Bill McKibben: Reality Intrudes

We can’t actually keep on like this

Bill McKibben

In our political life, reality hardly matters any more. Earlier today the president of the United States, in a fit of pique, proposed renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America.” He hides in a food cart and sends journalists out as decoys to be killed on his behalf. His winsome aide hands him an endless stream of flattering tweets. And yet the world stumbles on. People die, obviously, as a result of this folly—in the Middle East, and in middle America, where suddenly measles is a serious threat again. (Hell, the deaths attributable to Elon Musk’s decision to destroy USAid put him in the Stalin and Mao category for negligent manslaughter.) But human societies are for a while resilient; we assume that there’s always a chance for a reset. After the next election normal service will resume. If you start with a rich country like the U.S., it can absorb a lot of decline.

But that’s not how physical systems work. You push them and then past a certain point things change. If the temperature drops below 32 degrees water freezes, and if it rises above 212 then it boils, more or less. This newsletter spends a lot of time in the world of politics, because that’s where we need to make changes. But sometimes we need to remind ourselves that ultimately that political world is a subset of the physical one, simply because that’s how things work.

And we’re now reaching, I think, the point where that physical system is running out of margin.

Take a look at this graph. It shows the temperature of the global sea surface, averaged on a daily basis. Since our planet is 70 percent ocean, it’s a pretty good gauge of how hot the planet is getting. And what it shows is that in all the decades we’ve been measuring, it’s never been hotter. Given what we know about climate history, it’s almost certainly never been hotter in the history of our species. (Handily, by the way, that 21.1 Celsius line is just about exactly seventy degrees Fahrenheit.) As a Canadian professor wrote, “August 21st likely marked the warmest Sea Surface Temperatures have been for the entire Holocene period, and possibly even as far back as the last Interglacial 125,000 years ago.”

As Damian Carrington chronicled yesterday

The new ocean heat record being set in August is especially remarkable as global sea temperatures are typically highest in March and April, after the austral summer. The southern hemisphere has significantly more ocean area than the northern.

“The record is another clear signal of an ocean under growing stress,” said Dr Samantha Burgess, at the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which produced the new data. “El Niño is adding heat to the system, but it is doing so on top of decades of human-driven warming. The consequences are already visible: the number of marine heatwave days globally has more than tripled since the early 1990s.”

That means many things. Among them, as Ben Noll laid out yesterday,

The unusual ocean warmth has fueled powerful storms in the Pacific, such as Hurricane Lala near Hawaii, helped create a reservoir of extra moisture that has contributed to recent rainfall extremes across the United States and boosted summer heat across Europe.

This is a system that’s being pushed much too hard and much too fast, and it’s breaking.

Forty two percent of the world’s ocean area is now experiencing a “marine heatwave.” This means that wide swaths of coral are already “bleaching,” turning a deadly shade of pale; we don’t have the numbers yet, but it’s entirely predictable. We learned earlier this summer that the last huge coral bleaching event, the fourth this century, ran from 2023 to 2025 and

impacted 84% of the world’s coral reef area in all three coral reef-containing ocean basins (Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans). Mass bleaching was documented in at least 83 countries and territories.

It’s not just that coral reefs are one of the wildest corners of God’s brain; it’s that they provide food for 500 million human beings and keep waves from destroying shorelines. But still—they’re underwater. We don’t actually seem them on a daily basis. It’s hard for us to imagine the damage.

Trees are easier for us to see; think of them as coral reefs but on land. And here’s a completely remarkable account from Eric Niiler on how the hot new wildfires bred by our hot new atmosphere are degrading them in the most obvious possible ways

On a gentle slope on the western side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where a towering green canopy of ponderosa pines had stood for centuries, wildfires have transformed roughly 1,700 acres into brown, bare shrubland.

That forest is gone for good, scientists say. Spiky shrubs and poison oak have replaced the majestic trees. All that is left of the pines are burned logs and dead branches.

It’s part of a wider transformation that’s taking place across the Western United States, from Oregon to New Mexico, as bigger and hotter wildfires sweep through forests that have not evolved to survive such high-intensity blazes and a warmer climate. Recent studies estimate that as much as 40 percent of Western conifer forests will turn into shrubland by 2100 as a result.

These trees help define the American west. (Google the Oregon license plate). But they also function as part of an ecosystem. To wit:

Researchers say that as trees disappear, winter and spring snow will melt faster, affecting wildlife as well as communities that are already struggling with water shortages. Some Western states get as much as 75 percent of their water from snowmelt.

“When you remove the forest, that snow is more susceptible to melting earlier,” said Benjamin Hatchett, an interdisciplinary scientist at Colorado State University. And he noted that a warmer, more arid climate dries out soil and pulls moisture from plants, making them more susceptible to wildfire. “That thirstier atmosphere is a big concern,” he said.

Oh, and:

Forests also absorb planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Bigger, older trees store more carbon than younger trees and shrubs. The loss of conifer forests today means a hotter tomorrow.

But again, much of that is invisible—co2, sadly, can’t be seen. (If it turned the sky smog-brown like carbon monoxide we’d have done something decades ago). And even forests are far away from where most people live as to seem almost unreal. (Once, a visitor looking at the Vermont foliage near my home asked me if we collected the colored leaves when they fell and put them back up next year, as if they were a kind of Christmas decoration).

So let’s think about that water for a moment, the snowmelt that’s disappearing ever faster. Here’s another remarkable account of the American West, this time from Reis Thebault. It begins in the control room of the Central Arizona Project, the vast canal project that supplies water from the Colorado River to Phoenix and its surrounds, which are some of the fastest growing communities in America. The Colorado, though, is drying up, and so big cutbacks are coming.

Short-term reductions, announced by the federal government on Friday, will cost Arizona roughly one-third of its share of river water over the next two years. But beyond that, a range of cutbacks remain possible.

Under the most severe outcome, the system would be cut off entirely during the driest years, setting off a social and economic meltdown Arizonans shudder to even imagine.

“They are threatening to shut down the Southwest,” said Brenda Burman, the project’s general manager. “It’s not possible to picture it.”

There’s a certain poetic justice here, perhaps—communities that have built their identity on the myth of the ruggedly independent western man overcoming the hostile elements, only to find themselves entirely dependent on the socialized distribution of limited water.

Cave Creek, a picturesque burg steeped in cowboy kitsch in the foothills north of Phoenix, gets 95 percent of its water from the aqueduct system

“Without Colorado River water, we would be a dusty little town with dirt roads,” Mayor Robert Morris said.

The town’s leaders have been scrambling to find backup plans. Cave Creek has hired a water consultant and struck deals with neighboring municipalities, cobbling together enough supply for the next five years, Mr. Morris said.

He has sought to prepare residents for higher bills and stricter conservation, working to undo a foundational part of the state’s philosophy in the process.

“The biggest thing for people to overcome is the idea of unlimited, cheap water,” Mr. Morris said.

But even that blow to identity is small compared to the blow that comes when you run out. And not just of affordable water, but of affordable food. And we seem to be nearing that point. We’ve long known, for instance, that yields of staple crops are rising more slowly than they would otherwise, because of higher temperatures. But a new study this week put some fairly remarkable numbers on the future: “severe water scarcity” events due to global warming could easily triple the price of wheat.

Looking ahead, climate model projections suggest that water scarcity will expand under continued warming. Our results indicate that a temperature increase of about 3°C could triple average global wheat prices relative to 2010.

But we don’t have to wait. As Somini Sengupta pointed out this weekend, in four paragraphs that may set some kind of record for condensed reality, that future is more or less now.

Wheat is at the heart of the modern diet, and this year, it is facing an accumulation of modern dangers. The breadbaskets of the world are getting pummeled by drone strikes and devilish weather, nudging prices higher amid already soaring food costs in the wake of the Iran war.

Heat and drought have diminished harvests in some of the biggest wheat-producing countries, including the United States, which is expected to have its worst wheat harvest in a half-century, spiking prices. Poor countries that agreed to buy American wheat under the threat of Trump tariffs could be stuck paying abnormally high prices.

The Black Sea, a crucial passage for the global wheat trade, is an active theater of the Russia-Ukraine war, while the Houthi militia’s attacks on shipping in the Red Sea have already forced grain shipments to take a longer, more expensive route around South Africa.

Beyond that, a supercharged El Niño further threatens water levels in the Panama Canal, while drought has reduced water levels to perilously low levels in transit routes like the Rhine and Danube rivers in Europe, raising transportation costs. All this at a time when the global atmosphere is hotter than normal because of a century of fossil fuel burning, threatening the livelihoods of small farmers in poor countries.

All of this is down to fossil fuels—the oil we’re fighting over in the Strait of Hormuz, the gas and coal whose methane and carbon emissions have sent temperatures soaring and river levels dropping. It’s reality.

Just to repeat the numbers, this time from Neal Burnette-Irwin and Marion Kilpatrick

Mark Jankowski with USDA’s Outlook Board is still crunching the numbers for the year, but says the crop is set to break all the wrong records.

“On our balance sheet, we didn’t make any changes to our export or other use forecasts, so all that essentially did was tighten up ending stocks by six million bushels from where we were last month. Now we’re looking at U.S. ending stocks of 717 million bushels, down 203 million bushels from last year, reflecting the fact that this wheat crop is a small crop. It’s historically small.”

U.S. wheat growers can point to a number of challenges this year, but Jankowski says the issues aren’t limited to domestic wheat production. The crop is also suffering globally.

“A fairly sharp reduction in the European Union production estimate. We lowered it by 1.8 million tons this month, reflecting very hot, dry weather that spread across the entire EU region over the summer. Much of that extreme heat hit during the grain-filling stage for wheat, so it is showing up as reduced yield potential. With a 1.8-million-ton reduction in the forecast this month, that would bring the EU’s wheat production forecast down to 134.2 million tons, down just about 11 million tons from last year.”

It’s not just wheat. In Europe, knocked to its knees by an endless stream of heat waves this summer, we have reports of vegetable harvests collapsing by double digits—sixty percent of France’s broccoli crop, for instance, is gone. Britain could face food shortages within months, one excited newspaper report warns; in Ireland, they’re calling for an emergency food stockpile as harvests run low. The UK government has refused to release an unredacted copy of a report from the country’s intelligence agencies about ecosystem collapse amidst rising temperatures, but we do know that it predicts the very real possibility of widespread food shortages by 2030, resulting in “price rises, migration, political destabilisation and possible war… fueled by the human-induced climate crisis.”

What I’m trying to say is, we are running up against limits. We have made it hot enough on this planet that things are going very wrong. This is not like politics, where you get to say something dumb and change the subject. As I’m writing this, for instance, word has emerged of a court filing where the Trump-appointed board of the Kennedy Center has threatened to tear the building down unless Trump’s name is carved on the wall. That’s not real; it’s a game, one designed to distract. But wheat is real.

Because we’ve pushed so hard into this new hot world, our margin has been substantially reduced, in some cases to nothing. As one scientist quoted in that excellent article on western trees and fire said,

“Forests do have innate resilience and under normal circumstances, they can take a hit or two and bounce back,” Dr. Coop said. “But circumstances just aren’t normal anymore.”

Still, there are things we could do. When it comes to forests we could at least not knock more roads into the middle of them, as the Trump administration decided to do last week. (If you want to read a bang-up piece of writing about the Peavine Fire currently devastating Reno, I recommend this from my beloved Third Act colleague B Fulkerson).

When it comes to the Colorado River, we could—as conservationists have suggested for decades—demolish Glen Canyon Dam and let Lake Powell drain downstream to Lake Mead. It wouldn’t solve the problem, but it would give us a little more margin.

And we could deploy lots and lots of solar panels to desalinate enough water to supply some of the needs of places like Phoenix (solar panels that, by the way, shade the desert and conserve some moisture). And we could, you know, stop building water-intensive data centers. (Big victory in New Mexico yesterday, where activists included my Third Act colleagues managed to win a temporary halt to the giant Jupiter project, “in part due to recent revelations about the use of millions of gallons of fresh water for the data center’s construction in recent months.”)

When it comes to food, we may have more margin yet. America’s fertile cropland is filled to an astonishing extent growing corn syrup, feed for cattle, and gasoline—an area the size of Indiana is devoted solely to producing ethanol, an absurd boondoggle. So we’re not without options. Using it to produce solar power and, you know, food people eat would take off some of the pressure.

Above all, of course, we can rapidly deploy renewable energy. At this point it won’t lower the temperature rapidly, but it could keep it from climbing rapidly. And it’s within our technical capacity—the planet possesses the factories capable of turning out solar panels three times as fast as we’re currently going.

I will return next time to politics, because politics is unavoidable. It’s how we will or won’t rise to these challenges. But for now I just want to drive home the reality, the sheer inescapable reality of life on our rapidly overheating planet.

Because we’re pushing the margins, and we’re doing it right now. One of the more remarkable essays I’ve read in recent months comes from Aruna Chandrasekhar, describing modern-day Mumbai as a “city of sweat.” This relates directly to the elevated sea temperatures with which I began this account—Mumbai, as anyone who has had the privilege of visiting the Gateway of India will recall, sits on the edge of the Arabian Sea. The city’s seawalls are already overtopped in storms, but the constant danger is the humidity. Here’s Chandrasekhar (and the whole article is very much worth reading)

In summer, Mumbai’s air holds up to 90% of all the water it can possibly contain, leaving almost no room for sweat to evaporate – which in turn leads to rapid dehydration, exhaustion and fatal heatstrokes. On a 38C day in April 2023, 14 people died in an outdoor rally attended by India’s home minister. What has come to be expected of millions upon millions of Mumbaikars, no matter how bad it gets, is resilience. But that resilience is coming up against hard limits of survivability.

Jari Mari is a crazy mosaic of the city’s extremes. Migrant, working-class Muslim and Dalit families live in tin sheds and one-bedroom concrete blocks stacked behind the high-security walls that seal off runway 27. The housing is so dense that the narrow lanes see no sun and feel no wind. But the heat still gets through, and the kids are always sick, many of the mothers in these houses told us: everyone has to sleep with their doors open, mosquitoes be damned. No one we spoke to could afford air conditioning.

In Sabiya and Sameer Khan’s one-room house, temperatures touch 49C. When we tell Sameer we’re not here to shoot planes, but to take thermal pictures of his asbestos roof, he looks at us like we’re mad. We show Sabiya how the fan above her stove is pushing hot air back down on her. A couple of blocks away, kids play cricket on concrete that shows a reading of 58.7C.

58.7 Celsius is 137.66 degrees Fahrenheit. No more need be said.

Please go here for the original article: https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/reality-intrudes

Reflections On Our Innate Capacity to Care

Photo by Molly

 

In a recent dharma talk given by Alexa Redner, who is now a guiding teacher at PIMC (Portland Insight Meditation Center — https://www.portlandinsight.org/), Alexa spoke of care as something that we are all born with and a quality that is intrinsic to our human nature. It is simply there, a core and sacred aspect to who we humans are.

Alexa also reflected on how through the challenges of our human lives and our struggles to embody our wholeness, this embodiment of care gets covered over. There can be layers of delusion, greed, hatred that we've absorbed in our unhealthy culture and through ancestral legacy burdens blindly passed down to us. Addictions, anxiety and depression, dehumanization and disassociation, and other symptoms of trauma serve as impediments to our own true nature. Yet, and despite all appearances to the contrary, the beauty and truth of who we most wholly are remains. It just gets covered over.

Today I can think of countless experiences in my own life where this has been true.  And there was one example that came to me to share with our Sangha on that Sunday morning. I spoke of how for years I would turn away from anyone standing on a street corner with their little signs asking for help. They were invisible to me. I didn't want to see them. I didn't want to see their pain. And my capacity to care was covered over with judgment and fear and an unwillingness to truly see and feel the pain of other suffering human beings.

One of the profound blessings of my path of healing, unburdening, and transforming my own suffering is an ever expanding capacity to be with the pain and trauma of another. As long as I was holding within my heart layers of unattended grief and fear and shame and loss, I couldn't look into the eyes of another human being who reminded me of what I was avoiding within myself.

Over the many years of embracing what I had been avoiding — and learning to hold myself with the deepest tenderness, compassion, generosity, kindness, and love — everything has been shifting and evolving. This very much includes my ever growing capacity to extend care.

Gradually, I began to not turn away and to increasingly notice the human beings standing on corners asking for help. And initially I would discern who I felt was worthy of a dollar bill. Then, over time, I came to not separate out who was worthy of care and who was not. It no longer mattered what their sign said, what gender or age they were, what race or ethnicity they were, or if they were alcoholic or drug abusers. I came to recognize these human beings as my sisters and brothers and who, like me, had suffered great pain and trauma.

Today my hand with a $1 or a $5 bill and a granola bar extends to any hand I can reach. Sometimes I've gotten to know names and a bit of history of the person before me asking for help. And, more than anything, I try to meet eyes with the warmth of my eyes that communicates I see you, you matter, I care.

Facing and healing and releasing my own history of deep trauma has transformed me in profound ways that I could not have imagined when I first began on this path of heart decades ago. And the truth of what Alexa Redner spoke of is today my own lived experience. This innate experience of care for all beings is simply there. It had just been covered over. Once I was blind. And now, increasingly with each year as I grow older, I can see. And I am filled with a depth of gratitude beyond measure.

May we all increasingly connect with the wise, compassionate, generous, and loving supports that we need to heal what covers over our capacity to see and to act out of care — deep caring for ourselves, our beloveds, and for all of life on our beautiful hurting Earth Mother. May we remember that we are all connected, all related, all family, all Sacred.

With Metta,

🙏💜

Molly

"Becoming Our Compassionate Self"

Gil Fronsdal: The Most Beautiful Qualities We Have As Humans

Photo by Molly

Generosity is not limited to the giving of material things. We can be generous with our kindness and receptivity. Generosity can mean the simple giving of a smile or extending ourselves to really listen to a friend. Paradoxically, even being willing to receive the generosity of others can be a form of generosity.

Mindfulness, by helping us notice our impulses before we act, gives us the opportunity to decide whether to act and how to act.

Buddhism’s cardinal ethical principle is to avoid causing harm.

Nothing whatsoever is worth the cost of a contracted heart.

Our intentions — noticed or unnoticed, gross or subtle contribute either to our suffering or to our happiness. Intentions are sometimes called seeds. The garden you grow depends on the seeds you plant and water. Long after a deed is done, the trace or momentum of the intention behind it remains as a seed, conditioning our future happiness or unhappiness.

The intentions to be kind, compassionate, helpful, happy, and liberated are among the most beautiful qualities we have as humans.

— Gil Fronsdal

Wisdom Quotes From Rachel Naomi Remen

I recently learned of the passing of Rachel Naomi Remen. And I am now once again moved to share these wise, compassionate, and loving quotes in honor of this remarkable woman and the incredible impact that she has had on my life and those of countless others. Rachel Naomi Remen will be missed. And her legacy lives on. Blessed be. 🙏💜 Molly

Photo by Molly

The Beautiful Heartfelt Wisdom 

of Rachel Naomi Remen

Our purpose in life is to grow in wisdom and in love.

Wholeness is never lost, it is only forgotten. Integrity rarely means that we need to add something to ourselves: it is more an undoing than a doing, a freeing ourselves from beliefs we have about who we are and ways we have been persuaded to 'fix' ourselves to know who we genuinely are.

When I have forgiven myself and remembered who I am, I will bless everyone and everything I see. The way to freedom often lies through the open heart.

When we know ourselves to be connected to all others, acting compassionately is simply the natural thing to do.  

Perhaps real wisdom lies in not seeking answers at all. Any answer we find will not be true for long. An answer is a place where we can fall asleep as life moves past us to its next question. After all these years I have begun to wonder if the secret of living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company.

* * * * *

"Human being" is more a verb than a noun. Each of us is unfinished, a work in progress. Perhaps it would be most accurate to add the word "yet" to all our assessments of ourselves and each other . . . If life is process, all judgments are provisional, we can't judge something until it is finished. No one has won or lost until the race is over . . .

In our instinctive attachments, our fear of change, and our wish for certainty and permanence, we may undercut the impermanence which is our greatest strength, our most fundamental identity. Without impermanence, there is no process. The nature of life is change. All hope is based on process . . .

It is taken me somewhat longer to recognize that a diagnosis is simply another form of judgment. Naming a disease has limited usefulness. It does not capture life or even reflect it accurately. Illness, on the other hand, is a process, like life is.

Much in the concept of diagnosis and cure is about fixing, and the narrow-bore focus on fixing people's problems can lead to denial of the power of their process. Years ago, I took full credit when people became well; their recovery was testimony to my skill and knowledge as a physician. I never recognized that without their biological, emotional, and spiritual process which could respond to my interventions, nothing could have changed at all. All the time I thought I was repairing, I was collaborating.

* * * * *

Few perfectionists can tell the difference between love and approval. Perfectionism is so widespread in this culture that we actually have had to invent another word for love. 'Unconditional love,' we say. Yet, all love is unconditional. Anything else is just approval.

Those who don't love themselves as they are rarely love life as it is either. Most people have come to prefer certain of life's experiences and deny and reject others, unaware of the value of the hidden things that may come wrapped in plain or even ugly paper. In avoiding all pain and seeking comfort at all cost, we may be left without intimacy or compassion; in rejecting change and risk we often cheat ourselves of the quest; in denying our suffering we may never know our strength or our greatness. Or even that the love we have been given can be trusted. It is natural, even instinctive to prefer comfort to pain, the familiar to the unknown. But sometimes our instincts are not wise. Life usually offers us far more than our biases and preferences will allow us to have. Beyond comfort lie grace, mystery, and adventure. We may need to let go of our beliefs and ideas about life in order to have life.

A label is a mask life wears. We put labels on life all the time. "Right," "wrong," "success," "failure," "lucky," "unlucky," may be as limiting a way of seeing things as "diabetic," "epileptic," "manic-depressive," or even "invalid." Labeling sets up an expectation of life that is often so compelling we can no longer see things as they really are. This expectation often gives us a false sense of familiarity toward something that is really new and unprecedented. We are in relationship with our expectations and not with life itself.

Belief traps or frees us.

* * * * *

I am no longer as inspired by expertise as I once was. Perhaps the worth of any lifetime is measured more in kindness than in competency.

Helping, fixing, and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. when you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. Fixing and helping may be the work of the ego, and service the work of the soul.

Many times when we help we do not really serve. . . . Serving is also different from fixing. One of the pioneers of the Human Potential Movement, Abraham Maslow, said, "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.' Seeing yourself as a fixer may cause you to see brokenness everywhere, to sit in judgment of life itself. When we fix others, we may not see their hidden wholeness or trust the integrity of the life in them. Fixers trust their own expertise. When we serve, we see the unborn wholeness in others; we collaborate with it and strengthen it. Others may then be able to see their wholeness for themselves for the first time.

Wounding and healing are not opposites. They're part of the same thing. It is our wounds that enable us to be compassionate with the wounds of others. It is our limitations that make us kind to the limitations of other people. It is our loneliness that helps us to to find other people or to even know they're alone with an illness. I think I have served people perfectly with parts of myself I used to be ashamed of.

* * * * *

There are only two kinds of people in the world. Those who are alive and those who are afraid. 

Every great loss demands that we choose life again. We need to grieve in order to do this. The pain we have not grieved over will always stand between us and life. When we don't grieve, a part of us becomes caught in the past like Lot's wife who, because she looked back, was turned into a pillar of salt.

We burn out not because we don't care but because we don't grieve. We burn out because we have allowed our hearts to become so filled with loss that we have no room left to care.

Suffering shapes the life force, sometimes into anger, sometimes into blame and self-pity. Eventually it may show us the wisdom of embracing and loving life.

* * * * *

The places in which we are seen and heard are holy places. They remind us of our value as human beings. They give us the strength to go on.

Sometimes just being in someone's presence is strong medicine.

From a good teacher you may learn the secret of listening. You will never learn the secret of life. You will have to listen for yourself.

Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us, not the sort of silence that is filled with unspoken criticism or hard withdrawal. The sort of silence that is a place of refuge, of rest, of acceptance of someone as they are. We are all hungry for this other silence. It is hard to find. In its presence we can remember something beyond the moment, a strength on which to build a life. Silence is a place of great power and healing.

Before every session, I take a moment to remember my humanity. There is no experience that this man has that I cannot share with him, no fear that I cannot understand, no suffering that I cannot care about, because I too am human. No matter how deep his wound, he does not need to be ashamed in front of me. I too am vulnerable. And because of this, I am enough.

* * * * *

Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don't do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering.

It has been said that sometimes we need a story more than food in order to live.

Sometimes when I ask people to tell me their story they tell me about their achievements, what they have acquired or built over a lifetime. So many of us do not know our own story. A story about who we are, not what we have done. About what we have faced to build what we have built, what we have drawn upon and risked to do it, what we have felt, thought, feared, and discovered through the events of our lives. The real story that belongs to us alone.

Most of us lead far more meaningful lives than we know. Often finding meaning is not about doing things differently; it is about seeing familiar things in new ways.

* * * * *

The willingness to consider possibility requires a tolerance of uncertainty.

Whether we are aware of it or not, we will refine the quality of our humanity throughout the course of our lives. More and more, people seek spiritual techniques to help them do this. But joy and suffering will do this for you, too. Every lifetime offers countless opportunities to become more whole.

Life offers its wisdom generously. Everything teaches. Not everyone learns. Life asks of us the same thing we have been asked in every class: "Stay awake." "Pay attention." But paying attention is no simple matter. It requires us not to be distracted by expectations, past experiences, labels, and masks. It asks that we not jump to early conclusions and that we remain open to surprise. 

Wisdom comes most easily to those who have the courage to embrace life without judgment and are willing to not know, sometimes for a long time. It requires us to be more fully and simply alive than we have been taught to be. It may require us to suffer. But ultimately we will be more than we were when we began.

* * * * *

Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you — all of the expectations, all of the beliefs — and becoming who you are. 

If you carry someone else's fears and live by someone else's values, you may find that you have lived their lives.

Reclaiming ourselves usually means coming to recognize and accept that we have in us both sides of everything. We are capable of fear and courage, generosity and selfishness, vulnerability and strength. These things do not cancel each other out but offer us a full range of power and response to life. Life is as complex as we are. Sometimes our vulnerability is our strength, our fear develops our courage, and our woundedness is the road to our integrity. It is not an either/or world. It is a real world. In calling ourselves "heads" or "tails," we may never own and spend our human currency, the pure gold of which our coin is made.

The marks life leaves on everything it touches transform perfection into wholeness. Older, wiser cultures choose to claim this wholeness in the things that they create. In Japan, Zen gardeners purposefully leave a fat dandelion in the midst of the exquisite, ritually precise patterns of the meditation garden. In Iran, even the most skilled of rug weavers includes an intentional error, the “Persian Flaw,” in the magnificence of a Tabriz or Qashqai carpet…and Native Americans wove a broken bead, the “spirit bead,” into every beaded masterpiece. Nothing that has a soul is perfect. When life weaves a spirit bead into your very fabric, you may stumble upon a wholeness greater than you had dreamed possible before.

Perhaps wisdom is simply a matter of waiting, and healing a question of time. And anything good you've ever been given is yours forever.

* * * * *

I have learned that the things that divide us are far less important than those that connect us.

Perhaps we are no longer a kind people. More and more, we seem to have become numb to the suffering of others and ashamed of our own suffering. Yet suffering is one of the universal conditions of being alive. We all suffer. We have become terribly vulnerable, not because we suffer but because we have separated ourselves from each other.

When we approve of people, we sit in judgment of them as surely as when we criticize them. ...To seek approval is to have no resting place, no sanctuary. Like all judgment, approval encourages a constant striving. It makes us uncertain of who we are and of our true value. This is as true of the approval we give ourselves as it is of the approval we offer others. Approval can't be trusted. It can be withdrawn at any time no matter what our track record has been. It is as nourishing of real growth as cotton candy. Yet many of us spend our lives pursuing it.

But judgment may heal over time. One of the blessings of growing older is the discovery that many of the things I once believed to be my shortcomings have turned out in the long run to be my strengths, and other things of which I was unduly proud have revealed themselves in the end to be among my shortcomings. Things that I have hidden from others for years turn out to be the anchor and enrichment of my middle age. What a blessing it is to outlive your self-judgments and harvest your failures.

* * * * *

She walked on in this way for several more minutes and at last came to a place in the labyrinth close to the circumference of the circle where the path unexpectedly turns sharply to the right. As you turn, you discover that you have reached the end of the path and a few more steps will take you to the center of the circle. Turning to the right, Glory suddenly felt the pinecone in her hands move as if it had become her own living heart. 

Deeply shaken, she looked up for the first time and found an unmistakable Presence in the center of the labyrinth, waiting for her. For just the briefest moment she could see Him quite clearly. His heart was open, a place of refuge for all who suffer. It had been broken open by the suffering in the world in the same way hers had been. 

Suddenly she understood why others had come to her for refuge since her childhood. The suffering she was able to feel had made her trustworthy. She stumbled the last few steps into the center of the labyrinth, knelt down, and for the first time since she was a child, she wept. 

In a talk about compassion, a former teacher of mine once said that practice prepares the mind, but suffering prepares the heart. Perhaps the final step in the healing of all wounds is the discovery of the capacity for compassion, an intuitive knowing that no one is singled out in their suffering, that all living beings are vulnerable to loss, attachment, and limitation. It is only in the presence of compassion that we can show our wounds without diminishing our wholeness. 

The Dalai Lama has said that “compassion occurs only between equals.” For those who have compassion, woundedness is not a place of judgment but a place of genuine meeting.

* * * * *

A colleague told me that he thinks of his life as an orchestra. Reclaiming his integrity reminds him of that moment before the concert when the concertmaster asks the oboist to sound an A. 'At first there is chaos and noise as all parts of the orchestra try to align themselves with that note. But as each instrument moves closer and closer to it, the noise diminishes and when they all finally sound it together, there is a moment of rest, of homecoming.'

'That is how it feels to me,' he told me. 'I am always tuning my orchestra. Somewhere deep inside there is a sound that is mine alone, and I struggle daily to hear it and tune my life to it. Sometimes there are people and situations that help me to hear my note more clearly; other times, people and situations make it harder for me to hear. A lot depends on my commitment to listening and my intention to stay coherent with this note. It is only when my life is tuned to my note that I can play life's mysterious and holy music without tainting it with my own discordance, my own bitterness, resentment, agenda, and fears.'

Deep inside, our integrity sings to us whether we are listening or not. It is a note that only we can hear.

* * * * *

Over the years I have seen the power of taking an unconditional relationship to life. I am surprised to have found a sort of willingness to show up for whatever life may offer and meet with it rather than wishing to edit and change the inevitable...When people begin to take such an attitude, they seem to become intensely alive, intensely present. Their losses and suffering have not caused them to reject life, have not cast them into a place of resentment, victimization, or bitterness.

From such people, I have learned a new definition of the word 'joy.' I had thought joy to be rather synonymous with happiness, but it seems now to be far less vulnerable than happiness. Joy seems to be part of an unconditional wish to live, not holding back because life may not meet our preferences and expectations. Joy seems to be a function of the willingness to accept the whole, and to show up to meet with whatever is there. It has a kind of invincibility that attachment to any particular outcome would deny us. Rather than the warrior who fights toward a specific outcome and therefore is haunted by the specter of failure and disappointment, it is the lover drunk with the opportunity to love despite the possibility of loss, the player for whom playing has become more important than winning or losing.

The willingness to win or lose moves us out of an adversarial relationship to life and into a powerful kind of openness. From such a position, we can make a greater commitment to life. Not only pleasant life, or comfortable life, or our idea of life, but all life. Joy seems more closely related to aliveness than happiness.

The strength that I notice developing in many of my patients and in myself after all these years could almost be called a form of curiosity. What one of my colleagues calls fearlessness. At one level, of course, I fear outcome as much as anyone. But more and more I am able to move in and out of that and to experience a place beyond preference for outcome, a life beyond life and death. It is a place of freedom, even anticipation. Decisions made from this perspective are life-affirming and not fear-driven. It is a grace.

* * * * *

I no longer feel that life is ordinary. Everyday life is filled with mystery. The things we know are only a small part of the things we cannot know but can only glimpse. Yet even the smallest of glimpses can sustain us.

Mystery seems to have the power to comfort, to offer hope, and to lend meaning in times of loss and pain. In surprising ways it is the mysterious that strengthens us at such times. I used to try to offer people certainty in times that were not at all certain and could not be made certain. I now just offer my companionship and share my sense of mystery, of the possible, of wonder. After twenty years of working with people with cancer, I find it possible to neither doubt nor accept the unprovable but simply to remain open and wait.

I accept that I may never know where truth lies in such matters. The most important questions don't seem to have ready answers. But the questions themselves have a healing power when they are shared. An answer is an invitation to stop thinking about something, to stop wondering. Life has no such stopping places, life is a process whose every event is connected to the moment that just went by. An unanswered question is a fine traveling companion. It sharpens your eye for the road.

When we recognize the spark of God in others, we blow on it with our attention and strengthen it. No matter how deeply it has been buried or for how long .... When we bless someone, we touch the unborn goodness in them and wish it well.

It is not that we have a soul, but that we are a soul.

For more from Rachel Naomi Remen, 

please go here:

http://www.rachelremen.com/ 

Wendell Berry: The Peace of Wild Things

  The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

 

— Wendell Berry

EXCELLENT — Lissa Rankin: No, You Don’t Need To Get Over Your Ego. You Might Actually Need To Strengthen It.

WOW! This hits the nail on the head! Illuminated here is why I remained stuck for so long in a range of painful and harmful symptoms of old trauma — including for many years into my recovery from substance addiction. That said, one of my earliest and deeply beloved resources on my healing journey, the psychologist and author of Circle of Stones Judith Duerk,, frequently spoke of the need to develop a strong healthy ego. But I didn't truly understand what she meant. 

At that time, I was also swept up in Eckart Tolle and other New Age spiritual bypassers — all of whom, in part, served to keep me lost, hurting, disassociated, and disempowered. What I recognize today that is also true is that the counselors and therapists I was seeing for the first two decades on my healing journey had not done their own deeper work of strengthening their healthy egos and their connection with Self. They were largely unaware of cutting edge trauma-informed practices and what Lissa Rankin articulates so well in this article. And what I understand so well today is that no one can empower anyone else to go further than they have first gone themselves.

Illuminated in this article by Lissa Rankin are glimpses into why I was continuing to react out of trauma triggers for years into recovery, why I was vulnerable to being drawn to a charismatic therapist who I saw for years and who turned out to be a narcissist, why I was part of and stayed in an unhealthy marriage for 31 years, and why each of our sons developed symptoms in adolescence of generational trauma. All of this and more continued to happen years into my sobriety and years into getting the counseling and help that I thought I'd needed to break painful cycles of ancestral trauma for myself and my children.

I have learned so much the hard way. And today I am profoundly grateful for those such as Dr. Lissa and other wise souls who truly understand trauma and how we can be empowered to heal, unburden, and transform even the most painful wounds we have experienced in our lifetimes. Read on. Powerful medicine. — Molly

By Lissa Rankin, MD

“Your ego is the problem,” says the guy on stage from the lotus position. “You have to transcend your ego,” he bellows, while claiming he has the 411 direct dial to God and seeming clueless about how egotistical such a claim might be. While informing you that the monkey mind is a pig you need to kill, while demanding that you meditate more in order to shut up that monkey, while inviting you to get your ticket to the next workshop, he promises you that if you do this, all of your optional suffering will finally be over. Then you can rest in enlightened bliss, no matter what’s happening around you, just like him, the one who has successfully killed his ego and is now perpetually in the “no self” of non-duality.

If you’ve spent any time in spiritual circles, you’ve probably heard some version of these “get out of your ego” teachings. They are repeated so often that they’ve become almost unquestioned in certain communities. The implication is that your ego is the sole obstacle standing between you and enlightenment, inner peace, divine love, awakening, spiritual guidance, perpetual bliss, and freedom from suffering.

But what if that’s exactly backwards? What if, instead of needing to destroy your ego, you actually need to strengthen it? Sure, some people are full of themselves and humility might be the right medicine for them. But many people who are drawn to spiritual seeking are not suffering because they have too much ego; they’re suffering because they don’t have enough.

Your Ego Is Not Your Enemy

Your ego is not a demon you need to slay. It’s not a monkey mind that needs to be silenced. It’s not an annoying stream of thoughts floating by like clouds during meditation. Your ego is a child in need of your unconditional tender-hearted love.

It’s the psychological structure that allows you to know who you are. It helps you distinguish “me” from “you.” It’s a constellation of parts that, when reasonably integrated, help you build a stable identity that allows you to distinguish yourself from someone else, that helps prevent enmeshment and boundarylessness, that protects you from cult leaders who want to encourage you to merge with them (in the name of divine merging.)

Your ego lets you make clear decisions, tolerate not getting what you want, delay gratification, regulate reckless impulses, and maintain healthy boundaries. It allows you to remain yourself while staying connected to others.

When we think of egos, we tend to think of loud, arrogant, or narcissistic people, but those people don’t have healthy egos. They have overbearing, unhealthy egos that often mask an unstable identity because of childhood trauma. A healthy ego is quietly sturdy. It knows where you end and someone else begins. It can say yes without collapsing into people pleasing, and it can say no without drowning in guilt or fear. A healthy ego can tolerate disagreement without feeling annihilated. It can admit mistakes without falling apart and receive feedback without becoming defensive. Ironically, when someone has genuine ego strength, they usually don’t spend much time defending their ego. They don’t need to. They have enough ego strength to handle the nuance of “I’m a generally good person who just did something not so great.”

Early Childhood Trauma Impairs Healthy Ego Development

Developmental trauma doesn’t simply leave painful memories; it interrupts the normal development of the self.

Children who grow up with chronic neglect, emotional abuse, coercive control, parentification, enmeshment, narcissistic parenting, addiction in the family, or unpredictable caregivers often never get the opportunity to develop a stable internal sense of who they really are. This core confusion of identity actually makes people with weak ego strength more likely to pursue spiritual seeking, to try to fill a void that wouldn’t feel so empty if they had a healthy ego.

When there’s not enough ego strength, kids grow up not knowing how they actually feel and what they really need. Instead, they learn to ask, “What does everyone else need me to feel?” Instead of wondering, “What do I want?” they become experts at asking, “What will keep me safe?” Instead of trusting their own perceptions, they learn to distrust themselves and depend on external authorities to tell them what’s real.

Survivors of the kinds of trauma that impair healthy ego development often develop wobbly identities organized around pleasing others, avoiding conflict, disappearing, caretaking, perfectionism, over-achievement, or hyper-independence. These strategies may look like a self, but underneath them is often a fragile sense of self that never got the chance to fully form.

When people like this encounter teachings that tell them to “let go of your ego,” they may eagerly comply. This isn’t spiritual surrender. It’s survival. One problem with this is that there isn’t much self there yet to let go of. The other problem is that it’s also catnip for cult leaders who are looking for people with weak enough egos that they’ll cooperate with the program of surrendering their free will, personal agency, and self protection—and do whatever the cult leader orders them to do.

The Difference Between An Unstable Self Or Weak Ego Strength & IFS’s “Self”

One of the reasons conversations about the ego become so confusing is that psychology and spirituality are often talking about two different things using the same language. When psychologists talk about a healthy ego, they’re talking about the developmental achievement of having a stable sense of selfhood, of identity. This includes knowing who you are, being able to separate and distinguish yourself from others, trusting your own perceptions, regulating your emotions, making choices aligned with your values, maintaining healthy boundaries, and staying connected to others without losing yourself. Developmental psychologists sometimes call this ego strength. Internal Family Systems would describe much of this as having protectors (parts) that are no longer forced into extreme roles because the inner system feels fundamentally safe.

Self, with a capital “S” in Internal Family Systems, is something else entirely. The IFS version of “Self” is not your personality, identity, or a constellation of parts. It’s not your life story, the roles you play, your preferences, your beliefs, or even your character strengths. Self is the spacious, compassionate awareness that can hold all of those things without becoming identified with any of them. Every religion has a name for this aspect of your being that is your birthright, that you’re born with, that can’t be damaged by trauma. The IFS “Self” isn’t something you create. It’s something you uncover as your wounded and protective parts begin to trust that they no longer have to run your life.

What creates a lot of suffering is that people with developmental trauma often have less access to both a coherent, healthy ego and to Self. Self is already there, but a healthy ego often has to be built, because you’re not born with a healthy ego. You’re supposed to develop it as a developmental task of childhood.

When your nervous system has spent decades organized around survival, you’ll tend to stay blended with protective parts almost continuously. The inner critic is bashing you. The people pleaser is fawning and accommodating and throwing other parts under the bus to keep the peace. The perfectionist is striving. The overachieving part is succeeding. The caretaker is scanning everyone else’s emotions and trying to juggle everyone’s needs. The intimacy avoider is trying not to bond, not to love, not to feel. These parts aren’t your Self, but they often become mistaken for your identity because they’ve been running the show for so long. But they’re not a solid, stable core identity, or ego.

Trauma treatment helps build ego strength by healing the developmental injuries that left the personality fragmented or unstable. As that healing unfolds, something else happens. Protective parts begin to relax, and when they relax, Self naturally becomes more available.

Notice the order. We don’t try to kill an unstable ego, and we don’t strengthen the ego instead of accessing Self. We strengthen the ego enough that it no longer has to defend itself so relentlessly or act out in unhealthy or even reckless ways. A healthy ego becomes a good steward of ordinary life while Self becomes the wise, compassionate leader of the inner family. They’re partners, not competitors.

If your psyche is a sailboat, Self is the captain. It knows the destination, remains calm during storms, and can see the horizon. But your ego is the ship itself. It provides structure, stability, boundaries, navigation systems, and protection from the waves. Your parts are the crew, each with different jobs, strengths, and fears. No one would suggest throwing the ship overboard because the captain is what really matters. Without a sturdy ship, the captain has nowhere to stand. Likewise, a strong ego doesn’t compete with Self; it makes it possible for Self to lead.

Ego Development Comes Before Transcendence.

Long before anyone can transcend the ego, they first have to develop one. Erik Erikson described healthy psychological development as unfolding through predictable stages across the lifespan. In the earliest years, infants develop basic trust. Toddlers discover autonomy. Young children begin to experience initiative, competence, and eventually a coherent sense of identity. Each stage builds upon the one before it. When these developmental tasks are interrupted by trauma, neglect, abuse, or insecure attachment, the resulting wounds don’t simply disappear because someone starts meditating or attends a spiritual retreat. They wait, undeveloped, often remaining hidden beneath spiritual language, under spiritual bypassing belief systems and practices, until life’s inevitable challenges expose them and reveal the cracks.

Object relations theorists like Donald Winnicott similarly recognized that a child develops a stable sense of self only when caregivers consistently mirror, protect, and delight in the child’s authentic experience. A securely attached child gradually internalizes the feeling, “I exist. I matter. My thoughts and feelings make sense. I can survive disappointment without losing myself.”

When those developmental experiences are missing, people often grow into adults with weak ego strength. They may struggle to know what they feel, what they want, or where their boundaries belong. This makes these people vulnerable to enmeshment, coercive control, authoritarian leaders, or dominating, narcissistic relationships in which someone else defines reality for them and they give their power away because they lack the ego strength to stay separate enough without collapsing.

This is why trauma therapy often begins not with helping people become less attached to themselves, but with helping them become more securely attached to themselves—parts to Self. We learn to notice our feelings and bodily sensations. We learn to trust our own perceptions of reality. We discover that we can tolerate conflict and hold people who hurt us accountable without exploding. We learn to protect our boundaries, to recover a sense of agency, to become someone who can remain connected without disappearing.

In Internal Family Systems, this process isn’t viewed as inflating the ego, as cultic narcissistic spiritual leaders would have you think. It makes sense that spiritual teachers who seek power and control over vulnerable spiritual seekers without enough ego strength would perceive someone else’s no, someone’s firm boundaries, or someone holding them accountable as “being in your ego.” If your ego is bad and you’re in your ego when you’re angry or calling out the cult leader, then by golly, that ego best be smashed so the cult leader can get away with anything they want, no matter how out of control their own overbearing ego might be.

But don’t take the bait. That’s just a strategy to silence dissent, shut down your healthy protest, demonize anger, and scare you into spinny-eyed compliance.

Your ego is supposed to protest when someone is controlling you. It’s supposed to hold your boundaries when someone else is crossing them. It’s supposed to feel angry when you’re being violated or someone else you care about is getting hurt. It’s supposed to resist oppression and retain agency. That way, your ego can ultimately surrender to the greater wisdom of your own Self inside.

Only then does genuine surrender become possible. Otherwise, what looks like surrender is often unhealthy compliance. What might look like egolessness is often identity diffusion. Identity diffusion can masquerade as egolessness, but healthy egolessness is the ability to loosen your identification with a stable identity, to be less rigid and more flexible. Identity diffusion is what happens when there was never a stable identity to loosen. Healthy surrender of the ego to the Self reflects psychological integration; whereas identity diffusion reflects developmental disruption and can make people vulnerable to coercive control and other forms of oppression.

The mystics of every tradition speak of becoming “nobody,” of “no self,” of non-duality. But paradoxically, that invitation only becomes psychologically safe after you’ve first had the chance to become a somebody. If the pursuit of “no self” happens before your identity solidifies, you can become much psychologically sicker, sometimes to the point of psychosis or a dissociative disorder.

Only a solid self that feels securely rooted can safely relax into the experience of being part of something infinitely larger.

Ego Strength Is Not The Same As Egotism

A strong ego is not the same thing as a big ego. Egotism is often an unstable identity, marked by insecurity, wearing a costume of grandiose superiority (like that of many spiritual teachers.) Healthy ego strength is something entirely different.

Healthy ego strength means you can:

• Know who you are without needing constant validation.
• Maintain your own thoughts even when others disagree.
• Set boundaries without excessive guilt.
• Hold people accountable when they’re hurting you.
• Say no.
• Respect the autonomy of other people.
• Protect yourself from abuse.
• Take responsibility for your mistakes.
• Recover after failure.
• Stay connected during conflict without losing yourself.
• Trust your own perceptions.

Notice that none of these qualities make someone arrogant or narcissistic. Quite the opposite. They’re the very qualities that make genuine humility possible. Make choices based on your values rather than blending with scared parts.

Suffice it to say you can’t voluntarily surrender a self you never developed. And if you’re working with spiritual teachers who demand that you do, please…for your own protection, consider seeing a therapist with experience treating spirituality-related psychological issues, like those who specialize is cult recovery.

Spiritual Bypassing Often Mistakes Dissociation For Enlightenment

Many traumatized people with weak ego strength are drawn toward spirituality because they genuinely long for healing, belonging, transcendence, and unconditional love. There’s nothing wrong with that longing. But some spiritual communities unknowingly reward trauma adaptations.

People who have poor boundaries are praised for being “selfless.” People who suppress anger are called “peacemakers” or praised for their dispassionate equanimity. People who abandon their own needs or safety are considered spiritual martyrs. People who tolerate mistreatment without holding anyone accountable are admired for their endless compassion. People who ignore their self-protective spidey senses are congratulated for trusting the teacher.

What psychology recognizes as fawning can easily be mistaken for spiritual surrender. What looks like ego transcendence may actually be self-abandonment. The nervous system cannot tell the difference between “I am surrendering to God” and “I am giving away my agency in order to survive in the presence of this flaming narcissist.”

Only careful discernment can make that distinction, and learning that kind of discernment requires healthy ego strength.

Cult Leaders Love Weak Egos

There is a really important reason so many high-demand spiritual groups emphasize ego death long before they emphasize psychological health. If every disagreement can be dismissed as “your ego talking,” legitimate concerns become impossible to raise. If someone questions financial exploitation, sexual misconduct, emotional manipulation, or abuse of power, they are told they simply haven’t transcended their ego yet, and blame is redirected to the one protesting, who is insulted for not being spiritually advanced enough.

If you say no, your ego is resisting. If you call out hypocrisy, notice contradictions, or protest two sets of rules, then your ego is judging. If you express hurt, your ego has got the best of you. If you’re grieving, you aren’t practicing non-attachment enough. If you leave, your ego has won. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

This is psychologically dangerous. Healthy ego strength is precisely what allows someone to recognize oppression, resist manipulation, trust their own perceptions, spot gaslighting and reality distortions, maintain boundaries, and leave abusive people or systems.

A person with healthy ego development can still be deeply spiritual. They’re simply much harder to exploit.

You need a strong ego before you can safely loosen your grip on it.

The paradox is beautiful.

The stronger your psychological foundation becomes, the less desperately you need to defend it.

People with secure identities don’t cling so tightly to being right. They don’t require constant admiration. They don’t collapse when criticized. They don’t lose themselves inside relationships. Because they’re internally anchored, they can become more flexible, more compassionate, more open, and more capable of experiencing awe, wonder, bliss, and interconnectedness.

That’s not because they destroyed their ego. It’s because their ego became healthy enough to relax. A mature ego is not a prison; it’s a secure home from which we can safely explore the vastness of consciousness. Without that home, transcendence can become dissociation. Surrender can become submission. Devotion can become dependency. Community can become cultic. And spiritual seeking can become exploitation.

Instead Of Ego Death…Healing

If any of this sounds familiar or feels confusing, give yourself a big hug. Take a deep breath. Take a moment of silence to regulate yourself. Then read on…

Perhaps the frightened child inside you doesn’t need another lecture about letting go of yourself. Perhaps he or she or they need someone to finally help them become themselves. To know where they end and another person begins, to trust their own perceptions, to protect what is sacred, to say yes with their whole heart, to say no without apology or justification, to love without disappearing, to belong without conforming, to surrender without abandoning themselves.

When that happens, something remarkable unfolds. The ego doesn’t have to be bullied or crushed into silence. It no longer needs to shout or act out so strongly. The child inside can finally exhale. And from that place of safety, something deeper naturally emerges: the spacious awareness, compassion, and connectedness that spiritual traditions have pointed toward all along.

Not because the ego was destroyed, but because it was finally loved enough to stop being so lonely, lost, confused, and scared.

The wrong kinds of spiritual teachers don’t want you to figure this out. If you send them this article, they’re likely to say “Don’t listen to her. She’s in her ego.” But the right spiritual teachers will celebrate you, support you, encourage you, gently nurture your ego strengthening, tolerate being challenged, admit when they’re wrong, and get curious about your efforts to deconstruct harmful spiritual teachings.

If you need support with ego strengthening, practicing IFS, or learning relational life skills to help you learn to love (yourself and others) in healthier ways, please join us for LOVE SCHOOL, a twice monthly IFS community of practice where we focus on learning, healing, practicing IFS meditation and other IFS tools, writing for the purposes of healing, and rest in Self together, in community.

In our next session, we’ll be focusing on Self-led friendship, how to meet new people, get to know the parts of you that show up when meeting new people, build healthy, safe enough community, heal ruptures with friends, practice discernment, spot red flags, and build more nourishing, reciprocal offline friendships. And we’re always focusing on building healthy ego strength—coming down from grandiosity and coming up from pits of shame or low self esteem.

Join LOVE SCHOOL here.

If you’ve been harmed by spiritual teachings, especially if you developed psychiatric or medical problems because of it, my heart goes out to you. My partner Dr. Jeffrey Rediger, a Harvard medical school professor who also went to Princeton seminary, who is the co-author of our upcoming book RELATIONSICK, has started a small private psychiatric practice for those who live in California or Massachusetts, and he’s uniquely qualified to treat those in recovery from spirituality-based psychiatric or psychological issues. He sees clients remotely via Zoom. You can learn more about him here. And buy our book RELATIONSICK here.

Please go here for the original article and other writings and information related to Lissa Rankin: https://lissarankin.com/no-you-dont-need-to-get-over-your-ego-you-might-actually-need-to-strengthen-it/