former ego
Reminder to all spiritual and mystical people – we still need an ego!
I’ve always known that I need at least a little ego. In the early 2000s, when I was a student of what we then called “insight meditation”, I knew, from my lived experience, that I couldn’t abandon my ego, what little I had, because it had saved me so many times.
When teachers would ask us to essentially distance ourselves from our “desires and preferences”, I let my attention wander off; while simultaneously my grandma’s words came to me - “jolly good luck to you”. Meaning - have fun trying to do an impossible thing. I recognized that, in a practical sense, that level of abandonment of preferences is impossible for an ordinary woman in modern times.
I may have come into this world a naive little cupcake, but I quickly learned - if you abandon your ego, they’ll eat you alive.
I have a strong urge to not be eaten alive.
So no, I never really tried to eradicate my ego.
That probably saved me from some sketchy situations.
I keep my preferences simple, but I do let myself be informed and up-to-date on my true desires.
By engaging with those practices for many years, my relationship to ego changed and also my ego itself changed.
My ego is my friend and I let her evolve.
Looking back I see my ego evolving like a Pokemon. It’s cute - early stages just totally frivolous, getting hurt, gaining wisdom, gathering skills and strength, ever-becoming more powerful, even in this moment.
One thing about eclipse seasons is that they fast-forward life and they quantum jump us. This can be good, bad or neutral, but often feels like a shock or a jolt. A chiropractic adjustment of the time-space continuum.
This speed-jump can mean that we walk into August brandishing the ego in one form and then walk out of August sporting a new version of ego. If we play it well, we walk into September cloaked in an ego more aligned with the future and our true nature.
Thinking can go in circles in eclipse season.
This is, by NATURE, a transitional time.
Humans don’t like transition.
Maybe instead of a transition foisted upon us, we look at it as a moment on the threshold, standing in the doorway that you are destined to walk through.
Right now is a good moment to clock things – especially the distant and near past things that might be weakly clinging to your ankles. Ask - “are these things still important to me? shall we drag these guys into the future?”
Right now is also a good moment to keep your tanks topped off and your surfaces clear. Meaning that you are ready for opportunity if need be.
Right now is also a good time to rest, make space for recalibration. A lot of evolutionary things happen “invisibly”, “behind-the-scenes” when we rest.
I do like the image of us checking one ego at the coat check as we enter the month of August, knowing it is HIGHLY LIKELY we’ll all be taking a different ego-coat home at the end. Maybe a better one - something that naturally fits us, and “dresses us well” for the times.
Which brings me to the first of our two summer eclipses. If you watched my Eclipse Season Summer 2026 video (on the Free Page), you will remember the Sabian Symbol for next week’s Eclipse in Leo -
“Intoxicated chickens dizzily trying to fly.”
This is a highly evocative symbol.
It speaks to mass awakening of consciousness, maybe premature, but definitely something where the “feathers are flying”. A lot of chickens are both intoxicated and trying to fly at once. It probably also is going to be a time where a lot of “feathers are getting ruffled”.
I am currently working on the Library video for the Leo eclipse next week. Since I know thinking can go in circles in times like these, it is going to be a pleasant practice that the heart, body, energy field and soul will really enjoy. It will be both a celebration and a respite - with an eye on curtailing that dizzy chicken energy.
May we all go into the near future able to stay supple and change WITH the changes. May we all understand that our ego can have former and current and future evolutions. We are in a micro-era that calls out for individual, collective and cultural change. May we see our Pokemon-esque egoic evolution as part and parcel of the larger revolution.
Until next time,
Jess
“you want a heart in this life, you pay for it.”
- Sylvia Plath, “The Fifteen-Dollar Eagle,” Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams
“I feel like an idiot who had been obediently digging up pieces of coal in an immense mine and has just realized that there is no need to do this, but that one can fly all day and night on great wings in clear blue air through brightly colored magic and weird worlds.”
- Sylvia Plath
MY DEAR
is it true
that your mind is sometimes like
a battering ram
running all through the city,
shouting so madly inside and out
about the ten thousand things
that do not matter?
- Hafiz
“Keep awake - alive - New.
Perform the paradox of being hard and yet soft.
Survive without calcification of the tender membranes.
Be a poet.
Be alive. “
- Tennessee Williams
"There are moments when the elixir of life rises to such over-brimming splendor that the soul spills over. In the seraphic smile of the Madonna's the soul is seen to flood the psyche. The moon of the face becomes full; the equation is perfect. A minute, a half-minute, a second later, the miracle has passed. Something intangible, something inexplicable, was given out - and received. In the life of a human being it may happen that the moon never comes to the full. In the lives of some human beings it would seem, indeed, that the only mysterious phenomenon observable is that of perpetual eclipse. In the case of those afflicted with genius, whatever the form it may take, we are almost frightened to observe that there is nothing but a continuous waxing and waning of the moon. Rarer still are the anomalous ones who, having come to the full, are so terrified by the wonder of it that they spend the rest of their lives endeavoring to stifle that which gave them birth and being. The war of the mind is the story of the soul-split. When the moon was at full there were those who could not accept the dim death of diminution; they tried to hang full-blown in the zenith of their own heaven. They tried to arrest the action of the law which was manifesting itself through them, through their own birth and death, in fulfillment and transfiguration. Caught between the tides they were sundered; the soul departed the body, leaving the simulacrum of a divided self to fight it out in the mind. Blasted by their own radiance they live forever the futile quest of beauty, truth and harmony. Depossessed of their own effulgence they seek to possess the soul and spirit of those to whom they are attracted. They catch every beam of light; they reflect with every facet of their hungry being. Instantly illumined, when the light is directed towards them, they are also as speedily extinguished. The more intense the light which is cast upon them the more dazzling - and blinding - they appear. Especially dangerous are they to the radiant ones; it is always towards these bright and inexhaustible luminaries that they are most passionately drawn."
- Henry Miller
“Bear in my that you are a great wizard. You can use your powers to practice white magic on yourself instead of the other kind. The most basic way to do that is to concentrate on naming, savoring, and feeling gratitude for the blessings you do have…
Don’t ignore the bad stuff, but make a point of celebrating the good stuff with all the exuberant devotion you can muster.”
- Rob Brezsny, Pronoia
“People seek retreats for themselves in the countryside, by the seashore, in the hills; and you too have made it your habit to long for that above all else. But this is altogether unphilosophical, when it is possible for you to retreat into yourself whenever you please; for nowhere can one retreat into greater peace or freedom from care than within one’s own soul, especially when a person has such things within him that he has merely to look at them to recover from that moment perfect ease of mind (and by ease of mind I mean nothing other than having ones mind in good order). So constantly grant yourself this retreat and so renew yourself; but keep within you concise and basic precepts that will be enough, at first encounter, to cleanse you from all distress and to send you back without discontent to the life to which you will return.”
- Marcus Aurelius, (AD 121-180)
“As Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius reminded us more than two millennia ago, it's not our experiences that form us but the ways in which we respond to them; a hurricane sweeps through town, reducing everything to rubble, and one man sees it as a liberation, a chance to start anew, while another, perhaps even his brother, is traumatized for life. "There is nothing either good or bad," as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, "but thinking makes it so."
So much of our lives takes place in our heads - in memory or imagination, in speculation or interpretation - that sometimes I feel that I can best change my life by changing the way I look at it. As America's wisest psychologist, William James, reminded us, "The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another." It's the perspective we choose - not the places we visit - that ultimately tells us where we stand."
- Pico Iyer
"I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves - we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other's destiny."
- Mary Oliver
“The fire and the rose are one.”
t.s. Eliot
"As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the suffering of our fellow-prisoners; decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can."
- Virginia Woolf
The soul, like the moon,
is new, and always new again.
And I have seen the ocean
continuously creating.
Since I scoured my mind
and my body, I too, Lalla
am new, each moment new.
My teacher told me one thing,
Live in the soul.
When that was so,
I began to go naked,
and dance.
—Lal Ded, 14th century, Kashmir. Translated by Coleman Barks
“In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak.”
― Tom Robbins