The Ego Isn’t the Enemy - It’s the Structure - Stepping Up to your Potential Podcast & Blog

May 9, 2025

There’s an idea among many spiritual seekers that the ego is a bad thing and that we need to somehow ‘get rid of it’. A few teachers remind us that getting rid of the ego is not possible, so instead we need to subdue it or otherwise minimize it. Essentially, we need to either excise or repress the part of us that interfaces with the world in which we live.

I have a very different perspective. It’s one I’ve outlined in the episode “Ego is just a Sense of Self“, but it’s been a while and I wanted to expand on the ideas started there. Essentially, in my experience and observations, the ego isn’t the problem and it’s not the enemy. The Ego is nothing more than a sense of Self. It’s the part of us that knows how to move through the world. It gives us a sense of ‘I’, a way to show up, to make choices, and stay oriented in our relationships and experiences. It enables us to maintain continuity over time. It’s not the flaw. It’s the frame we build everything else around.

But the Ego doesn’t just give us a sense of self — it also protects that Self. Its job is to keep us safe enough to function and to keep our persona system stable as we move through this life. The ego only becomes a problem when the foundational and supporting concepts of Self that it’s built on are distorted, broken, wounded, or missing.

The Yurt Central Ring

My husband once decided to build a small yurt, just as an experiment. And yes, I mean an actual yurt, the kind used by nomadic tribes in Mongolia, just a tiny version. There are a few key elements in a yurt’s design, but the one that stuck with me was the central ring at the top. That ring is the hub around which the entire structure is built and depends on, held in place by a series poles or spokes which connect it to the walls and that serve as the roof. He spent a lot of time testing different designs for that ring, trying to find one that could handle the stress without being too heavy or awkward to work with. The hardest part? Getting the ring to stay centered and level. It had to sit just right; otherwise, the whole thing leaned or sagged or just fell apart. Ultimately, he got it but that process was really impressed on me. In time, the experience of making that yurt became the clearest metaphor I’ve ever had for how the ego actually works.

Now, for the vast majority who’ve never seen a yurt close up, a more familiar comparison might help: think of a bicycle tire. The center hub holds everything together, but it only works if the spokes are evenly distributed and intact. If that hub is off-center or tilted or the spokes are bent, broken, or missing, then the wheel wobbles or collapses. That’s a useful image, but here’s why I still go with the yurt central ring, or toono, instead of the hub of a wheel: people don’t live under bike tires. A wobbly tire is inconvenient. A destabilized yurt? That’s your shelter, it affects everything inside. So while the structure of a tire hub and a yurt central ring are similar, the stakes are different. When the central ring of a yurt is off, the whole home becomes unstable and might even fail in a bad storm. That’s why I feel it works so well as a metaphor for the ego.

So if the ego is the toono, what are the poles holding it up? To name a few, they include: my core beliefs, internalized stories, personal/familial/ancestral/cultural wounds and gifts, survival strategies, and all the many identities that I subscribe to or have been given. These are the structural elements that give shape to how I see myself and how I move through the world. These are the poles of the yurt in which my soul or spirit exists within in this life. They stretch from the outer wall to the center ring, stabilizing the whole thing. Without them, the ego has nothing to rest on.

Now imagine that some of those poles are compromised. Maybe one is tied to an identity that doesn’t believe it’s worthy of success.
Another holds the unresolved pain of a child-self. Another’s warped by trauma, something that hit hard and never really got processed. When those poles are damaged, the central ring, the ego, starts to compensate. If it’s just one or two, maybe the structure wobbles a little in certain circumstances. But when enough supports are bent, missing, or misaligned? The whole thing becomes unstable, and the ego goes from being a steady framework to a system under stress.

So if the central ring is the ego, and it’s wobbling? That’s not because the ring itself is flawed. It’s because the supports are.

The ego isn’t broken, it’s overcompensating. It’s spending all its energy trying to stay upright while the poles beneath it — the beliefs, the wounds, the identities — are bent out of shape. That’s why trying to kill the ego, suppress it, or pretend it doesn’t matter misses the point. You don’t fix a wobbly yurt by tearing out the central ring. You fix it by repairing the supports. Heal the poles and the ego becomes what it was always meant to be: a strong center that moves with life, instead of bracing against it.

Identifying the Poles that Need Attention

When something in life hits hard — loss, shame, rejection, trauma — it can warp one of the inner poles. Sometimes those support poles are handed to us by family, by culture, and by early environments. These are often beliefs which are never questioned, roles we were just expected to play, and stories we absorbed before we even had language.

Whether inherited or experienced, the result is the same: one of those internal supports is now weakened. In order to keep standing through the pressures and storms of life, the system has to adapt.

I might over-function in one area and shut down in another. Some of what I call connection could just be roles I perform, not relationships I inhabit. Maybe what I think are boundaries are actually just masks. At times, I might shape-shift — not out of freedom, but survival. And it’s entirely possible to believe that if I stop focusing my attention on this ego-structure, even for a moment, I’ll disappear — so there’s no space left to truly see anyone else.

Over time, these adjustments start to feel like who I am. But they’re not. They’re compensating strategies, temporary fixes meant to bring stability to a structure that’s off-balance. When I spot those strategies, what I’m really seeing is a signal: One of the poles meant to support my center needs attention.

That’s the work of ego healing: not tearing out the central ring, but restoring the supports which enable it to stay steady and aligned.

Before I continue on here, I need to call out something. This sort of deliberate healing can be done in many ways, and I chose one of the more destructive forms because I was impatient. I was also in a space where I could do this. At the time, this was not the language I used but in hindsight I can see what I was doing in this way: I actively and intentionally started banging on all the support poles to find out where the weaknesses were. What this did was ultimately collapse one of the foundations for my entire ego and triggered a Dark Night which took me years to navigate through and ultimately out of. To learn more, listen to my episode which covers what I call the Emotional Blender period. Essentially, I forced the entire ego structure to collapse and then I had to figure out how to rebuild the entire thing. Not the best way to go, but definitely something on the menu if you choose to do this work before you’ve reached a Dark Night crisis moment organically. Actively choosing to tell the soul “ok, show my what I’m not seeing” is a pretty big opening. The ego is hiding these wounds and beliefs for a reason, and facing them will require courage and fortitude. But the result? I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Alright, warning delivered. Now back to the story.

So how did I identify which poles might be compromised? I started by noticing the strategies I’d learned to rely on, especially the ones that showed up again and again, in different forms, across different seasons, most especially when under stress. Eventually I realized that those patterns didn’t define me, but they did point directly to where some of my supports had been bent out of shape.

Before I understood ego in the way that I’m sharing here, I only saw the surface—repeating patterns in work and relationships, even in how I talked to myself. Different situations, same story. When I tried working with the patterns only, no matter how much I analyzed them, I couldn’t shift anything long term. I didn’t know the root – I just knew the manifestation, and I was stuck.

I had thought these patterns were my personality — over-analytical, avoidant, people-pleasing — but I learned that they weren’t my personality at all. They were adaptations. They were strategies that the ego structure was using to help me, this embodied soul-self, get through everyday life in accordance with my beliefs about myself and the world. It was just survival. My system compensating for something off in the foundation.

The deeper truth of this didn’t land until I worked my through the biggest Dark Night so far in my life — the Emotional Blender period mentioned above. Every dark night unravels or unmakes something in our lives which is an untruth. In this particular Dark Night, what was unmade was my ego – more specifically, every belief I had about who I was, my value, and my place in this world. Everything ego-related that I’d built to survive got stripped: the roles; the masks; the stories. And in that unraveling, I finally saw the truth of the ego in the image of the yurt’s central ring: it was never really the ego itself which was the problem. The real issues came from everything which held up the ego.

That realization gave me a map to navigate what had become an untrusted landscape. I followed the patterns to uncover the stories I’d been living out, then traced those back to the experiences that had shaped them. From there, I began to ask: what else might be true? What different meaning could be drawn from the same past?

All of this was mental work and it showed me something important: the mind can take me far, but not all the way. At some point, I had to drop into the heart and let it speak in sensation, not strategy. Things began to shift when I stopped treating these patterns as personality flaws and instead started recognizing them as signs of deeper strains. It wasn’t the ego that needed fixing — it was the fractured support system beneath it. But to access these deep truths, I first had to face everything I’d tucked away. Not just the events, but the buried weight of them: the grief, the fear, the shame quietly pulsing beneath the surface.

I came to see that the ego wasn’t silencing my truth. Rather, it was protecting me from the cost of hearing it. And that cost? Some truths don’t just shake a few beliefs, they dismantle foundations. They call into question the poles that everything else is built on. And the ego, smart as it is, knows exactly which poles are foundational and which are supports. It will do anything to protect those foundations: deny, avoid, lash out, go numb. Because to face the truth causing the warped poles means the structure might not hold.

That’s why we fight so hard to stay asleep to certain truths. Not because we don’t care but because something in us knows: If I see this clearly, the old self might not survive it. As mentioned above, this indeed is exactly what I chose to do but not everyone faces this level of crisis intentionally. Know that at it’s core, all Dark Nights are a soul-led demolition and renovation of whatever is being unmade. In this instance, the Dark Night was reckoning with all those ego support-poles that were never strong enough to hold the real Self waiting to come through.

And it’s during that demolition — after the old supports were gone, when the ego was no longer trying to hold it all together but instead needed to reinvent itself on better, stronger foundations — that is the deepest truths finally surfaced.

Once the compensations fall away, what was left was the core wound that all those defense and deflection mechanisms were trying to cover. For me, what rose to the surface wasn’t just pain — it was a question. A quiet, persistent one that had lived underneath every pattern and every defense I had ever built.

A question that had shaped my life more than I realized.

The Core Wound

As I began rebuilding, I discovered a theme running through everything: an unconscious fear of separation — from people, from belonging, from self-worth.

Every time I felt abandoned, every time I was dismissed or misunderstood or abandoned myself, something in me cracked. Like everyone with an unhealed wound, I adapted. I built walls where I should have built bridges. I leaned into control when what I really needed was trust. I walked away when I should have stayed. All because these actions made me feel safe.

When I finally started on this path of healing and integration, the very first wound that I ran into was Unworthiness. The idea that I was unworthy explained everything — why I made those choices, why I carried these patterns, why certain stories stayed stuck and others were rejected. It made sense. I moved forward as if this discovery was a foundational one, and so I started to dig into the wound, to really let it come up so that I could feel it fully, to give voice to all the pain it held. That worked, to a point and it never really resolved.

When I went through this whole Dark Night process, it was there, always there. But during the aftermath of that Dark Night, when I was putting the pieces back together, I was in a very different emotional space. Finally revisiting what I believed to be a wound of unworthiness, I discovered something rather different. Sitting in the feeling of unworthiness, letting it vent its pain, I had an epiphany. I saw in my my mind’s eye the moment of being born, of being painfully ejected from a place of comfort, warmth, and love into a cold, searingly bright space, held by plastic gloved hands and masked energetic strangers only to then have the literal lifeline to my source cut, severed in a final act that I in my simplistic instinct-driven infant-mind could only interpret as rejection. My first question, beyond “what’s happening?!” was “why was I cast out? why was I rejected?” The answer? A sense of shame that I can only articulate as “I must not be worthy…”

That was the moment I understood: Unworthiness isn’t the wound. It’s the answer — the story I reached for to explain the pain of the true core wound, Separation.

In that moment, my very first human act was to create meaning. To reach for a narrative that would help me survive. “If I was cast out, it must be because I wasn’t worthy of staying.”

That story became identity. It became the blueprint I unconsciously followed from that moment on. The instability that no amount of surface-level healing could have ever fully stabilized until it, too, was brought into the light.

Rebuilding Around the Central Ring

Once I saw the full story, everything shifted. Not all at once. Not like a switch. But like a release, a loosening of something that had been pulled tight for so long that I didn’t even realize I was bracing. Once I re-experienced the true source of the instability — not just the behaviors, not just the pain, but the story at the core of everything — I could finally meet the wound, integrate it, and offer that infant-mind a new narrative to carry forward.

That’s what ego-healing work is. Not ego death. Not erasing identity. But bringing the center back into alignment.

What I’ve come to know, after walking through that fire, is this:

A healed and centered ego no longer reacts from defense.
It doesn’t spiral at the first sign of discomfort.
It doesn’t lash out, shut down, avoid, or cling to control without noticing what it’s doing.
The person still feels everything, but from a place stable groundedness, rather unstable compensations.
It becomes very hard to rattle, frighten, or control someone whose ego is centered. And if it happens, they know how to recenter quickly.

Once the biggest problem areas had been addressed, the structure of my ego could finally hold in all weather. The ring was steady and level. There’s always more tweaking to do — big and small — but it’s far easier now to both identify and correct when something slips out of place.

This is the place where genuine empowerment becomes possible. Not performative power. Not reactive control. But that quiet, steady kind of power that doesn’t need to prove itself.

And now, the true gold of the journey: When the ego is healed—when the central ring is no longer tilted or torqued—it becomes a clear conduit between Embodied Self and Higher Self. Nothing’s blocking the channel. The signal is as clear as it gets in this life.

From that place? I can finally step up and begin to open the heart – not just to feel more, but to live from a place of genuine coherence.

TL;DR

The ego isn’t the enemy—it’s the structure holding your life together. Stop trying to tear it down. Start healing what holds it up.

About the Image

I talked in the post about my husband’s mini-yurt project. He made it entirely as a backpack, which was so cool. I took pictures of the entire process from taking down the standing yurt to him wearing the pack for travel. It’s even unlevel, so bonus. These were taking long before I decided to play with photography, so they are just documentation images rather than something dramatic or cool looking. If he still still had this, I would have asked him to break it out so I could just that. Ah well. The central ring, toono, he came up with for this little travel version is essentially a rope wrapped styrofoam wreath.

Audio

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Stepping Up to Your Potential: Personal Growth · The Ego Isn’t the Enemy — It’s the Structure

Video

Video is also available through the YouTube Channel. The background images features 3 dark red Gladiolas against a rustic fence with a giant Jacaranda tree behind them. Of all the spaces in my gardens, this fenceline is perhaps the view I see the most because I’m looking at through my kitchen window. For an episode on healing to find balance, I thought this video was closest I had to symbolically represent the themes.