Use Mindfulness to Emancipate Your Life Potential by Disarming These 3 Ego Traps

Every day, the vast majority of people across the world struggle. They struggle everywhere, regardless of background, nation, race, gender, sexual preference, income or wealth, living situation, or any other label that people identify themselves by. People all around the world struggle with the inherently challenging situations that life presents them, and they continue to struggle when they fall prey to traps, or obsessive thought loops that their own minds - their egos - set.

However, every single person, no matter their circumstances or identity label, actually possesses the ability to free themselves from these ego-designed traps. The ego by design is never satisfied for long, and so the ego needs to be fed constantly by reinforcing its imaginary image of self. This is why these traps are so devastating and mire us constantly in obsessive thought loops: these ego traps reset themselves every time they are sprung or every time you manage to free yourself from them.

Stoking the ego is a lifelong addiction that prevents most people from fully enjoying the incredible journey that is life. Most people believe what their egos tell them about how they need to do various things to feel okay, to feel important, or to feel alive. This belief ties their identity to the ideas their egos project in their minds, which are inherently insatiable; the vision of self that the ego creates is an asymptotic imagination that can never be attained.

You are as you are and life is as it is in each moment. When you change and become something else or when life changes and as a result you become something else, then you are now something else. The law of the universe is constant change. So at some point before long, who you are and the life around you will change again.

The ego is problematic by nature because it tells you that the universal rule of constant change does not apply to the vision of self it convinces you to believe in. It convinces you to resist changes it sees as negative such as losing something you have and crave changes it sees as positive such as gaining something you do not have. In either case, the ego constantly resists the reality of the present moment and tries to control life itself by controlling change. Once again, this is impossible, because the nature of the universe is constant change. This is why the ego is insatiable. It actually believes that it is possible to reach and maintain constant alignment with the asymptotic vision of life it imagines, which is by definition always somewhere different than where you are in each moment.

The ego may be silent at times when it perceives nothing “important” as changing. Yet when some “important” change inevitably happens that pushes your real, present reality out of alignment with this idealized image of self, the ego barrages you with negative thoughts and emotions, urging you to figure out some way to fix the change and get back or gain whatever was lost or not yet attained.

For instance, it can be as simple as being annoyed when someone calls you in the middle of working or studying. Your ego shows you a self image of a very dedicated person, when suddenly your concentration is interrupted and your reality loses alignment with that image. In this moment, the ego will resist that change and make you feel upset for being interrupted. Your self image was a you who concentrates diligently for several hours, or maybe more, without losing focus. Does being interrupted have any material impact on who you are? Does being interrupted mean the world thinks less of you for not concentrating for four hours straight? You can simply choose to deal with the interruption and then get back to concentrating. You’re still a being who is/was/will be concentrating. There is no reason to be upset, but in that moment you feel upset because your ego convinces you that working without interruption is essential for you to feel productive and ultimately successful in life. How petty is that? What if it was your family or friend calling to tell you that someone close to them just died, and they wanted to talk to you to be comforted? How insane would it be to cling to your vision of an uninterrupted, dedicated self in the face of that change?

Let me clarify that there is no problem with concentrating. This little story is not telling you never to choose to concentrate for hours at a time. On the contrary: building your concentration abilities can be very beneficial to you as you explore life. This is only a small warmup before covering the following three ego traps. Its aim is to help open your mind a little more than before to the possibility that the ego’s impossible pursuit of an ideal vision of self will constantly create problems, when they do not need to be created.

The real problem stems from the ego’s mental resistance to the law of the universe: constant change. So the problem is not concentrating, but rather getting upset when you are interrupted while concentrating. That resistance is what drains your energy and prevents you from feeling peaceful, even when change happens. That resistance prevents you from accessing the power of presence to address change with grace and acceptance, and allow change to be a neutral, if not positive experience. Answer the phone and decide to go do something else. Or if it makes sense, get back to concentrating. Either way, there’s no reason to be upset. You do not need to feel upset because you are always as you are in any moment, even as you change. You are not diminished when the ego is diminished, as Eckhart Tolle might say.

Every single person has the means to emancipate themselves from the impossible traps of their own egos and bring more peace, energy, and power into their lives. It is as simple as learning to become a  Presentvert. For all of us, this requires letting go of the egoic image of ourselves that lives in the past and future, and fully accepting the present moment and who we are in each moment.

Here are three examples of mental traps that I’ve seen set in my own mind as well as those of friends and family. In each case is also revealed a path to freedom from ego.

Ego trap #1: Complaining is like venting - it’s healthy and makes me feel better.

Complaining certainly feels like a way to let negativity out, and cathartic after a rough day. Sometimes, complaining even feels like a part of the process of working through problems, and necessary in order to discover new insights.

While complaining - or more accurately talking - can release negative energy, the danger with complaining is that hanging on the underside of every complaint is a little hook which is attached at the other end to an ego trap. Complaints hook into your consciousness and pull you out of the present and into the past or future when a complaint becomes a common refrain, or the act of complaining itself becomes a chronic habit. Obsessive, complaining-oriented behavior is a clear sign that one of these hooks has sprung the ego trap. At this point you are no longer living in the present moment where it’s possible to either accept the situation or take action to change the situation that you are complaining about. You are now living in an impossible, asymptotic vision of reality; an ego-designed mental image of the past or an imagined future.

For example, the next time you talk to that person you are complaining about, your ego-perceived reality is that they will still be an asshole to you, no matter what. Even if they are almost killed by a drunk driver and suddenly questioning their own behaviors and are trying not to be an asshole any longer, you will still be suspicious, because in your imagined reality of complaining, they are an asshole to you. You will still remember all the wrongs they have done you, despite talking to a person who may now possibly want to ask your forgiveness for those actions. You won’t be ready to dissolve that negativity in your own life and move on with more peace, because you have literally hooked yourself deeper into that negativity with every complaint.

You will not bother to try making any changes to your situation either, because you have hooked your future up to that negativity as well. In your imagined future life, nothing you can do in the present will take you anywhere except for the same negative past that you already think of as reality. Therefore, your mind convinces you to complain more, as if this is the only present action available to you.

You won’t have an honest conversation with that asshole to truly probe for the possibility that they will change. If you do, then you will bring that egoic negativity into the conversation, to which the asshole’s ego will likely convince them to react, which will make the situation worse. You won’t bother having a second conversation either, because your mind convinces you that “obviously talking about the same thing to someone twice never led to a different outcome.” You will ignore or misremember the cases where people had to talk to you or a good friend about things multiple times before you or they really listened. You will find some excuse, such as fearing being passed over for an upcoming promotion, to not talk to your boss about the matter if the asshole is a colleague. Or your ego will convince you that your boss is an asshole, too who won’t listen. Even if this is true, your ego will continue defending/seeking your vision of you as the victim of an asshole, and make up reasons not to talk to HR, or to change your job, or to start your own company. You won’t accept that they are an asshole and allow their comments to pass through you either, because your identity is being the asshole’s victim, and playing this role requires you always to become incensed by the outrageous things they say. If your friend is an asshole, your mind will convince you not to talk to them or stop being friends with them for other, logical-sounding reasons. If the asshole is a family member, your mind will convince you not to seek therapy to work towards confronting, disengaging from, or learning to live with that family member.

Once the complaint-based ego trap is sprung, your mind will convince you at every turn to believe that the present will never change and that the ideal vision of you is to continue to be this asshole’s victim.  So long as you are trapped by your ego, you will in turn keep yourself shut out of the energy, peace, and power that comes from accepting or acting to change your present reality.

If this resonates with you, then why would you even bother complaining in the first place? Is being a complainer and a victim of whatever it is you’re complaining about really an identity that you want to have? Is complaining really the only way for you to release energy or negativity and feel better?

Your mind may convince you that it’s a must to complain, because everyone does, you can stop complaining whenever you want to, and it’s the easiest way to blow off that negativity (even though negativity really only begets more negativity). Your ego wants you to believe this, because complaining generally leads to more complaining, and this means more chances to hook you into the ego trap and stop living in the present. However, going for a run, playing a sport, working out, playing music, playing with your pet, cooking, and even taking a few deep breaths are also ways to accomplish the same thing that complaining does. So why not do one of those things instead? Or, why not simply redirect your mindset and focus on something positive? Tell a friend about an upcoming vacation, a new project you’re excited about, or ask them about their own lives.

While the substance that complaints stem from often holds a deeper issue that can be addressed by actually operating in the present, the urge to complain itself is like an itch: if you leave it alone for long enough, it will disappear.

Ego trap #2: In order to be happy, I must first achieve X.

This ego trap is one that many people fall prey to because it is imprinted on us virtually everywhere we look, and from very early on. Growing up in school is where we learn that a C is not a B, which is not an A-, which is not an A. Even a perfect score of 100/100 or 4.0/4.0 is no longer perfect; taking advanced placement courses can boost student grade point averages past what was previously a perfect score. Then come early jobs or internships, which enable us to attain money, credit, and status, along with material goods and experiences, which we learn to spend that money and credit on in order to enhance our status in pursuit of an egoic vision of ourselves.

In order to be fulfilled and happy, the message is that we need to do something and achieve some point while doing that something. Society gives our family/friends/teachers the same message, who then often help to reinforce it with us.

This ego trap is set when this norm is internalized. The trap springs once we have achieved those various things, if our subsequent thought is that now we can’t stop to be happy about what we have achieved until we achieve the next thing. The trap ensnares us in a constant loop where we constantly feel unhappy, because we believe that we haven’t achieved enough yet and will feel bad until we do achieve more. As you can see, this is another asymptotic egoic vision, where the goal posts for happiness simply shift every time we think we score, and the game goes on to an endless overtime.

The voice in your head, which is your ego, may attempt to distract you from listening here and disarming this trap by claiming something such as “achieving things and constantly striving to better yourself is good. If a person doesn’t strive for that, they would become lazy, unsuccessful, unliked. Or they will lose all the positive things they have achieved.”

The clue that will help you to stay focused on disarming this ego trap is not in whether or not you achieve things. Just like concentrating, achievements can be great. They can keep us alive, stoke our excitement for life, and help others. The clue is in whether or not you think that achieving things is required to be happy.

It’s fine for an achievement to make you feel satisfied, but it is important to realize that achievements are not the only way to feel satisfied or happy. This realization is the key to disarming your ego’s trap when the glow from your latest achievement fades. In such a moment is when you are closest to escaping the trap, but also the point at which you will succumb to another round of ego ingratiation, which will end in the same critical fork in the road at some point in the future, when the glow from your next achievement fades.

Step out of the trap and into freedom by exploring the other ways you feel happy that don’t involve achieving anything. For many it is spending time with friends or family, enjoying nature, or doing something just for the joy of it, like playing music. Realizing that achievements aren’t the only way to become happy will help you to attach less importance - ego - to achievements in the first place, which will enable you to live your life more mindfully and with more energy, peace, and power.

Beware that you will step back into the trap if you find yourself trying to turn the thing which you enjoy into an achievement, such as needing to spend X hours per week with friends, or be able to play Y song on the guitar proficiently by date Z.

You don’t need to follow your ego in order to achieve things. You can still achieve many great things without ego. The difference is that when you achieve things without involving your ego, you won’t feel bad when those achievements inevitably change, fade, or are lost, as will eventually happen under the universal law of constant change. You will realize that life involves change, appreciate the experience for the journey that it was, and then go on to achieve new things and embark on new journeys, without being drained by the mental obsession over what your ego feels that you lost or failed to fully gain. When you can genuinely realize that achievements aren’t required to make you feel okay or to “be” something more than who you already are in each moment, then you emancipate yourself from the bonds of this ego trap and the beautiful reality of life as it is will become clear. You can then enter a flow state of being, wherein what you do is imbued with a pure sense of joy for or acceptance of what you are doing in that moment that isn’t drained by the previously constant background anxiety that you need to succeed in that thing in order to become something more.

Ego trap #3: Life has dealt me a bad hand and therefore succeeding is outside of my control.

It’s true that the cards we are each dealt in life aren’t all the same. It’s true that some people get dealt hands that seem luckier and others get hands that seem terrible. Loss, for instance will happen eventually to all of us, but it doesn’t happen in the same way, or at the same rate to each of us.

When something significant and negative happens to us, many of our knee-jerk reactions are to react as if it shouldn’t have happened and to proceed on that fruitless assumption. “It’s not fair,” we tell ourselves. “This shouldn’t have happened.” “Why did I get this hand when there are awful people out there who have way better hands?”

But who says that the cards we are dealt have to remain in our hands throughout our lives? Or that we don’t get dealt new hands as time goes on? Or that the community cards we can combine our hands with remain the same? What if the game we’re playing isn’t even Texas Holdem Poker, but Go Fish? Or some other game we don’t even know the rules of?

Once again, the ego’s trap is to create an idealized version of yourself that is always different from your present reality, and to convince you that you have to be or do something to achieve this impossible, ideal self. If you were to set aside this idealized version and accept yourself as you are, then there would be no ego-created mental stress. When the “self” is removed from the equation, what’s left is just “you;” your true essence.

Often, people think of the ego in terms of ego inflation, as in when you feel proud of yourself and go on to feel smug or arrogant. However, when there is scarce ammunition to inflate the idealized sense of yourself, then the ego will resort to deflating this idealized sense of self and convince you that you are worse off than you in reality are. The ego tells you that the way the world sees you and that you should see yourself is as a wretched and tragic victim. As in the inflated sense of self, the deflated sense of self is always asymptotic and different from your reality. If you see yourself as a victim, then any time life deals you a new hand that is better than this sense of victim self, your ego will use rational logic in order to reject that opportunity to enjoy or improve your life, and you will feel drawn to return to your victim identity, where life is constant pain and suffering.

The mindful way to step out of this trap is to have the courage to shift your perspective to view the rules of the game differently, and to discover that you don’t have a bad hand. You just have some cards. This takes courage because this trap is very deep. By the time it springs, your ego’s position is already very well entrenched, having used the traumatic pain or years of rejection to bury the trap of victimhood deep down in your mind. 

Stepping out of this trap is the most difficult of the three mentioned here because of how deep it is. Almost like a voyage to the bottom of the ocean, it is likely that you won’t be able to reach it of your own volition by free diving. Soliciting professional help such as a therapist can help you prepare for the journey to the depths necessary to disarm the ego trap of victimhood; however, the only one who can actually disarm the trap is you. You must be willing to see it as a trap, and be the one to step out of it.

In discussing mindfulness with a friend recently, he told me that one of his colleagues was a man with no arms. This man apparently had a refrain which he would tell people often and went something like: “I have no arms but I chose to continue living. What’s your excuse?”

There are countless examples of people such as this man - and many more of people with even more challenging situations - who consciously choose to emancipate themselves from their victimhood traps. They did this by first choosing not to deny that the past should never have happened. They accepted the cards that they were dealt. Then, they chose to focus on being themselves as they are, rather than stay attached to their idealized, negative self images. This enabled them to access the energy, peace, and power that still did exist in their present realities, but was imprisoned away by their egos. When they disarmed their own mental victimhood traps and stepped from the past into the present, they found that life could still continue on.

These are only a sampling of many, many traps that the ego sets to lure us out of being present and living our most energetic, peaceful, and powerful lives. Getting started on your journey of mindfulness and learning to see these traps by living in the present is as easy as taking a deep breath. Stay tuned for more tips and musings on mindfulness.

Inspired by works by Eckhart Tolle.