The Two Sides of Working on Yourself
There are two aspects of us that we can work on if we want to effectively uncover our best self:
1. The Ego – who we think we should be
2. The Soul – who we are (our spiritual core)
When we work on both, we do so from opposing angles, but both are absolutely essential. In fact, you cannot uncover your best self without this dual approach. We can only arrive at our self and inhabit our self fully by coming at it from both sides. That means having the courage to find and follow our spiritual inclination while working on our shadows.
We’ll see that the self naturally feels intangible to us, perhaps even fanciful, buried under all the layers of ego. But with an open mind and heart, we might just notice the subtle intuition that something spiritual is there inside us. Let’s invite that daringness to discover what lies beyond our present state by sincerely seeking to understand the ego and the self.
The Ego:
The ego is what blocks the self. The prison. Without peeling the layers of ego, there’s no way in. The more we peel off, the more we discover about ourselves that is confronting. We feel frightened and ashamed about what we’re covering with our masks that help us look better to ourselves and the world. And we simultaneously feel freer by exposing our ego masks – the postures of who we think we should be.
The method of working on our ego is:
1. Call ourselves out on our ego's selfishness to prove and defend its identity
For example, I have the desire to be seen as the best husband so I don’t feel small and not enough in this relationship that is so precious. By sharing this with my wife and also by writing this, I get to call myself out!
2. Diligently do all we can to not play into it
I’m very conscious of this ego identity to be the best husband. I try to focus on just serving my wife rather than being seen as “the best husband.”
3. Take responsibility when we do play into it
When I fail, I get humbled and apologize for my insecurity around being seen as the best husband. I’ll keep trying to understand her and support her rather than trying to get validation for my being enough.
4. Seek guidance to work through our ego addictions
I need coaching for perspective, empathy, and the ability to share my heart. I need people who understand me, care about me, and can give strength to my growth journey. I need safe spaces to process my hopes, fears, emotions, and the road to freeing myself of ego.
If we follow this path, we’re destroying the prison, bar by bar. We get a hint of the potential within. And we forage closer and closer to the soul.
If we don’t remove the blocks, we’re out of reach from the self and it becomes wishful spirituality. Doing your spiritual practices while letting the ego run the show is the greatest disservice to the self and to everyone else. It makes this most crucial work on the self far less effectual for us and even repellant to others. Nothing is more unattractive than hypocrisy, which is what work on the self without work on the ego becomes because in the name of the self, we continue to project ourselves egoically rather than act from who we are!
In the monastery where I spent some of my most formative years, I observed that many of us followed through on the work of the soul with our meditation, prayer, and spiritual services. But those of us who did not as carefully strive to monitor our ego’s workings suffered unnecessarily.
Some of my fellow monks were resistant to work on the ego. They felt why waste time on the stuff of this material world like psychology? They felt our work is beyond that. And as a result, I observed that dear monastic brothers of mine suffered in isolation, unable to confront the shame and speak about their difficulties, caught in a culture of toughing it out, trying to just focus on God rather than our inner work, experiencing terrible loneliness, forbidden longings, unfulfilled desires for a secure identity in the world, and harboring high levels of frustration that also caused pain in their relationships. This broke my heart. It reinforced for me the necessity to work on my own ego and offer that opportunity to others. It made the calling to invest in this side of the self-work much louder.
We can’t skip the ego work to hit the transcend button. That’s called “spiritual bypass.”
If we earnestly keep peeling away at the layers of ego, we develop strong momentum. But even as the bars of our ego prison are being destroyed, it feels there are always more of them – an endless prison. And the soul is atrophied from never actually having moved.
The ego side is a great starting point for our self-work because we all are familiar with the qualities and behaviors of our egos. This is why most people who engage with us do so from the vantage of working on the ego. And even working on the ego is exceptionally rare in this world. It is glorious. But that still is just licking the honey jar, tasting what fragmental smudges might be there without opening it for what’s inside.
The Soul:
The soul, on the other hand, is uncharted territory… Even more rare. That’s the honey. And the jar is bottomless. In the sacred text which we’ve dedicated ourselves to studying and teaching as the foundation of Upbuild’s work, the Bhagavad-Gita, Krsna expresses that out of many thousands of people hardly one may endeavor for perfection.
How many people do you know actually seeking the perfection of the soul? I don’t mean someone who goes to a place of worship or someone who believes in the soul or God or energy. I mean someone who is striving with every breath to embody the qualities of the eternal soul that is infinitely attractive in its humility, purity, honesty, patience, selflessness, compassion, strength, and love.
As long as we do the work on our egos alone, we find ourselves in an asymptote of forever going closer, without arriving. The real self is left theoretical – a construct. This is not the bypass of wishful spirituality – this is no spirituality.
Going directly to the soul awakens us to who we are. Spiritual practice addresses that deepest me who we crave to be. Nothing else has the power to do this.
In my own life, that’s sacred mantras, reading, prayer, and wanting to lovingly serve everyone. It requires the vision that all living beings are souls, and I am placed here simply to serve these souls.
At Upbuild, we’re so impassioned about our Enneagram work because we get a taste of being more and more ourselves by removing the blocks of the ego. This encourages us to go deeper. But even our teachers, Don Riso and Russ Hudson at The Enneagram Institute, share that the Enneagram can only take you so far on the journey to the self.
To cross the threshold and actually know the self requires a spiritual practice.
Are we bold enough to tread this new terrain?
The Mission:
At Upbuild we strive to take both approaches to working on ourselves with utmost sanctity. Self-realization is everything to us, and this dual approach is the key to accomplishing it. Without both, we’re missing something, and deep down, the self knows it. We may not allow ourselves to feel it, as we drown ourselves in busyness, responsibilities, obligations, pleasures, pains, and escapes from having to deal with our shadows. But we can never be satisfied this way. The treadmill always pushes us onward in a state of perpetual wanting.
It’s only when we remove the blocks and go to the heart of who we are that we can be our real selves. That requires a constant movement of managing the ego and awakening the soul. One is an outside-in approach, and the other an inside-out approach. The work on the ego is outside-in, starting with the covering to go deeper inside. The work on the soul is trying to grow the deepest self to the point where I can experience it out in the world, free from all external layers of ego.
To exit the paradigm of the familiar and take on the paradigm of the soul is no small task. But it is the most extraordinary one I know. And my deepest conviction is that anyone who sincerely takes up the mantle will wholeheartedly agree. Imagine what this world would be if we all responded to this calling and tried to help each other arrive at our real selves.
The heart is the deepest part of us, where the soul resides. It is likened to a precious garden. The two sides of working on yourself are 1. removing the weeds of selfish qualities like lust, greed, envy, and anger that choke the self, and 2. watering the flowers of the real self through absorption in spiritual practice. If we sincerely tend to our garden with both sides, then we are guaranteed to awaken from our ego-slumber to who we really are.
What will you commit to doing to work on yourself from both sides?