Heart-Ego & the Act of Egoing

Ego is a way consciousness constricts towards certainty and/or control

It doesn't feel helpful to me right now to talk about the Ego, as if it's the single thing. When I hear the word, it evokes the image of a little, constricted me living in my head. Which is a real thing, but only one example of a larger pattern of ego.

It seems more useful, but still pretty useless, to point towards several egos. There's a central ego in the head, sure — but there's also a heart-ego that I can feel pretty strongly lately, and a few other little egos that I'm feeling more weakly (though, sigh, they'll probably become more salient in their own time).

What seems most helpful, most true to my experience, is to drop ego as a noun and experience it as a verb, or sometimes an adverb. A type of action, or sometimes just a certain quality of inner actions.

I'll write in terms of the heart-ego, since that's the one I already mentioned, and the one that's really present lately.

Ego-ing, as I feel it, can be most simply described as a way that consciousness constricts to try and get certainty and/or control.

The usual ego, the head-ego, has been pretty well described along these lines by others. The need to control and manipulate the world, to control experience, to maintain a reliable personality and follow rules for ourselves and so on — all just the ego's games. All a certain way for consciousness to constrict and behave ego-ly.

Which Leads Me to the Heart.

I've had glimpses of the non-egoing heart before. It's open and vital and flowing. It's what I aspire to and tap into when I write things like this:

There's a sturdy vastness in that kind of heart. It can keep flowing and flowing and provide love and care and genuine wish for well-being, regardless of personal circumstances or petty bullshit. Or even non-petty bullshit. The personal considerations can and do still exist, but they're held in that vaster space.

In the heart-ego, the way that the heart does egoing, there are all manner of constrictions and shut-downs and knots. I can feel them more clearly than ever these days, though describing them is a whole other game.

Heart-Ego

Let's try that game for a moment: you might imagine your emotional system as something similar to your vascular system — a system of vessels and arteries, flowing and flowing. For most of your life, you accept the way it flows, you notice that sometimes it really hurts, or makes you jealous, or tired, or sends you into long depressions — but this is a vague noticing, you're only dimly aware that something is going wrong somewhere in the system.

Then, after some time, you find yourself much more intimate with your heart and its system of flowing veins. When situations come up that cause you pain, you not only feel the pain, but you also feel the movement of your heart-system that's causing it!

Maybe your lover says something unkind, and you feel badly about it — and you can feel the inflammation in your veins that's constricting the flow of love.

Or maybe a friend makes the same bad self-sabotaging decision for the nth time, and you just can't face watching the situation play out again — and you feel a knot form in your veins, cutting off the flow of love and care towards that friend, protecting you from feeling the inevitable pain when the situation goes how it always goes.

Our hearts do things like this all the time. All the time. And it's not evil or anything, it has a function — it tries to protect us, to not let things into the system that are going to hurt. Our loving awareness constricts, cuts itself off, because being open when something difficult happens is painful — so we close.

But the heart-ego gets so overactive, or at least mine does. I can't pretend to know how yours works, but from looking around and listening to everyone else, it seems like I'm not alone here.

I've caused myself more pain by constricting and shutting down my ability to love than I have by staying open when something hurts. Over and over again, I find ways to torture myself with disconnection, loneliness, heartbreak, jealousy, and all the other heart-knots, all because my heart-ego has gotten overprotective. It pre-emptively spikes emotional inflammation, cuts off the flow of love, turns back in on itself or just generally goes sluggish.

Un-Egoing the Heart

This is how I experience my emotional heart, as something like a vascular system made of emotional energy. It's a system that wants to relax and strengthen and open and make itself available to the flourishing of whoever I hold in my heart. This is the ambition I have for myself — to have the capacity to stay open and support others more fully, to be a river to my people.

I've gotten closer to that ambition, but for now, the heart-ego is still strong. It clings on and reflexively clamps down on the flow of love if any of its old alarms get tripped. Some parts of me try to calm down, relax, and open the flow back up — but other parts of me get fearful, angry, petulant, or depressed. It's a back and forth, a somatic negotiation that can take all day to play out.

So far, open awareness, somatic resonance, and some imaginal communication have been the best ways to negotiate and open the heart-system back up, to nurture the heart-ego and let it feel safe enough to let go a little here, dissolve a little there. But it's slow work, and some of the most emotionally taxing I've ever done (also physically taxing, if I’m being honest).

If you've read this far, and you have any idea what I'm talking about, I'd love to hear how you handle (or handled??) things like this. The brahmaviharas and forgiveness meditation are on my radar; "Feeding Your Demons" has done okay lately; IFS-style work is in the mix. What else do you got?