Ego attacks can come in all varieties, from vicious and mean to subtle and sweet. That makes them so tricky.

I had one the other day. It came out of nowhere and was the vicious kind, the kind that comes at you like a hurricane, except without warning. You find yourself in the midst of the worst mental shitstorm imaginable. It comes at you from all directions, and it knows exactly how to hit you in the most effective way possible. Those storms pack quite a punch and can overwhelm us in no time, because the devices used are usually deadly. This ego is made up of our collected memories and thus it knows all intimate details of our lives. This is what is utilized in a full blown attack. All the registers of a well informed agent provocateur are put in play to scare us into submission.

If it’s one of the vicious attacks, it will usually come at us with all kinds of ideas around our failures and shortcomings. We haven’t done enough, we are too lazy, too dumb, too fat, too ugly, too stupid, too careless, or not trying hard enough, not ever going to make anything of ourselves, and on and on it goes. There is one thing all of the arguments have in common, they are fear mongering in one form or another. Then we panic. What if this is all true? What if we are failing in some major way? After all, we all want to be responsible people at the end of the day. So then we begin to consider the very urgent and alarming arguments set before us, and bingo, we are hooked. We get sucked into the drama, and once that happens, we have to deal with it all. We can either work through the list of challenges one-by-one, or go into denial about them all by arguing our way out and around them. No matter what we do, we are now in full ego identification in all its glory.

The other way the ego attack can come at us is the subtle and sweet kind. It tells us in some way that we are so great, perfect, deserving of praise and generally wonderful. It’s like watching a hurricane from the safety of a bunker. It doesn’t seem to be based on fear, because it feels really good and lulls us into a state of comatose self-delusion. This self-delusion is the fear part. The delusion that I am nothing but this wonderful ego, which has to constantly be afraid of not being good enough, perfect and wonderful. Buying into this one will usually lead to complacency on one end and big time arrogance on the other end. And neither one of those ever allows us any peace.

Both attacks have in common that they are made of the ego and nothing else. It is about me, me, me. So whether we fall prey to a sweet or vicious attack, we always end up in the same place as a result. So what is there to do?

To get into the eye of the storm. When I had my attack the other day, I was taken aback, because I had not experienced this level of intensity in quite a while. For a moment I was like a curious customer checking out the goods presented for sale. I picked it up, looked at it and considered whether it could be useful. I considered all the scary crap my ego was throwing at me. And it felt awful. It also felt overwhelming. That’s when I stopped for a moment and looked at what was going on. That pause is the eye of the storm. That is the moment or space where we get to see what is going on, and that opens up choice. To choose whether we want to continue to listen to the shitstorm or not. If we choose not to engage, we stay in the eye of the storm, it is still going on around us, but we can watch it and feel calm in the midst of it. If we do this, it subsides surprisingly quickly. For me that meant making a run to the grocery store, not talking to anyone and simply watch the bs my ego was throwing out at me. Once I got home, it had moved on.

All we have to be is willing. Willing for this to pass us by. To be willing to consider that the storm is of our own ego’s making and has no meaning or reality beyond that. The next time you see the storm coming, or find yourself in the midst of it, see if you can remember that every hurricane has an eye, and put yourself there.

Cheers,

Ralf