Want Help Letting Go of Egoic Behaviors? Treat Them Like Cold Symptoms
You have to try this.
My favorite quote from Eckhart Tolle is:
“Awareness is the greatest agent for change.”
And that is what this piece is about. The indispensability of awareness for spiritual growth.
Awareness of what? Our unconscious behaviors and reactions.
I came up with an analogy a while back that helps a ton on this. It’s about the common cold.
When we get a tickly throat, runny nose or a cough, we assume we have a cold coming on. So what do we do?
Like treating a cold
In order to treat the underlying problem, the cold, we drink fluids, down some Nyquil and take it easy. And instead of that five-mile run in thirty degree weather we’d planned on, we take a hot, steamy shower.
Most people get this right when dealing with the cold virus.
Not so with our “psychic viruses.” What are those?
Behaviors like:
- Screaming obscenities at old people driving too slowly.
- Becoming completely unglued, to the point of physically trembling, when someone disagrees with our political opinion.
- Shutting down for an entire evening when our partner says something that pushes an emotional button.
- Rambling on incessantly to our spouse or close friend about our frustrations at the office; the same frustrations we rambled on and on about the day before. And the day before that…Do you know people who do that? I sure do.
All of these are examples where the response is way out of proportion to the incident. Somebody cuts into your lane, causing you the grievous injury of having to lightly tap your brakes, and you scream at them? And they can’t even hear you?
Trust me, I should know. Been there. Done that. Though not nearly as much since I began practicing all this spiritual stuff.
Don’t beat yourself up
Fine, so we blow up at other drivers, and have all kinds of reactions we know aren’t quite right. Is my point to make us all feel badly about this?
No. The point of this piece is to demonstrate that we can use this to grow, in the most important way possible. We can use these incidents to actually work on ourselves at the deepest level.
How? What is the psychic equivalent of fluids, Nyquil and resting?
Let’s start with the biggest problem we face in dealing with this: We don’t see these behaviors or reactions as problematic. We may not like that we blow up at a driver or yammer on and on about the same things ad finitum, but we look at them and think,
“Hey, that’s part of being human. Life is hard. And sometimes we don’t act the way we’d like.”
The main point of this piece is to wake you up to the fact that these behaviors are not just part of life. The things that happen to us are. Like people cutting us off, dealing with difficult people at work, boyfriends saying things that press your buttons. That’s life.
But flying off the handle at bad drivers or yammering on day after day about the same set of “problems” are symptoms, just like coughing and a tickly throat, of an underlying condition.
So the first step is simply noticing when we do this. We want a bell to go off inside us and then say to ourselves,
“Okay, I just completely lost my shit on an old woman who’s driving fifteen MPH below the speed limit. What’s up with that?”
We don’t judge it. We just notice it.
And we certainly don’t feel badly about it. Beating ourselves up over this, or anything, is not productive.
So now that we’ve noticed ourselves exhibiting one of these unconscious behaviors, what’s next? What is the equivalent of resting, drinking lots of fluids and taking a steamy shower?
The underlying problem: our egoic baggage
First, we need to clarify what the underlying problem is; i.e., what is the cold-equivalent?
The answer is simple: It’s all of the egoic, emotional baggage we’ve collected over our lives. Unfortunately for us, cold viruses come and go, but that baggage doesn’t…
Unless we let it go.
Letting go is where it’s at
And why would we let something go if we think it’s just a normal part of life and something we don’t need to deal with? We wouldn’t.
Which, and pardon my lack of humility, is why this article is so damn important! Because letting go of your egoic guck is the central work of spirituality.
We can meditate for ten hours a day and read every Eckhart Tolle and Michael Singer book, but if we don’t let that stuff go, the cauldron of problems swirling around in our lower selves will continue to plague us until our last breath.
See this as a huge opportunity!
Bottom line: We need to look at our stuff coming up/being poked as an opportunity. An opportunity to rid ourselves of the baggage that holds us back in every area of our lives.
But we have to be aware of it as it’s happening or the opportunity passes. And that won’t be easy at first. Why? Because all our lives we’ve reacted as if these behaviors are “normal.”
That’s where this cold analogy technique can be a big help. Just train yourself to notice when one of these unconscious behaviors rears up and then say,
“Okay, I completely lost my head over something ridiculously trivial. It’s no different than coughing and sneezing. Instead of drinking fluids and resting, I need to let this go.”
And keep doing that! Every day. For as long as it takes to empty yourself of…your egoic self.
That final step of letting go, the equivalent of resting and drinking fluids, is something I’ve related numerous times.
We simply relax with the feeling that has arisen. Relax all around it. We don’t try to overpower, engage with, or push away the feeling. We relax all around it…
And let it go.
Meditation as facilitator
For the umpteenth time, I’ve found that the single best way to facilitate the ability to step back and observe our behaviors as symptoms and then to let them go is to develop a meditation practice.
All meditation is is practicing observing, without judgment, what’s happening in the present moment. Getting better at that will make you better at observing yourself in your daily life.
The recap
So here again are the three steps:
1. Drill into your head that reactions like honking and screaming at bad drivers are not okay with you.
2. When you have those kinds of reactions, look at them as symptoms of an underlying condition, no different than coughing or sneezing indicate that you have a cold.
3. Then relax and let go.
Doing this will lighten your psychic load and and get you closer to liberating yourself from yourself.
This is mindful self-compassion in a nutshell. As a survivor of childhood trauma I’ve had difficulty with traditional meditation. However I’ve found ways to practice mindfulness that are healing and that have helped significantly with letting go of egoic baggage and trauma baggage. One of the most helpful has been the practice of mindful self-compassion a la Neff and Germer’s work—teachings, meditations, workshops, meetings, etc. (centerformsc.org).
I share this because I have also benefitted greatly from your teachings and your sharing of wisdom from so many sources of wisdom. And I especially love how you make practices simple and relatable by using examples and sharing your own struggles and successes with honesty and humility.
RQ