The Power of Your Ego - Lessons From a Shark Dive
In this blog post, I want to chat about the power of your ego - partnering up with your ego to create a more magnificent life. Instead of a life filled with resistance and struggle and challenges, when you accept the true power of your ego in a positive way, in a collaborative way, your life can shift, you can feel full integration and create magnificence.
What Do I Mean By The Power of Your Ego?
We've been talking about the ego for decades, maybe even a century by this point. The ego as something separate, something horrible, something awful, something that we should avoid and we should try to get rid of and the ego is so bad it makes us do bad things. This is not just in the psychological sense, but this is all over the world. We're talking about this separate sense of self in so many traditions around the planet.
What really is the ego?
Here's the thing, I don't want you to get too attached to the word and what people think that ego means. It's really just a part of who we are as human beings and it's become a separate sense of self. And it does sometimes tell us things, warn us of things that we need to avoid, perhaps danger or it keeps us safe. But at some point, the ego seems to become, a hindrance to our evolving, to our growing, to our success.
A Shark Dive With My Ego
The story that I’m about to tell you is actually about you. So I want you to read it as if it were about you because it is. As we evolve, what we're all seeking to do, is to reintegrate our egos, bring ourselves back into realignment, our whole selves and that includes our egos.
While I was on a recent trip to Hawaii to drop my daughter off for college, I was invited to do a shark dive with my daughter to go out into the wild and free dive into the water in a safe way. Safe for the sharks and for the humans to be present with them.
Now, I love marine life and my fear surprisingly wasn't about diving with sharks. My fear was around being on a boat. I get very motion sick. I've always had that happen since I was a child, even in cars. I would get very sick. In fact, I did a boat excursion back earlier this year where I was violently sick and for several days after.
So I was invited to do this shark dive in Hawaii, and I chose to participate because they wouldn't have had enough people in the boat otherwise and my daughter and her friend wouldn’t have been able to go.
I agreed somewhat hesitantly and noticed on the drive over there that I was starting to experience some ego in the form of anxiety. I noticed it. I slowed myself down. I saw where it was going. My ego was replaying scenes from February (a similar experience gone bad) because it wanted to keep me safe.
And the truth is that I was safe. I was in a safe moment. I was safely in the car and what happened was by slowing myself down, by getting myself present with my own ‘I am’. The I am that I'm being in the world, my true ‘I am’.
So I had to check back with the ‘I am’ that I have created over the course of decades. And this ‘I am’ has the power to shift my very beingness. So I played with this a little bit on the way over.
We showed up at the boat and there was this moment. I noticed this one moment where I slowed it down. I could play it back in my mind and I want to bring you there.
I walked up to the boat. There was a young crew there and I was having a chat with the captain, this young man, maybe 21, 22 years old. And I asked, “What do you think about me going out? What are the waves like?” And he said, ”It's moderate waves. But if you have any motion sickness, it's probably not a good idea to go out.”
And I felt something rearing up inside of me. I didn't know exactly what it was at the moment. I do believe it was the ego in some way. There was a resistance to what he was saying. It was almost like the way my ego took it. It was like a challenge. And perhaps it was the way my consciousness was holding my ego at the time because I had played with that ‘I am’. And so the way my consciousness accepted his words was as a challenge. And so I chose to accept it.
And I want to report back to you that I had one of the most choppy experiences that I've ever had on the water and also one of the most peaceful. I had zero motion sickness and that has never happened to me before. I really enjoyed myself both on the boat, in the waves, and in the water. It was an incredible experience that I shared with my daughter and with her friend. And I felt amazing afterward. The exact opposite of what I felt countless other times when I've been out on the water like that.
This is the potential of embracing the power of your ego. I could have shown up in that exact same situation and created fear anxiety dread and stress. And the truth is that I didn't actually have to get in the boat. They had enough people there. I chose to embrace that challenge. I chose to embrace the power of my ego. And that’s super exciting.
The Takeaway
Repeating my ‘I am’ over and over and over on that boat focused me. It connected me. It connected me to my deeper truth and to everything around me as well as the experience and the outcome.
And this is just one example. You can use this with your ego in any situation in your personal life, in your professional life, with your children, and with your partner.
I want to encourage you to embrace the power of your ego. The challenge is to see, to sit, to be still, and to see where your ego is rising its head up. Even if you think maybe this is just wisdom. Just play with where maybe your ego could be. It could be denying you some joy in your life, some success, some happiness, some bliss, and definitely some evolution of your consciousness.
What I'm saying is that this is possible. It opens you up to possibility. And that's what I want to invite you to open up to the possibility of conquering whatever it is you have not yet conquered.
Your Challenge
I'm challenging you to play with your ego this week.
Get aware of, and be present with the power of your ego.
Find a place in your life where it's holding you back and really embrace it. Notice it. Pivot and find the joy.
Find the way that you can be with it and use your own ‘I am’ to transcend it and to grow the evolution of your consciousness.