4 Ways to Identify Ego so You Can Be Present & Fully Alive in the Moment
Learn how to recognize the stark differences between the identity developed by your ego and the unmistakable, irreplicable energy of your Inner Being.
So you’re ready to do some ego work, but all of the resources you can find on the topic are outrageously abstract, poetically vague, and just plain impossible to understand or execute in your reality.
Welcome my dear friend, you’ve made it to the right place. Have a seat, get comfy, and let’s break it down together.
Thankfully, while the context will vary from person to person, the ego has an extremely recognizable set of characteristics that can be easy to remember and pick out in any environment (with practice, of course).
Let’s start by identifying the source of egoic content. Whether it is a memory, a belief, emotion, viewpoint or opinion, the first and most important thing to see is the separateness of You from your thoughts—the voice in your head that never stops talking.
I would tell you to just think about this for a moment, but that would give your ego (the voice in your head) a chance to call bullshit on my claim and preserve its control over your identity.
Instead, witness it. Take a few deep breaths, feel centered around and connected to your breath, feel the connectedness of your body inside, your aliveness. It may sound wild, but trust me, put all of your attention towards feeling your internal energy. Remove attention from the voice in your head and direct it to physical sensation; feel your breath, fingers, toes, back, neck, on and on until you can sense your internal energy.
If you’re having trouble with this part, stop reading and find a guided body-scan meditation to listen to. This is a great way to get in touch with your internal “aliveness” if you’re completely new to the concept.
The point of this critical first step is to start breaking down the identification we feel with the voice in our mind. Without making this shift in self-perception, you will always believe yourself to be the thinker, rather than the one who witnesses or uses the thinker as a tool of the body.
It is possible to take back control of the thinking tool (the voice in your head) rather than allowing it to control you.
As anyone who’s struggled with clinical anxiety can attest to, we all have moments when our mind seems to be following someone else’s orders. The difficulty is in building the confidence to determine exactly which thoughts we’re in control of, and which are the products of the ego’s insanity. So, the key solution here is building that confidence by training ourselves to know when our ego is responding, and when our true inner essence has center-stage—you can actually learn how to tell the difference.
Here are four foundational characteristics of the ego; anytime you spot these in your thought patterns or emotions, you can know that it’s not really You, it’s coming from your ego.
1. Ego will inject everything with a sense of self—”What does this thought/memory/emotion/opinion/situation mean to me and for my identity?”
It’s become quite normalized to feel as though we are a product of our experiences in life, and that the opinions we hold, the values we honor, the physical attributes of our body and even our own names have all been working together to create our true, unique identity.
“This is me and my story.”
But the truth is, if we spend all of our time experiencing life as a means of creating our identity, we’re basically using the miracle of life for our own selfish gain, to further our self-perception.
We cannot fully or genuinely honor something or someone if we are using them as means of self-enhancement and identification — this would deny the item or person the ability (or really the innate right) to live its own sovereign life. We habitually identify with what they are to us and how they enhance our sense of self.
This concept was made quite clear to me when I applied it to the context of how I viewed and interacted with my significant other; he was my boyfriend, my travel partner, my refuge, my biggest fan, my most trusted confidant, my family. Rather than witnessing, appreciating, and loving him simply as an individual who is exciting, intelligent, spontaneous, trustworthy—rather than simply appreciating the beauty of his heart and the insanity of his mind (independent of what those things could do for me), I found identity in being his girlfriend, and having him as a boyfriend.
We have been taught since birth that we can unearth or create our unique identity by bringing the things that we like close, doing the things we enjoy each and every day, reaching an absolute opinion on a controversial topic, holding on to certain lessons and mistakes from our past. We are constantly giving the external world the power to define who our Inner Essence is, as if that could ever be possible. The energy that created our external world, our society, is not the same energy that created our soul, spirit, Inner Being, “I Am”-ness, whatever it is you want to call the occasionally divine consciousness inside us all.
The form and the formless, as Tolle refers to it, cannot explain each other, they cannot coexist. If we are finding identity in the formed, we lose all connection to the formless inside of us. The opposite is also true—when you are able to live within and maintain awareness of the consciousness inside (the formless) your conceptual identity with things and people (the formed) will fade away.
2. The ego strengthens its personality by making other people and situations ‘wrong’ in order to validate its ‘rightness’.
Honestly, Eckhart Tolle said it best, it doesn’t get much simpler than this.
When you complain, by implication you are right and the person or situation you are complaining about or reacting against is wrong.
There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. Being right is identification with a mental position—a perspective, an opinion, a judgement, a story. For you to be right, of course, you need someone else to be wrong, and so the ego loves to make others wrong in order to be right.
In other words: You need to make others wrong to get a stronger sense of who you are.
Not only a person, but a situation can be made wrong through complaining and reactivity, which implies that “this should not be happening.” Being right places you in a position of imagined moral superiority in relation to the person or situation that is being judged… It is that sense of superiority the ego craves and through which it enhances itself.
~Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose.
From the longstanding debate of whether or not pineapple belongs on pizza, to the enormously antagonistic fight over a woman’s reproductive rights, we tend to validate our identity by winning arguments. We use opinions and beliefs to create boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’—a way to stand out amongst the crowd, a new bundle of thoughts that make us not only different from others, but better.
When you win an argument over an opinion or belief, your identity is validated, strengthened by the concession of your opposition and congratulations from your peers. It feels good to be right. It is, quite literally, an ego boost to believe that the bundle of thoughts we’re so ferociously defending is better, more accurate, of a higher morality than the ‘others.’
But the truth, if it is the absolute and undying truth, does not need or care for your defense. Any disbelief thrown its way will never be able to change the validity of its truth, so you aren’t arguing in service of the truth, you’re arguing to defend and protect your identification with the truth.
“I have to be right about this, because if I’m wrong, that means every part of my identity that was built on this is a sham.”
3. The ego thrives off of long-held grievances and the self-destructive impulses of emotional reactivity.
For an entire decade, I held an immovable grievance against a group of people that either created or worsened the wounds that emerged from the 3 years I spent trapped in a cycle of sexual, verbal, and emotional abuse.
After working with 4 different therapists, a barrage of religious mentors, and having all of the expected breakdowns among friends and family, I held fast to my anger—it was my only protection. I continued to carry around my scars as if they were something to be proud of, something I could build my life around in the hopes that I would never again be hurt in the same way.
But not only that, I felt righteous in my bitterness because I used it to warn others. I convinced myself that I could make it out and tell my story so that others could learn from my mistakes. If I held onto my bitterness, my righteous anger, I could protect anyone and everyone (including myself) from enduring such a thing again.
The only problem was, holding onto this pain made me fragile. I had an endless list of ‘triggers’, I couldn’t hug my parents without crying in the car afterwards, I couldn’t encounter the name of my abusers without enduring a steady stream of flashbacks that would often last for hours. I cried every single day, for virtually no reason. My trauma (by direction of my ego) was manifesting new enemies in every place and person I encountered. And if my pain so choosed, I would spend days in bed; paralyzed, numb, dead inside.
By holding onto and attempting to make strength out of my pain, I was allowing it to run my entire life.
I had found my core identity in being the girl who was abused, and now being the woman who would fight against abuse. That was all I was, a victim with a comeback story. That was all that my pain would allow me to be, and my ego loved it.
It wasn’t until I began my deep dive into literature of enlightenment, awareness, and the common illusions of control that I realized I didn’t need protecting, and more importantly—I didn’t have to resign myself to a life of trauma-responses and endless triggers.
The only thing the ego wants is to survive and control, and when sensitive traumas and enormously tragic pain is involved, it is way too easy to lose the inner You and instead allow pain to run the show. It feels safer, certain, familiar, righteous.
While this idea deserves an entire series of articles all on its own, the primary notion is this: how I feel about what happened to me will never change the reality of my past, it will only change how I show up today, in the present moment.
You see, holding onto a grievance (or even genuine trauma) holds you in a constant state of being “against” the world, situations, people, life. When you hold onto and identify with a painful past experience, you will see life through the distorted lens of that pain. Like a vicious cycle of inward self-harm, you will be destined to find pain in everything and be controlled by it in every moment.
The truth is, the past has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that, and the ego wants nothing more than to be stuck anywhere else than this present moment.
You may not be ready to process or identify the reason why you’re holding onto a grievance, maybe you feel justified, maybe most would consider you justified. Until you reach the point in your healing when you realize that holding onto a past grievance only serves to contaminate today, you will remain under the control of your pain.
4. The gap between “I want” and “what is” is where the ego gets its food.
The ego is made up of thoughts—memories, opinions, beliefs, expectations, dreams, values. So in order to survive, it needs your mind to focus on the most compelling thoughts possible. Think about it like our social media algorithms—it shows you content (thoughts) that you are most likely to get stuck watching (thinking about) for hours, so it can hold your attention as long as it wants.
As you can probably guess at this point, thoughts of the painful past or anxiety-ridden expectations for the future are some of the most compelling thoughts the ego can use. As long as it can keep your attention away from the present moment, it can thrive.
Nothing can change the past or know the future — any attempts to speculate and set detailed expectations for tomorrow or find a fulfilling sense of closure from the past are delusional. All you can truly experience and mold is this very moment, and now this one, and here we are in another new moment already. By the time you read this, I would have had an infinite number of fleeting moments to appreciate.
Each concept we’ve explored in this article is a tactic that we know the ego uses, but pulling at the root of it all is in recognizing if and when your thoughts are taking you away from the present moment. Are you complaining because something isn’t right? Are you upset that something didn’t happen? Are you nervous about what may happen?
Begin to notice how often you live in the past. How often do your past experiences, pains, wrongdoings, or even traumas affect how you are showing up today? Then ask yourself, do you really want to give your pain anymore power over your future? Your ego definitely does.
It’s far easier said than done, but if you can get to a place of accepting that everything is unstable, everything is fleeting, nothing is controllable, predictable or understandable, then the pressure to control and make things “right” evaporates. Live in the knowledge that nothing can be made to be anything it isn’t. The past cannot be changed, the future cannot be decided.
The only thing that can contaminate, disrupt, or harm your day is how you show up to experience it.
The question you must ask, and be entirely honest with yourself in answering, is whether you want a life of peace or drama…
From there, when you can maintain focus on that one simple decision to pursue peace, understand that control is an illusion, and live in the present moment, it all gets relatively easy.
