to receive.
Like the seasons in nature, there are a variety of tendencies in ego that arise in experience. The strategy isn’t attempting to avoid these patterns, but allowing each one to be recognized as equally deserving of a depth of love that only you can provide yourself.
The two basic seasons in ego are mania and depression. In mania, the energy of ego is reaching outward toward the people, places, and things it believes will inflate, maintain, or reinvent its false sense of security. Whether pursuing new romantic interests, seeking a change in lifestyle, or a move to a new country, it is common for ego to look for fresh forms of newness to pump more life into an already unraveling structure of conditioning. This doesn’t mean anyone seeking romance, life changes, or moving to a new location is in ego. It is more so taking a look at the motivations behind the reoccurring patterns at hand.
Do you believe a new relationship will satisfy you? Are you putting your hope on a future-pending event? Are you confusing being present or liberated existence with predictable compulsive behavior? Are you truly following your bliss or looking for something else to anticipate and chase in a long line of repetition, exhaustion, and disappointment?
If so, these are more so patterns of ego versus deep-rooted intuitions to follow. Intuition tends to be more of a silent form of inspired guidance, whereas as egoic patterns have a “race against time” or “against all odds” type of energy behind each pattern. Intuition says, “Here is what I’m inspired to choose”. Conversely, ego says, “Here is the next thing I’ve convinced myself I cannot live without”.
If you happen to notice yourself in a constant state of grabbing, merely exchanging one type of obsession for another, it is essential to establish a consistent routine in your life that no amount of desires, cravings, or pleas can interrupt. For a manic insatiable ego, the consistency of a daily routine unravels such tendencies. During this season of ego, manic states often inspire compulsive activities of overconsumption. Whether in the form of frivolous spending, binging, regular alcohol consumption, or drug abuse, including habitual rounds of plant medicine, it is common for ego to reach for self-defeating patterns as a way of attempting to cure its hunger for more.
Even when a manic state leads you to believe how becoming someone else, doing something else, or going somewhere else is the answer to your prayers, it is far more insightful to love your own heart and stay true to the consistency of a daily routine.
Even when a manic state leads you to believe how becoming someone else, doing something else, or going somewhere else is the answer to your prayers, it is far more insightful to love your own heart and stay true to the consistency of a daily routine. It may feel as if the fate of your highest destiny is passing you by, when, in fact, it is the unhooking from manic states that resolves a need to reach out and grab for the things that only create greater loneliness, dissatisfaction, and existential hunger.
When not in manic states of desperate grabbing, obsession, or over-consumption, the ego enters the opposite season of depression. Instead of reaching out only to discover more hunger along the way, the ego empties out by pushing away the things it once reached out towards. During this season, the tendency is to withdraw, isolate, lash out, and shut down. No matter how often or consistently ego goes back and forth between manic grabbing and depressed withdrawal, it often doesn’t see the connection between these two seasons.
When seen through the eyes of consciousness, it is attempting to satisfy the ravenous hunger of ego that creates the momentum of depression that soon follows. If willing to love the one who craves, instead of indulging every whim, the two seasons of ego are able to mutually dissolve, so you can make peace with the emptiness of being that is neither a high of any kind or any low point in experience. In emptiness, nothing is gained or lost. It is a space of eternal resolve, while acting as an environment of sweet defeat for an ego that returns home as it is integrated.
There can also be hybrid seasons of ego where the pattern is to lash out at those who don’t offer you enough attention to satisfy such an insatiable hunger, hoping to manipulate others into acting as rescuers, so there are more things to be fed by. No matter the variation of pattern at play, if an ego likes you, it will inevitably dislike you, whenever not getting enough to end its hunger or cure its loneliness. Equally so, if an ego can push you away, there will soon come a time when, for whatever reason, it will reach out once again, whenever the pattern of hunger arises.
As inherently heart-centered beings, it can be confusing when we typically want the best for everyone and do not wish to contribute to anyone’s pain or suffering. It can be difficult to say no to an ego when you believe you are the cause of their pain. When in ego, you tend to be as easily manipulated by other people’s patterns as you are run around by your own. No matter how desperate of a plea or threat is being made, often times, the best way to support the unraveling of ego is by giving space when anyone is inflamed or desperate. As we offer space by embracing our own hearts in response to any egoic behavior, the love sent to your heart equally fills every being in existence. This means you cannot actually hurt someone by giving them space, since you are capable of accelerating their healing journey by loving yourself more often.
As self-love becomes a well-established practice throughout your life, you are able to find the strength, courage, and conviction to say no to your ego as well as the egos of others in the most open, honest, and heart-centered way. If this leads to disappointment, it is life’s way of helping to give someone back their power by escorting them into a stage of depression only caused by how desperately they reach out to grab, take, manipulate and objectify.
No matter the areas of life where the push-pull mechanism of ego plays out, the only remedy is the practice of self-love. By taking the time to love the one who wants, while embracing the one who pushes it all away, your consciousness wakes up from this exhausting dynamic of polarity to find true peace and resolve, whether personal gains or losses emerge.
One “I love you” at a time, your consciousness remembers it has the right to desire anything in existence, even though nothing you attract will ever satisfy the hunger within you. The more you nurture the aspects of self that seem to go off the rails, without indulging each desire, the less time is spent repenting such patterns by isolating, lashing out, withdrawing, or shutting down.
This is why the practice of self-love is the central theme in the new spiritual paradigm. You can put yourself under a microscope and become aware of many patterns, but you cannot resolve the oscillating seasons of ego until each pattern is wholeheartedly embraced, honored, and nurtured as never before. Just as many people amp out on caffeine only to later sedate their high with alcohol, or remedy a hangover with another caffeinated buzz, human beings bounce back and forth between mania and depression, until a deeper spiritual impulse arises. As it occurs, a timeless depth of harmony rescues you from the pitfalls of ego by inviting you to hand over every alluring option, until there is no other choice, but to love yourself in response to life.
In surrendering to the power of your highest divine authority, you come to acknowledge the reality of love as the only answer in existence. No matter the question, craving or concern at hand, there is no other reason why anything arises, other than to invite you to embrace the one who uses questions, cravings, and concerns as ways of requesting your loving attention. By loving whatever arises, you bring each exhausting season of ego to an end by reminding you how brightly you’ve always been meant to shine.
