questions. For example, when I breathe,
how far into my body does that breath
have to go before it stops being air and
becomes a part of me? Where does my
ear end and sound begin? Where does
this writing end and your mind begin?
As we ask these questions, we begin to
see that the boundaries the ego creates
are arbitrary. The body cannot be
separated from the world we live in,
except in our imagination.
TheBhagavad Gitasays when we are
truly aligned with our highest potential
we serve others without worrying about
whether it benefits us. We surrender our
actions to something greater than our
own egoic concerns. It isn’t a seismic
shift that gets us there. It’s a constant,
gentle effort that helps us transcend the
ego through purposeful living.
Ultimately, yoga’s lesson is that we
can live in the world and at the same
time draw nourishment from the part
of us that is beyond the world. If we can
direct even a small amount of the energy
we use to maintain our self-image
toward something bigger, we will be
able to more fully nurture our potential.
We will come to see our ego as a porous
membrane through which we move
each time we seek to travel between our
individual human experience and our
vast and boundless consciousness.THINK OF YOUR HOUSE —the place you
live — it contains you, you retreat there
and inside its structure you change and
grow. These things are healthy. Because
you have a house, you can move into the
world and function there. If you never
left your house, however, its structure
would become unhealthy.
The ego is like this house. It contains
us. It organises our attention. It gives us
an experience of our personality. It isn’t
wrong to have an ego, just as it isn’t
wrong to have a house, but each of these
things should moor our experience, not
restrict it. This is what allows us to both
have an ego and move beyond it.
Ego is the part of us that mediates
between our internal, instinctual drives
and the social and ethical customs we
abide by to live as part of a community.
One of its primary responsibilities is to
determine what, in our environment, we
attend to and what we ignore. It chooses
which of our impulses we express (those
that support our self-image) and which
we repress (those that do not). It
protects the parts of us that feel
vulnerable and employs strategies to
ensure that our physical, mental and
emotional needs are met while we grow
and evolve. It has a tricky job. It needs to
be strong enough to integrate the
countless uplifting, challenging and
contradictory experiences we have and,
at the same time, maintain a level of
internal stability that allows us to feel
secure.
The Sanskrit word for ego —
ahamkara — speaks to this. It means
‘I maker’ and refers to our internal
storyteller that paints the world with the
colours of ‘I, me and my’. In navigating
our human experience, it’s an all-important compass, problematic only
if we become confined by the thoughts,
emotions and experiences it generates.
However, when it comes to our
spiritual evolution, it’s important to
understand that while our ego is
certainly a part of us, it’s notallthat we
are. To believe that it is, is to believe in
an illusion, an illusion which yoga says
is the foundational source of our
suffering. It’s calledavidya, which
means ‘ignorance’ but not just any kind
of ignorance; ignorance of our true
nature. Avidya is our tendency to treat
as ‘true’ the parts of our experience
that change, while turning a blind eye
to the parts of ourselves that are
unchanging: eternal.
This seems abstract, but we can
play with the idea in a practical way.
Day-to-day, we treat our thoughts
and emotions as if they were all we
are. But consider this: the fact that we
can witness our thoughts means there
is an aspect of our awareness that exists
beyond them. When we step into the
place of ‘witness’ we tap into a deep and
spacious aspect of our awareness that
sees but doesn’t think, and watches but
doesn’t judge. It is pure, still and
eternal.
Yoga says that if we can tap into this
part of our self, we will realise that we
are not an isolated ego floating in space,
but rather a single drop of awareness
in the vast ocean of energy and
consciousness we call life. We will see
that our ego is simply the vehicle
through which universal consciousness
expresses itself inside us as an
individual.
We can touch this more universal
56 part of our self by asking some simple
november/december 2017yogajournal.com.auOur ego has a tricky job mediating between our internal drives and the social and
ethical customs around us. So, how does it work and how do we learn to evolve?
The mystery that is
YOU
By Karina Guthrie
Karina is a full-time yoga teacher at
The Practice Bali, a studio committed to
making traditional technologies accessible
to contemporary practitioners. She has
also recently launched Breathe Yoga and
Wellness, a website that supports yoga
teachers to continue their studentship of
yoga. Follow her journey and teachings at
http://www.breatheyogaandwellness.com and on
instagram @karina.guthrie