0:00:06.9 Juan Alvarez: Would you like to be a better parent or a partner? Are you ready to break free from unwanted habits and get over the burden of the past? Maybe you would like to develop a healthier relationship with money or with food, or be able to lead with compassion. In all those matters, mindfulness can be a catalyst of change, and the resource that you can always tap into. My name is Juan Alvarez, and I’m an Executive Coach, and the mindfulness teacher. A teacher and a guide or a companion for people looking for attainable ways of being more present, peaceful and conscious in their lives. I have dedicated my life to exploring how mindfulness and meditation improve our relationship with the world and with the people around us. So tune in, if you want to build a solid meditation routine and learn different techniques that will also enhance the only practice that truly matters, when it comes to being purposeful, life itself.
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0:01:13.5 JA: Welcome to Life Is The Practice, friends. Today we will touch on an essential topic for understanding the practice of mindfulness. Understanding what the ego is and how living in the egoic state fills our experience with this content. It’s the cost of most of the problems we see in the world. We will also explore meditations and practices that helps us dissolve this very harmful state. So let’s go. When we talk colloquially about the ego, we refer to selfish or egocentric behaviors. But in the environment of mindfulness, ego means something different. The French philosopher, René Descartes, answer the question of human existence with the observation, “I think, therefore I am.” Well, this way of thinking is in fact at the core of our human dilemma. We are poorly served when we equate thinking with being, believing we are, because we think. What Descartes found is not what explains our existence, but what prevents us from realizing it. He defined the ego. “The ego is the identity that we develop when we believe that we are our thoughts. That is a sense of being derived from mental activity and content, “A mind made me.” We are immersed in a serious existential confusion, equating thinking with being.
0:02:29.7 JA: You know that inner voice that is constantly speaking, that permanent inner dialogue. Well, that’s ego. I can hear you thinking now, “But well, but that voice is me. What is this guy talking about?” If you pay attention to that voice, you will realize that it’s constantly explaining who you are, explaining how life is, judging, comparing, labeling yourself and others. It is a voice that tends to be dissatisfied and obsessed with the future. It might sound a bit like this, “I’m so clumsy. I should have done things differently. I haven’t done enough. I’m not good enough. What if I fail? What do I have to do tomorrow? This is taking too long. That person is wonderful. I’m so bad at this.” Sometimes, the voice tells us a story about who we are, based on something that happened in the past. My client, Yohannan Terrell, recently observed.
0:03:29.4 Yohannan Terrell: When I was a kid, I used to tell people I had a bad luck, because I had saw all of the negative things happened to my life. And I was owning that. And that was how I was living. As I’m doing the word now, I realized that that was a part of a pattern that’s been in my life for years.
0:03:48.3 JA: The problem comes from not having control over our attention. The mind absorbs it and develops an eye through thought. This is the psychological eye or ego. The ego is only one aspect of our experience and not the whole of who we are. The human experience is not limited to the mental process. The mind happens in the human experience, just like the emotions in the body. The totality of what we are has more to do with the vital energy that activates the human experience and that we share with all other forms of life. As the mind lives in time, the past and the future, the mental concept of “I” also lives in time. So “I” contains a group of thoughts about my life experience and memories about the past, and mental projections towards the future. The story of this mind and this body. The mind has taken control of our experience and has developed a sense of being in itself. This is like a disease, but we have accepted it as something natural because we are so immersed in it, that we do not realize we are sick. A science has proven, “Life is a single experience, an integrated field of consciousness in which form and thought happen.” But few people perceive this consciously, and that’s what we’re changing with the practice.
0:05:05.9 JA: Let’s talk now about the main problems that the ego brings to our lives and why it is so important to learn to dissolve this state with the practice. When we relate to the world through the ego, we say that we are in the egoic state. All the difficulties that arise from living in the egoic state trace back to one fundamental problem. The egoic state is a state of separation from the whole. Through identification with the mind, I believe that I am an independent life form and that I am separate from the whole. When I’m in the egoic state, I am unable to recognize myself as one with life. And I have a direct experience of what science has concluded, that nothing exists in isolation from anything else. In other words, we are all one life. When I’m in an egoic state, all my attention is absorbed in thought. I have no bandwidth left to realize my true nature. The shared vital energy that activates all life forms and can only be discovered by bringing our attention to the present moment, which is where life happens. Instead, we’re most often completely distracted by the reveries of the mind, the past, fantasies, self-talk, the future, etcetera. The noise we call mental chatter, this generates two main effects in my experience. A continuous feeling of inner emptiness, like an existential void. And the permanent feeling of fear and insecurity.
0:06:32.8 JA: Let’s look a little bit more closely at both of these issues. Our inability to recognize totality in ourselves, makes us feel a permanent inner emptiness as if there is something wrong with us, something missing. And this leads us to an experience of permanent scarcity. This is very important for understanding our behavior and what we see in the world every day. This situation shows up in the human psyche as a root narrative. We tell ourselves, “I’m not enough. I’m incomplete. I feel inadequate.” This is the source of our negative self-talk, self-doubt and overall low self-esteem. Depending on the person, this voice can telegraph many kinds of negative messages. “I’m not a good mother. I’m not fast enough. I’m a bad person or I’m not worthy of being loved. Or I’m not a good leader,” etcetera. Sometimes, I ask my clients to write down their egoic patterns in a journal as they uncovered them. This helps them realize what their ego sounds like, which makes it easier for them to recognize it. Sam Malik, a brilliant entrepreneur, and one of my clients, has generously agreed to share with us some of his journal entries.
0:07:46.4 Sam Malik: I’m not good with money or smart at business. I’m just a by-product of privilege, education and a financially well-to-do family, that gave me an unfair advantage. I’m failing because my business isn’t making as much money this year. I shouldn’t keep putting my money in the property. I’m not good at real estate, I just got lucky on one purchase. I shouldn’t get carried away.
0:08:05.7 JA: This main message of, “I’m not good enough,” brings us to a general state of permanent scarcity. A deep feeling that something is always missing, were incomplete, empty, inadequate. And these feelings and this state of mind drives us to seek completion, attempt to feel the existential void and solve this uncomfortable situation. The problem is that we look for that fullness in the wrong places. This happens because of our attention is controlled by the mind, and the mind is focused on the future, and everything that happens outside of us. We try, usually quite unsuccessfully, to explain and complete ourselves through what we do and what we have and in so confusing being with doing and having. We convince ourselves that at some point in the future, this feeling of existential emptiness will disappear and we will then feel satisfied and happy. “When I finish this project. When I have more money. When I get married. When I have children. Or when I lose weight. When I get faster. When I buy that house or when I finally managed to move to another country.” This way of thinking makes our sense of well-being conditional on something happening in the future. A future that never comes. A perpetually moving target.
0:09:26.9 JA: We may also try to explain and complete ourselves by developing an identity through the objects we own, my house, my car, my clothes, my money. But none of it matters. Things will never complete us. Instead, we will remain stuck in a never-ending cycle of a scarcity that pushes us to create more and more and more. Nothing is never enough. It is an endless exhausting loop. This is how an obsession with the future develops and why we get stuck in road productivity, permanent materialism and restless dissatisfaction. I believe this is the origin of the anxiety and depression that many of us experience.
0:10:10.4 SM: I see myself in the mirror and I pass judgment at my body. My ego creates an identity of laziness and lack of discipline, a narrative that my body is falling apart. My ego tells me that I’m unproductive. It feeds on this. It tells me that I don’t have time to work or see friends or meditate until all my to-dos are done, because my productivity is where my value is derived.
0:10:31.2 JA: Are you keeping busy? Good. Here’s just one example of how the ego is completely ingrained in our culture. How we idolize compulsive productivity, which is really nothing more than idolatry of the ego. If you’re not busy, it looks like you’re doing something wrong. You should always be doing more. I remember when I worked in the business world, there was a certain culture of body abuse. Some of my colleagues proudly share how they only had slept three or four hours for days to finish a project, or we drank coffee or took drugs to endure long hours of work. There was even a sort of admiration or glorification of the people who had insane habits. The ones who were always at work first and the last to leave, all in the name of productivity. Although, one might wonder if the busiest of us are necessarily the most productive. Another classic expression of life from the egoic state, is that we’re constantly rejecting the present moment because it doesn’t satisfy our need for completion. There’s always something missing. An example of how these manifests in our common experience is how much we complain about the present moment, which is nothing more than a way of rejecting or creating conflict with it.
0:11:44.9 JA: “It’s too hard. This is taking too long. Yesterday was better. Tomorrow will be better.” In other words, drowning out the possibility of appreciating the life that unobtrusively and silently goes on beneath all that mental noise. The present moment, life becomes a mean to an end, transactional. We get a stuck in the belief that salvation is coming at some moment that is not now. We tell ourselves, in the future, I will have acquired X or done Y, and then I will be finally complete. But that thing we’re looking for, waiting for, hoping for, never happens. There comes a time in life when you have tried enough things and you realize that you’re still just as empty. Nothing seems to fill your inner emptiness. We call this moment, “The mid-life crisis.”
0:12:40.8 JA: Unfortunately, more people never go farther and get lost in more egoic processes of different kinds, running marathons, taking courses to find a life purpose, writing a book, or even developing an identity through a spiritual practice. Anything, but taking that fullness, abundance and prosperity in the only place where it can be found, here and now, in the connection with life itself within us. This seemed abstract to me when I was young. What do you mean when you talk about the truth lies within you? I even got frustrated because it sounded like nonsense to me. Through my course, The Practice, I explained what wise people have been telling us all along in a practical and simple way. It is not as complex as it seems when you learn the method. Very simply, it’s about routine. You can learn more about this in episode one.
0:13:34.8 JA: Another of the main impacts we suffer when we experience life from the egoic state, as I mentioned earlier, is a feeling of permanent fear and insecurity.
0:13:44.5 YT: I didn’t realize how much fear was driving me in a lot of circumstances and how I probably passed up many opportunities because of that fear.
0:13:55.3 JA: Why does this happen to us? By not recognizing ourselves as one with whole life, as a part of the whole. We see ourselves as an independent entity outside of the great system of life. We become separate and defenseless when we are not living life with capital letters, a concept that sustains us and organizes our experience. When we orient ourselves to my life, we are now responsible for caring for, owning, for protecting it. When we enter that egoic state and separate ourselves, we trade trust for fear. This situation of permanent fear, which is a fear of life itself, leads us to try to control life to generate a state of perceived security, and attempt to cope with this feeling of fear.
0:14:43.6 JA: Our attention is focused sometimes obsessively, on the future and on everything that happens outside of us. The result will generate ongoing anxiety and tension in our daily lives. Trying to control how life is going to happen, is as exhausting as it is useless. We try unsuccessfully, to predict where we will be, when, with whom? How many sales are we going to have this year? When will we finish this project or my studies? How much money should I have saved at the end of the year? And if we manage to meet these self-imposed expectations, it is very likely due to an unhealthy amount of a stress and suffering that makes us sick. If we do not meet these self-imposed expectations, we feel like a failure. Like we’re doing something wrong, leaving us once again full of fear.
0:15:33.5 JA: From time to time, life reminds us that we have no control over anything, and we freak out. As Mike Tyson said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” How many of you had a pandemic plan in their calendars for 2020? Of course, I want to point out that we have to think and plan to carry out the practical affairs of life, but we can not do so while knowing that all these mental exercise is nothing more than a mechanism to helps us operate in the world of form. We can choose to reject rigidity, the scarcity. We can decide to remain flexible and dedicate it to life without attachment to imposed plans, and without existential needs. I plan, yes, but life itself gives me trust, not my plans. And when something suddenly changes and things don’t turn out as I expect it, I let myself go and I don’t resist. I don’t generate negativity and suffering. I am at peace with myself and with life. This requires a permanent practice of presence and surrender, of course. And that’s our work. In my coaching sessions with CEOs and leaders, I often point at trees as an example. The trees are not worried, wondering if it will rain enough or if they will be struck by the lightning in the next storm. The tree merely sprout into life each day and entrust themselves to the wisdom of the life that carries them. Trees do not have a mind that complicates their lives.
0:17:05.4 JA: However, it is clear that the recent intelligence that operates through them and the flowers and the squirrels and the rest of life. Why would it be different for us humans? There are parallels with the practice. Every day we awaken, and like the trees, we sprout into life, present and grateful to have the opportunity to participate in the experience of life. We humbly relinquish responsibility for life to life itself, and we recognize that we are one with life, letting go of the identification with the mind and the annoying mental noise of the egoic state. The goal is to feel fully alive and embodied in the here and now. At the beginning of the day, we can decide to trust the intelligence of life itself and give ourselves to it. I personally remind myself that life has no opposite, and that the end of the experience in form is not the end of life, but a transition from one way of our experience in life to a different way of experience in life. Life is eternal. And whatever you look, life goes on. And starting the day by integrating this understanding, frees me from the fear of death. And more importantly, from fear of life. Throughout the day, I try not to lose this state of alignment with life or to return to it as many times as I can, with my continuous practice of presence and surrender.
0:18:34.5 JA: In summary then, living in an egoic state generates feelings of inner emptiness and oppressive insecurity. It triggers a multitude of negative thought patterns that govern our experience and behaviors as human beings. “I’m not good enough.” Scarcity as a default, chronic loneliness, envy and comparison, the obsession with productivity and materialism, projection of the body, innumerable health problems, anxiety, fear, depression. And the mind’s response is predictable, it dictates a need to control life, mires us in permanent complaints and negative self-talk, self-doubt, life dissatisfaction, lack of love for oneself and others. When I resolve the egoic state, I resolve all the effects derived from it, or as they say in the Buddhist tradition, “No self, no problem.”
0:19:27.4 YT: I would just say that you’re used to living life one way, and you’ve probably been trained and cultured and cultivated to live life in a certain way. But there is a different way to live, and there’s a better you beyond the ego and beyond all the chatter and the mental chatter and the negative thoughts. There is the true you, the essence of who you are. And the sooner you’re able to unlock that, the sooner you’re able to enjoy life a little bit more and to have tools. It’s not something that you’re gonna be able to solve permanently, and all of a sudden, you’re gonna live the rest of your life perfect, and everything’s gonna be great. No. But it’s great to have tools that allow you to unlock your true potential and also be able to deal with what life throws at you in a better way, and not just living through your mind and through those thoughts. The ego, it’s so powerful that you need tools to be able to go through life and not let the mind overcome you. And that is the huge benefit of the practice.
0:20:35.5 JA: Okay. So let’s see what tools Yogi is referring to. As we have said, the egoic state is a state of identification with the mind. Our attention is absorbed in the mental process, and the mind creates a separate self from the whole. The first thing we have to do is to learn to break the habit of thinking all the time and bring our attention to the present moment. Developing the skill of presence is essential to get out of the dream of the ego. I recommend you listen to Episode 3, Cultivating Presence, in which I talk in-depth about this topic. Apart from this, to be able to dissociate yourself from the ego, you have to be able to see it. This is the most important thing, to see the ego for what it is instead of being absorbed by it. For this, we work on the development of inner presence, the ability to observe our mental and emotional processes, as well as to make ourselves present in the body. By looking at the mind, we can distance ourselves from mental narratives and see them as ego rather than me. This is fundamental to letting go of the mind and not using the mental content to explain ourselves and secure an identity. Everything exposed to light becomes light itself, said St. Matthew.
0:21:55.0 YT: There’s a huge benefit of recognizing your ego. Just the recognition, the awareness alone, when you’re in a moment, and your ego’s in full control, and you see it spiraling. And it’s… Whether it’s rage or fear or whatever that emotion that is taking over your body, the awareness to be able to stop and say, “Wait, this is just my mind. This is just my mind telling me all these things. It is not reality, because right now and this moment is the only thing that matters. And right now, I’m just sitting here. So let me just start there, and then I’ll deal with what I need to deal with now, instead of being driven by all of the thoughts of the past and the future and letting all of that consume you. That is the biggest unlock. And being able to separate the mind from the ego from yourself is a game changer.
0:22:42.6 JA: How do we develop the ability to see the ego? For this, we practice with the inner presence meditation, which is a technique designed to help us observe our inner experience, sensations, emotions, and thought. I will leave a link with a guided practice in the show notes. And apart from meditating with this technique, we must consciously observe real life, be in the present moment. This is what we call active practice. And of course, the more we are trained, the easier it becomes.
0:23:13.6 SM: I started by stepping away and really doing inner presence meditation and seeing what was disrupting me. It’s almost like there’s a broken record here, and it’s just playing negative thought patterns. And understanding that I wasn’t my thoughts, and that I could actually take a step back and observe them as a third party, and also realize that a number of those thoughts were inherited, conditioned. Realizing that I can be the observer, and I can actually watch those thoughts and not judge myself for those thoughts arising. And just realizing those thoughts are being thrown around into the world all around us.
0:23:50.2 JA: Of course, this is a continuous exercise, and we get better at it with practice. There is no final destination or getting it right, as Sam also reminds us here.
0:24:00.9 SM: I think that it’s easy to relapse into the egoic state. And I also think that that’s something that people need to expect getting into this work, and realize that the practice is a tool to go back to. It’s not like a solve, a practice is a tool for when that inevitably happens. There’s going to come a time where no matter how rooted in this work you are, something probably is going to trigger you and cause you to move from the state of ego.
0:24:26.4 JA: “And beyond the ego, what?” you might ask. Well, actually, the practice is not about eliminating the ego, but about putting it in its rightful place. We’re not looking for any extremes, neither being dissolved in the essence of life and divorced from the form, nor totally lost in the ego and divorced from the essence of life. We’re looking to reconnect with the abundance, peace, trust and unity that is inherent within us. We can recalibrate our consciousness of being and balance our life experience.
0:25:00.3 SM: Mind, body and spirit, or mind, body, soul, mind, body, self. Whatever that sort of capital S is the true essence of us, that thing is perfect as it is. And it is the same in you, in me, in everyone else, and in your cat and in the trees, and in anything that comprises this beautiful, incredible force of life around us.
0:25:22.0 JA: What we seek is to place ourselves in an intermediate point between essence and form, serving as a portal between un-manifested life and manifested life in order to express life’s will. We can be the hands, ears, eyes and mouth of life in the world. We can help the universe to experience form consciously, help the universe to know itself. In my opinion, this is how we embody our greatest potential as human beings and fulfill our vital purpose. Is this too woo woo? You might be thinking, “Hey, I’m just here, because I just want to cure my anxiety.” Well, no problem, that works too. But please go and listen to Episode 2.
0:26:05.9 JA: Dear friends, we’re reaching the end of this episode. And I want to say good-bye by emphasizing the importance of the work we do every time we dissolve the egoic state. Let’s look at the natural world, the animals, the plants. They experience the planet as an earthly paradise and playfully enjoy its beauty and abundance on a daily basis. Sadly for us, humans, the ego tries to prevent us from this oneness and revelry. Seduced by the sneaky snake of the ego, we bite into the apple of identification with the mind, fall into the temptation of compulsive thinking and enter into the sin of separation. We separate from life, and we separate from each other. In a frantic rush to explain ourselves, we distance ourselves from one another, to the point where our shared humanity is lost, buried like a treasure under mountains of mental rubble. A distant echo, unrecognizable among the noise of the mind.
0:27:05.2 JA: Dog lover, Yale graduate, Mexican, Republican, likes pineapple and pizza, 6 foot 1, runner, black, entrepreneur, millennial, Muslim, Enneagram type 6, male, vegan, loves techno music, hard worker, mom, addict, football fan. Regardless of how innocent some of these labels seem to us, the consequences of these game the ego plays are serious and harmful. The problem is the distance, not the content. The more we label each other, the more we destroy ourselves. Orders, flags, left, right, right, wrong. These labels dehumanize us. We do so much damage to each other by relating from a place of separation, fear, insecurity, negativity. This is how it happens, all the atrocities we commit against each other every day. The marginalization, discrimination, poverty, war, hunger, insensitivity to the suffering of others, it all originates in the egoic state. After all, we can justify any kind of barbarity when we inflict it on a label or a category rather than an actual person. There is no need for us to experience life in this way. I believe that it is possible to live in unity and in peace, sharing the abundance of the paradise of life. But we have to learn to surrender our ego, and we still have work to do.
0:28:51.0 JA: This is not about trying to be good people, it’s about practicing and learning how to disarm the ego. Even if we try to be good, we’re going to judge and de-humanize others, creating separation and causing damage, because we cannot avoid it. Whenever we are trapped in the egoic state, we betray ourselves. Science has taught us that there’s only one unified field of consciousness in which all experiences take place. In other words, we’re all one, one life taking countless forms. This is not new, we’ve known it for a long time. Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, vibration and space. We just need to catch up to that truth in our experience, hence The Practice.
0:29:39.7 JA: This is about re-calibrating our consciousness of being and recognizing the unity in our own experience, otherness and oneness with the here and now. It is not a rational process, since there is always separation in the mind. It is an energetic meeting therefore. The perception of it happens in the body as a sensation and not in thought. The external celebration of our uniqueness must be grounded in a strong internal foundation of oneness. It is about reconnecting with life, finding life in our lives, returning to a state of alignment with the abundance that we are, curing ourselves of the disease of separation. It’s about seeing in ourselves, in each other, in paradise.
0:30:28.5 JA: Alright, friends. In our next episode, we will talk about conscious parenting, I hope to meet you there.
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0:30:39.9 JA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Life is the Practice podcast. If you found it valuable, please subscribe, leave us a review, you might help others live better. And if you want to learn more about the practice, please explore the online course that is available to you at lifeisthepracticepodcast.com. Thank you, and be well, friends.
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