In this Soul teaching on false healing and growth, you will learn:
- Why most spiritual teachings and healing modalities don’t go deep enough
- The 3 levels of the mind and their contribution to your reality
- How the spiritual ego shows up in your life
- How to heal the spiritual ego
- And more…
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.
C.G. Jung
It’s hip to be a spiritual chick or dude…
Where my mother’s generation saw her as the black sheep in the family because of her unquenchable thirst for self-development and believing in the supernatural, today to be ‘spiritual’ is ultra chic and super hip. To do yoga, drink kombucha, fast or to do a detox cleanse are the new Gucci, Prada and Louis Vuitton’s of the multi billion dollar spiritual and wellness industry. They are considered the new “Must haves” not to show off how wealthy you are, but to show off your open mind, open heart and deep virtue.
Even Dior has in recent years tried to cash in on this spiritual trend by launching a Tarot themed design line that includes clutches (2017), dresses (2021) and decorative plates (2021) that appeal to your inner woo-woo.
The problem however with trends and fads is that it attracts a lot of fakes and wannabe’s which dilutes what something is really about. It also leads to superficialness and so-called quick fixes because one isn’t in it for oneself, but rather to impress others.
Which is what this teaching will focus on; the spiritual ego and the different ways it can show up on our spiritual awakening journey. Because even those genuinely seeking the Divine, can become completely blindsided by their spiritual ego – it’s a trap that we can all fall into.
What is the spiritual ego?
I recently read that EGO is an acronym for Eliminating God Out, I personally believe Eclipsing God Out is an even better one – that just hit me now.
Here’s why:
Because when the ego kicks in it does obscure our Divine light, it does attempt to deprive our soul of significance and power and it does try to obscure or block out our own divinity.
And this is also what makes the ‘spiritual ego’, the worst kind of ego – because it pretends to be the Divine and our embodied divinity when it’s nothing but a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s when we know exactly what to say and what to do, to look ‘spiritual’ or ‘enlightened’ but in reality, our ego is still running the show and we are no closer to the embodiment of the true self because basically we are living in la-la-land based on false healing and false growth.
The ego itself is not bad, nor does it need to die. All that needs to happen is that we stop identifying with it as if it is who we are, because it’s the false self. It’s the imposter and it’s the most difficult for us to see through this charade, when the ego pretends to be our own divinity. When the ego tricks us into believing that we are already ‘enlightened’, ‘ascended’ or embodying the truth of who we are.
The problem with thinking light is good, dark is bad…
Within the spiritual community there is a preoccupation with the light and as the Carl Jung quote at the beginning of this teaching states an avoidance of facing one’s own inner darkness, simply because the latter is much more (x 1000 and beyond) uncomfortable to do.
It’s a lot easier and pleasant to focus on the light because that’s where we want to be. It seems to be the end destination, so that’s where the spiritual ego wants to be seen – as the first or at least among the first to cross the finish line. There are no prizes to win or recognition to be gotten for facing one’s shadows, so why would the spiritual ego want to go there – when there is no fame or glory to be had in it?
Which is why most spiritual seekers tend to stay in the shallow end of the swimming pool where it’s nice and safe, where your hair doesn’t get wet and you can touch the bottom at all times. You’re looking hot and sexy, but let’s be honest – you aren’t really swimming. In fact most of the spiritual teachings and healing modalities never go deeper than the shallow end of the pool.
It’s one of the reasons I have opposed so-called Twin Flame meditations and activations for so long, because all they do is have you imagine ‘figures of light’ instead of facing the actual darkness that needs to be faced as part of the inner union process. There can be no inner union until one can embrace both their darkness and their light equally (aka transcend duality).
But the truth is that this ‘light is good and dark is bad’ interpretation, stems from the old paradigm 3D or ego thinking glazed with a light coat of spiritual or new age varnish that is meant to appear as the real deal, but isn’t. Instead of really understanding the higher spiritual truths, they are reduced to fit the old way of thinking leading to spiritual judgment, spiritual superiority and so on.
Yet in order to truly transcend the darkness and expand into our wholeness, we need to embrace both sides of us and until we do our shadows are going to keep sabotaging us so that they can be brought into the light once and for all. Because the ultimate truth is of course that, both a shadow and the darkness can only exist in the ABSCENSE of light. As soon as we bring the light into them, they cease to exist, which is why we should all aspire to become comfortable swimming in the deep end…
It’s because you don’t know what you don’t know
The real problem is that our shadows and inner darkness aren’t evident to us, they are in our blind spot which makes it very difficult for us to see them. To help us see them more clearly they are projected outside of us into the world, which allows us to see them mirrored back to us in the people, situations and experiences we encounter in our everyday life.
Yet, even then we can find it extremely difficult to own them because our inner shadows and darkness are parts of ourselves that are so painful to see – which is why we banished them into the dark in the first place. They stem from unresolved pain from our childhood, from our current and previous lifetimes or themes inherited through our maternal and paternal lineages.
When it comes down to it, much of our deepest trauma is actively being hidden from us – so that we can continue to function. If we would remember all our pain consciously, we would not be able to get up out of bed each day and take care of our kids, go to work, cook and clean or go to school.
In order to better understand this we need to quickly dive into the three levels of the mind.
The Conscious Mind
The conscious mind holds everything that we need to know in order to function in everyday life. It’s what we use to navigate through our everyday experience and everything that would jeopardize our ability to function is blocked out of our conscious awareness until we are ready to face it.
This is the primary reason why we are not aware of our level of trauma and wounding until we start searching for it, because it is deliberately kept out of our conscious awareness in order to protect us and to be able to continue our lives as best as we can. You think nothing is wrong with you, or that the events of your life haven’t affected you – but that is only because you have dissociated from them and banishing parts of yourself into the shadows is one of the ways we do this.
The Subconscious Mind
Most of this unresolved pain is held in the subconscious, which means that the mind knows that it’s there but chooses not to focus on it. The subconscious mind is like a dark basement full of stuff, that is only seen when we shine a flashlight on it which brings it into our conscious awareness. The rest of the time it just sits there in the dark, waiting to be seen.
Although that’s not exactly true either.
Because your unresolved pain does not sit their completely idle waiting to be seen, it seeps through in your everyday life. This is because the subconscious mind pulls in the people, situations and experiences that will help you heal this unresolved pain once and for all.
It’s this mechanism actually that prevents you from fully living the life of your dreams, as the subconscious and unconscious mind are what creates 95% of our reality. Our conscious mind only has a 5% influence on our lived experience.
It’s the proverbial skeletons in the closet of our subconscious basement that continue to screw up our manifestations which Carl Jung so accurately warned us for by saying:
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
The Unconscious Mind
The unconscious mind regulates all the processes that have to go on no matter what. Processes that cannot depend on your conscious or subconscious awareness, such as breathing, your heart beating, bodily functions, organ function and reflexes for example are all taken care of by the unconscious mind.
Everything that secures our physical existence is taken care of by the unconscious mind, which runs on automatic pilot in the background whether we are awake or sleeping, and this remains to be true even when someone has lost consciousness or is in a coma.
Very traumatic experiences can leave imprints on the unconscious mind altering the brain and body chemistry. This is also true for survival mechanisms that activate our fight or flight response, these are all hardcoded into the unconscious mind through for example childhood trauma. Science has already established that childhood trauma leads to brains wired for fear.
The difference between the subconscious and the unconscious mind is that, with the subconscious mind the mind knows it’s there but chooses not to focus on it. When something is held in the unconscious mind neither the subconscious mind nor the conscious mind know about it. It’s almost as if it was completely forgotten, except for the unconscious imprint it has left on the body. This is the level where trauma has changed our brain and body chemistry.
Until we have fully ventured into the underworld of our unresolved pain all the way to where our experienced trauma has left an imprint on not only our psyche but also on our brain and body chemistry, we haven’t fully faced the darkness within ourselves.
The problem is that we often don’t see ourselves as traumatized if we weren’t starved, tortured or raped by our childhood caretakers. But the truth is that even completely acceptable situations can be traumatizing, when despite legitimate reasons a child’s needs remained unmet. You do not need to have a childhood from hell in order to carry unresolved pain, it can be hidden in things that didn’t seem a big deal at that time but hit hard nonetheless.
Ego is able to convert anything to its own use, even spirituality.
Chögyam Trungpa
How the spiritual ego shows up in our life
The spiritual ego is not a new concept, it’s very well known among spiritual teachers who help their students transcend it, as well as the fact that many spiritual teachers suffer from it themselves – when their fame and fortune get’s the better of them. How many Guru’s haven’t been caught with their hand in the cookie jar, so to speak?
But also outside of the spiritual community it’s a known phenomenon that is even scientifically being researched. An in-depth 2020 study by Roos Vonk and Anouk Visser from the Behavioral Sciences Institute at Radboud University in the Netherlands concludes that some spiritual practices can lead to narcissistic behavior and attitudes.
In particular, those who worked in “energy work” and other areas exhibited higher signs of believing themselves to be spiritually superior and have “it all figured out.”
‘Spiritual Superiority scores were consistently higher among energetically trained participants than mindfulness trainees and were associated with supernatural overconfidence and self‐ascribed spiritual guidance. Our results illustrate that the self‐enhancement motive is powerful and deeply ingrained so that it can hijack methods intended to transcend the ego and, instead, adopt them to its own service.’
The study concluded that people that believed they could send positive energy to others remotely and communicate with spirits in ways that they felt put them at a “higher level” than those who could not do such things. This is certainly something that I have found to be true as well, with people who have the gift of sight that it tends to make them feel superior when they have not done their own healing work.
But the harsh truth is that the spiritual ego can show up at every stage of our spiritual awakening process. Here are some examples of how:
- Telling others how to live their life, despite their own lives not working
- Randomly preaching to others or spiritually ‘mansplaining’ to them
- Referring to themselves as the awakened counterpart or believing that they are spiritually more evolved than their Divine counterpart
- Spiritual hypocrisy, talking the talk, but not walking the walk
- Giving unsolicited and out of context advice, coaching, therapy etc.
- Feeling spiritually superior
- Not willing to face our shadows or darkness because we believe we don’t have them
- Thinking we are already ‘enlightened’, ascended or further along on our spiritual journey than we actually are (I have found this attitude to be rampant within the Twin Flame community)
- Believing we are better because we are vegan, vegetarian, do yoga, juice, fast, have developed our spiritual gifts and so on
- Think that our spiritual practices are more important than how we show up in life
- Wearing our spirituality or spiritual practices as a badge of honor
- Talking about false light teachings, false Twin Flames, battling the dark forces, etc.
- Thinking you already know everything (lacking humility or a willingness to learn)
- Comparing our spiritual progress to others
- Bragging about our own spiritual attainment
- Not willing to be wrong, aka wanting to be right
- Thinking you hold the ultimate truth or hiding behind your individual truth
- Dismissing someone else’s view because it doesn’t match your own
- And much, much more….
This all leads to a sense of false healing and a sense of false growth (spiritual delusion) where one believes to be further in their spiritual awakening process than they actually are. This quickly becomes a vicious circle as they don’t do the inner work, convinced they have already done it – which keeps them firmly stuck in the same place until they are willing to look at what they have been trying their hardest to avoid to see – which is their deepest unresolved pain.
So the question is – how do we heal the spiritual ego?
The very first step is to admit to ourselves that this is going on, because as long as we are in denial we can’t do anything about it. Because here is the deal, if you are struggling with feeling superior it actually indicates that you are masking deeply and often extremely painful feelings of inadequacy and insecurity. These underlying emotions are so painful, that you compensate them by fleeing into their opposites where you escape feeling weak, powerless and so on. You make yourself believe that because you are superior, you have the upper hand.
In short, it’s a defense mechanism meant to protect you from feeling vulnerable, out of control and feeling the pain of the original wound you are attempting to mask. And you don’t need to come out publicly and admit to everyone that this is true (which will undoubtedly make your spiritual ego cringe at the thought of it), you only need to admit it to yourself in order to be able to start your healing process.
When it comes down to it, being in spiritual ego is not ‘bad’ or a lifelong sentence, it’s just one of the many wounds that needs to be healed on our journey back to Oneness. It’s a trap that we can all fall into and that we have all fallen into at one time or another in our spiritual awakening process. I would be lying if I said that I never caught myself being in spiritual ego or in ego in general, that’s no sin – we are all human. The problem arises when we remain stuck in it, because it stagnates our actual spiritual awakening process when we allow the spiritual ego to hijack it and tell us we are already what we are actually not – our true authentic self.
Here are three shifts that you can make today to shift out of the spiritual ego:
Be willing to admit you don’t know it all
You don’t need to know it all and you can’t know it all. The true mark of a spiritual seeker is the fact that the further they come, the less they know. They are willing to learn, they are willing to be wrong, they are willing to see a new perspective and above all they are open to see the higher truth. People who think they already know it all, can’t do any of the above because they have a closed mind – this goes hand in hand with wanting to be right.
One of the reasons I have gotten so far on my Twin Flame journey, is because I was willing to see the truth of it and not what I wanted it to be (aka physical union with the Divine counterpart).
Be willing to face your unresolved pain
As I described above a sense of superiority is always masking a deep unresolved pain, that needs to be faced so that it can heal. The price we pay for wanting to appear perfect is inauthenticity, which everyone picks up on energetically anyway.
While you pretend to be perfect and without flaws, your energy doesn’t lie and shows people the truth whether you like it or not. You aren’t really fooling anyone, except yourself. But perfection, doesn’t have to be flawless. True perfection includes one’s flaws.
The truth is that we cannot be whole without fully embracing every aspect of ourselves, which includes the parts that we have difficulty accepting about ourselves. As long as we have banned aspects of ourselves into the shadows because they are too ugly or painful to face, we aren’t fully whole and we can’t be fully authentic. But above all we can’t be fully One within ourselves or with others, when we are still fragmented within. Which is why it is imperative to face our inner dragons and demons, our shadows and inner absence of light – aka the dark.
You cannot Ascend or become enlightened without bringing your inner shadow and darkness into the light, otherwise they will continue to take you vibrationally down.
Be willing to be where you are in your journey
Lastly, it is important to be willing to be where you are in your journey. This is not a race, there are no extra bonus points for finishing first. There is no competition, there isn’t a limited amount of spots available in Heaven, nor do the rest end up in Hell. Relax, you are safe to be where you are.
First of all there is no Heaven or Hell, except for our own creation here in the physical. We are all meant to live in Heaven on Earth and this is a state of consciousness that becomes available to us when we do the inner work as discussed on this website and as I teach in the School of Soul Embodiment.
You cannot fake it until you make it into the Heaven on Earth (5D) frequency, you cannot pretend to be there when you are not. Even if you could convince others to believe this, you cannot truly convince yourself because your reality experience can ONLY reflect back to you what you have attained within. So, there is no real advantage to pretending to be somewhere where you are not and the only person that you are truly hurting by doing so – is yourself.
There is no shame to be where you are right now, when I came onto this journey seven years ago I knew nothing. My life was a mess, I was deeply unhappy, broke on every level including financially and my life had been hell leading up to that. With a difficult adolescence, two failed marriages, one child a drug addict and another dying shortly after her birth – aka the human experience. We all have messy pasts, we have all been through painful experiences and that’s okay.
It’s okay to fully embrace where you are right now (even when it’s not where you want to be in the end), because this is what allows you to face the reality of the here and now so that you can take the steps you need to take to end up where you want to be. If you trick yourself to believe that you are already somewhere where you are not, then it’s really difficult to actually get there because you have basically allowed yourself to get lost in a spiritual fantasy land. This of course doesn’t serve you and only makes the journey longer.
I see this a lot within the Soul Partnership community, where people feel they don’t need a program for example because they feel they are already so close to ‘union’ or they have already done so much inner work. Instead they tell me, all they need is a one on one session to dig deep and heal. This is never true, because one cannot undo in one or two hours what takes months or years of inner work. However, because they overestimate where they are in their own journey they underestimate the amount of work that still needs to be done. In essence these people are still looking for quick fixes instead of real solutions.
The truth is that some of my students in the School of Soul Embodiment are already in physical union with their Divine counterpart, but realize that they still need to do their inner work because being together with their person of course didn’t magically fix everything that wasn’t working in their life. Others leave the program as soon as they have gotten what they wanted (physical union) because they overestimate what this really means, being together with your person does not magically fix one’s underlying issues – it tends to exacerbate them so that they can be healed.
Yet many people who believe to be in physical ‘union’ tend to feel superior towards those who are not, because they feel they have somehow cracked the code. They don’t realize that our higher selves use both closeness and distance to bring up the deeper subconscious wounding. They are often not together because of the deep inner work that they have done, but simply because that is what is needed in their particular stage of the spiritual awakening process.
I pray this teaching serves you and helps you identify the spiritual ego within yourself and gives you the tools to move past it. Remember the problem isn’t the spiritual ego, the problem is remaining stuck in it. No matter how long you may have been stuck in the spiritual ego, you can decide today to forgive yourself and shift out of it – so that you can authentically continue your journey into becoming who you truly are.
With my deepest love,
