How do we work with both? Why do we need to? What is ego shadow?
In Part One, I reflected on my evolving understanding of essence and ego—not as abstract spiritual ideas but as lived realities that shape how I show up for myself, my relationships, and the clients I walk alongside. What’s becoming increasingly clear is that knowing the difference between ego and essence isn’t enough. Personally and professionally, the real work is learning how to relate to them, navigate their tension, bring them into a conscious dance, and meet the shadow that inevitably surfaces when we do.
This is where the work deepens.
How Do We Work with Ego?
Working with ego, for me, starts with respect. It’s not what I used to believe. Earlier in my spiritual journey, I saw the ego as something to overcome or dissolve. But I’ve understood what Jung emphasized long ago: the ego is not our enemy—it’s a developmental necessity. It’s the part of us that negotiates reality, makes choices, and protects us from overwhelm. In trauma healing especially, the ego is often the first responder. It shows up in dissociation, defensiveness, perfectionism, and overachievement—all ways we’ve learned to stay safe. Recognizing and respecting the role of the ego is a crucial step in our personal and professional growth.
But what once kept us safe eventually becomes the cage. So the invitation isn’t to destroy the ego but to befriend it, to hold it in loving awareness. Tolle’s teaching—”watch the thinker”—has been vital. In my practice, I often return to the observer seat, noticing when my ego is narrating, comparing, or reacting. That simple act of noticing begins to loosen the ego’s grip.
Michael Brown offers another pathway: feel rather than fix. He believes the ego’s resistance softens when we meet our emotional body without trying to change it. I’ve experienced this firsthand—when I resist my anger, my ego flares; when I breathe into it, something softens. The ego finally relaxes when it senses I’m willing to feel instead of flee.
Thomas Hübl adds a powerful relational layer. He reminds us that the ego cannot be integrated in isolation. Our wounds were formed in relationship, and so healing often happens in relationship. Through attuned presence—with ourselves, with others, with a field larger than us—the ego slowly begins to trust that it doesn’t have to be in charge.
How Do We Work with Essence?
Working with essence feels less like doing and more like allowing. It’s subtle and quiet, often missed in a culture obsessed with performance and productivity. For me, essence reveals itself when I’m deeply present—when I drop beneath my thoughts, connect with nature, or sit in stillness with a client and feel that sacred hush between us. Essence provides us with the capacity to connect, to love, and to say “We.” It is this essence that inspires hope and a sense of connection in our personal and professional lives.
Almaas teaches that essence emerges through inquiry, a kind of somatic curiosity that brings presence into direct contact with our experience. Instead of asking, “How do I fix this?” I’ve learned to ask, “What’s here right now?” This shift in orientation creates space for essence to arise—not as a goal, but as a natural state that was always there beneath the noise.
I often guide my clients into this space, too—not by giving answers but by helping them slow down enough to notice what’s real, what’s alive, and what’s not a story. And when they touch it—even for a moment—something reorders itself, not from effort but from alignment.
Essence doesn’t shout. It doesn’t compete. It simply is. And the more I orient toward it, the more I can hold my ego’s fear without being consumed.
Why Do We Need to Work with Both?
Trauma recovery is not just about releasing pain—it’s about remembering our wholeness. Wholeness includes all of us: our light, our shadow, our ego, our essence. When we try to leapfrog over the ego to get to essence, we create what Hübl calls ‘spiritual bypass’—a subtle form of dissociation dressed up as transcendence. Spiritual bypass is a term used to describe the tendency to use spiritual beliefs and practices to avoid dealing with our emotional and psychological issues. It’s a way of ‘skipping over’ the hard work of personal growth and healing by focusing solely on the positive aspects of spirituality. When we live only from ego, we stay trapped in reaction, performance, and separation cycles.
We need both. Ego allows us to function, differentiate, and say ‘I.’ Essence provides us with the capacity to connect, to love, and to say ‘We.’ When these two aspects are in conscious relationship, something remarkable happens: we move through the world with clarity and compassion. By ‘conscious relationship,’ I mean a state of awareness where we can recognize when our ego is taking over and consciously choose to bring our essence back into the picture. This balance allows us to become instruments of presence—not perfect, but available. We should strive for the balance and harmony between ego and essence in our personal and professional lives.
I want this for myself and my clients: not to be free of ego but to befriend it. We should not live in essence all the time but return to it repeatedly as a home base, encouraging and motivating us to continue our journey of personal and professional growth. Why not aspire to live in essence all the time?
Because essence is vast, and we are also human.
Living in essence means residing in presence, love, truth, and timeless awareness. It’s spacious and luminous. But it’s also egoless, which can feel disorienting, even threatening, to the parts of us that are still healing, still needing control, identity, safety, or validation.
For instance, when we feel the need to control a situation or seek validation from others, that’s our ego at play. On the other hand, when we’re fully present in the moment, feeling love and truth, that’s our essence shining through. We don’t live in essence all the time because we’re wired for survival. The ego organizes our experience, manages our boundaries, protects our wounding, and gives us a sense of self. Without it, we wouldn’t know how to function in a world of clocks, calendars, and contracts.
Living in essence all the time might also dissolve the friction that allows growth, creativity, and intimacy. In truth, we need both: the ego to navigate form, and essence to remind us we’re more than it. It’s this delicate balance that guides us.
It’s not about staying in essence—it’s about remembering it, returning to it, and slowly integrating it into how we live, speak, touch, and choose. This process is a journey of growth and transformation.
What Is Ego Shadow?
If ego is our conscious identity, then the shadow is everything that our identity refuses to see. Jung described the shadow as the disowned parts of the self—the emotions, desires, and impulses we’ve judged, suppressed, or rejected. It’s the aspects of us we were told were “too much” or “not enough.” Over time, these exiled parts accumulate in the unconscious, driving our behavior from behind the scenes.
My ego shadow emerges when I’m reactive, judgmental, or overly identified with being ‘the healer.’ It shows up when I pretend to be calm but feel resentment underneath, when I bypass my pain in the name of professionalism and when I fear being vulnerable because some old part of me still equates that with danger. For instance, when I get defensive in a disagreement, that’s my ego shadow at play. Or when I feel a surge of jealousy towards a colleague’s success, that’s another manifestation of my ego shadow. Other common manifestations of ego shadow include feeling superior or inferior to others, being overly critical, or needing to control situations.
Tolle calls this reactivity “unconsciousness”—moments when the pain body hijacks the present and repeats the past. Michael Brown frames it as “emotional charge”: suppressed emotions from childhood that distort our perception until they’re integrated. Emotional charge is the term used to describe the intense emotional energy stored in our bodies when we don’t fully process our feelings. This stored energy can often influence our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors without realizing it. Hübl expands the lens even further, pointing to the collective shadow—unprocessed cultural, ancestral, and societal trauma that we each carry and perpetuate unless we consciously choose to interrupt the cycle.
What strikes me most is that the shadow isn’t inherently negative—it’s just unseen. And what remains unseen rules us. When we turn toward it with presence and curiosity however, it becomes a portal—a doorway back into essence.
Integration as a Way of Life
These days, I live less from answers and more from inquiry. I don’t always succeed. My ego still wants control, validation, and certainty. My essence invites surrender, openness, and humility. And my shadow—well, it’s always nearby, waiting to be met with compassion.
But I’m learning, softening, and circling closer to something that feels profoundly true: that healing isn’t about becoming someone else—it’s about becoming more ourselves. It is about weaving ego, essence, and shadow into a tapestry of wholeness that can hold our own stories and those of the people we serve.
That’s the deeper invitation I feel now—to meet each moment, each client, each part of myself, not with force but with presence, to walk the path of integration not as a task but as a devotion.
And maybe that’s what this whole journey is really about—not perfection, not transcendence, but remembering who we are, over and over again, until even our ego becomes a doorway to the divine.
