Ego Deaths and Spiritual Awakenings

I’ve died a hundred times and will die a hundred more.

I’m not here to heal 14 generations of family trauma. Our ancestors left us with so much more than that: willpower, strength, courage, wisdom, tenacity, love, compassion, forgiveness, and life itself. Not just their problems passed down to us.

I had to kill off the part of myself that spiritually bypassed self-acceptance and accountability, that I am 100% responsible for being exactly where I am in life today. 

The part of me that thought someone was coming to save me had to die. 

I slayed the part of myself that thought I was going to save someone else.

Part of me had to die when I thought I was going to be with that one girl forever, when it didn’t work out.

I had to kill part of me that didn’t understand that my parents and family did the absolute best they could with what was available to them while raising me, regardless of my perception of right, wrong, fair, bad, or good.

I had to kill off the part of me that held resentments.

I had to kill the part of me that wanted to be understood by others.

The part of me that wanted to be liked and to “fit in” had to go.

I had to kill the weeds of rage and rejection to plant a garden of self-worth so flowers of inner peace could blossom.

The part of me that was fueled by politics had to die. Letting go of what is out of my control while still caring, yet not allowing myself to be pressured by others.

I had to kill the part of me which truly wasn’t me, wasn’t mine; all that was outside of myself, the thought I could control an outcome, or had some ability to do so. Allowing people and the world to be exactly how it is while coming back to myself and what is within my abilities and field of expertise.

~Each time we shine light on one of these aspects of self, we can dissolve that part of our ego to explore and rediscover who we are without it. This exploration leads to seeing other aspects of self that we must face as well, continuously sculpting our behavioral patterns and lens of perception from the inner to outer world, and how we interact with it. Lose everything and find out who you are with nothing. 

There are many forms of ego death

I’ve been working with psychedelics for over 20 years, learned from and brewed Ayahuasca in Peru, started a religious nonprofit, and have been serving legally in the states since 2019. The topic of ego death and what that is comes up quite frequently, so I’d like to talk a little about that here as a psychedelic facilitator.

Your ego is part of you, your light and your shadow. The yin and the yang. The anima and animus. The ego never fully dies, nor can one rid themselves of their ego, ever. To remove your ego would be removing the consciousness that animates your physical vessel. Humans need three things to maintain life: the brain, the lungs, and the heart. The heart pumps the blood, the lungs pump the air, and the brain pumps electrical impulses.

In many ancient languages, breath and spirit are synonyms. Your spirit is your breath. Your lungs are lifeless without breath. Your breath is medicine. Strong, full breath = strong spirit, strong tenacity. Weak, shallow breathing = low spirit, low energy, low blood flow. When the spirit has left the body, breath has left the body as the body stops breathing.

Sol means light. Soul/Sol/Sun/light. “The Temple of Solomon” is three different languages, meaning light, Sol, Om, and On. Your soul is your light. You are light. You are physical, manifested, dense light. Your body (soul) is literally a temple of light, while spirit is the breath that rolls through you and connects you to every living person, plant, and animal on this planet.

You don’t have a soul; you are the soul. You are the light, as well as the light is within you.

When we engage in breath work, we add fuel to the fire. The fire itself is consciousness, the spark of life and furnace that suspends all of existence.

We are humans, manifested hues of light, individual colors within a spectrum of the rainbow that is the collective. Consciousness is a collaborative experience between the unified collective and the individual. The unified consciousness chooses individuality like the colors of the rainbow, separate yet together as one; each with its intended purpose and harmonizing color creating combinations. Your individual experience is part of the unified consciousness, choosing to see the world through your eyes, hear music through your ears, dance the way you dance, dress how you dress, and speak the way you speak.

The spirit fuels and amplifies the soul. The breath fuels and amplifies the light body. The light body/soul is woven into the fabric of the unified consciousness, individual and collective. The breath/spirit is one of three necessary fuels for the soul/light body to sustain life on this planet; the others being food and water. We are beings with awareness and discernment; without consciousness, the body is lifeless, the soul lacks animation and movement, and the driver behind the wheel is absent.

So who or what is the driver? What’s driving the decisions this vessel makes? The great existential question and journey of self-awareness that allows us to truly reflect while looking in the mirror. Observing one’s own thoughts and actions allows the self to be aware of what actions drive the driver to set the destination on the GPS of their life decisions. Am I truly the driver within this earthly vehicle, or is there a set of preconditioned circumstances that force the accelerator and the hand that turns the wheel? If I don’t identify or no longer fit into a particular subgenre or category based on belief structures, who am I? Without my wardrobe, without these things, what would I be? Would I lose my friends? Were they really friends if they only liked me because of my wadrobe/car/boat/job/status/popularity/lifestyle/money/what I offered? Am I the same person without those friends?

Am I the story of what happened to me while growing up? Am I a victim of my previous relationships? Is that why I can’t trust or love someone new? Am I a record repeating the same story to different faces at different times, so they hear the song that I sing that makes me who I am? Am I that song? Am I that story on loop? Who would I be if I stopped telling the story? Am I a story of rejection or prosperity? Do I sing a song of hard times or make an anthem of accomplishments? This thing happened to me, which made me like this; now this is my personality.

The ego is an aspect of our personality and our personal perspective of the whole universe and all of its contrasts. Depending on how we were raised and where, our ego will influence our life decisions, how we judge scenarios and people, influence how we dress, what music we listen to, and the social activities we partake in. The ego is the driver in the seat of the vessel. One can have awareness of the driver, or pretend to be the passenger in life and play the victim role.

Things don’t happen to you; they just happen.

A “blessings in disguise” mindset is fundamental ego awareness. Locking your keys in your car could have saved you from a terrible accident, or the person who ghosted you actually opened you up to a relationship that is more in alignment. The observer judges, labels, categorizes, and compartmentalizes the experience to put it into an area of their understanding that best fits their ability to comprehend the scenario. The ego itself may be limited by the capacity of its own awareness to fully comprehend the dynamics of the whole situation. The child wants a cookie before dinner, and the parents say no; the child may kick, scream, and say the parents are unfair, don’t care about the child, don’t love them, or whatever. The truth is, the parents were making sure the child waited until dinner to fill up on healthy nutrients instead of sugary sweets. The child simply can not reason or even fathom if the parent tried to explain. The child may even try to refuse the good food when presented to it, literally pushing away what’s healthy because it didn’t get what it wanted that was unhealthy. A child may hold other resentments toward the parents, as if they denied them an opportunity to fit in with other kids in school, stunting their social status if they didn’t keep up with the current trends. The child who had “too much” in others’ eyes or “too little” in their own eyes suffers the same in different ways; every rose has its thorns. Being broken up with and hating an ex, to realize later you were an equal part of the problem, you just couldn’t see it at the time. Refusing the good, healthy relationship because you didn’t get the unhealthy one you wanted, like the cookie. The ego can learn, heal, forgive, accept, and adapt. Our sails can be adjusted accordingly.

Resentments in the heart and an unchecked bad mood can turn into a behavior pattern, which can lead to a personality trait that holds a negative outlook. 

An ego with a negative outlook will focus on what they don’t like; what they resist persists; they find more things they don’t like to complain about; they like complaining about the things they don’t like, and that triggers their happy dopamine receptors. Finding comfort in the misery as a confirmation bias of how bad the world is, or their life seemingly is. An attitude of gratitude focuses the mind on the positive things we appreciate, so we will naturally align with more things we find joy in and are grateful for, which triggers the dopamine receptors. Our ego is always seeking its chemicals and will get them any way it knows how. The person at the bar for last call and the person on the yoga mat are both chasing a feeling; one is more sustainable. It’s up to the individual to learn itself, how it triggers its dopamine receptors, its energy manipulation tactics, and its self-preserving narcissistic tendencies. Our ego is the way we bob and weave through 8 billion others; there are healthy and unhealthy relationships with it, authentic and inauthentic. Learning to manage our own energy, when to be humble, when to be bold, and being authentically honest with others about our intentions is class and character.

Our egos are a combination of: 

The foundational seeds of our upbringing, 

How we learned to manipulate or get energy, 

The outlook of our personal perspective on life experiences, 

And the ability to self-reflect on our own thoughts, feelings, and actions, 

all of which collectively accumulate and harmonize to create our personality.

Our personality adapts as we learn and expose our unconscious behavioral patterns. 

The awakening involves becoming aware of our behavioral patterns and tearing down the walls of personal identity and belief structures. Bringing awareness to our bodies’ own chemical addictions and learning to manage them, as well as our communication style and how we receive energy/chemicals from others.

Awakening is understanding that we are responsible for our personal expansion, so we don’t get stuck telling the same story, but continuously adjust our sails to create new ones.

Awakening is withdrawing for a little while, like a caterpillar to a butterfly. It can be a painfully cathartic and beautifully rewarding experience as we lose parts of ourselves to discover new ones. Our ego never really dies; it just changes and learns to fly.

TAKE ACTION: Awakening is an ongoing process of self-discovery, reflection, and growth. If this message resonated with you, explore more of Aaron Eschenburg’s teachings and his work with traditional plant wisdom at Ancestral Herbs.