3 Signs Your Ego’s in Control

Who’s really in the driving seat of your life?

Imagine yourself in a car, driving along the road of your life, with all your passengers in the car with you.

First of all, you have your conscious personality with your physical body with all of its physical needs, that likes to take over the driving seat to ensure you’re slowing down, stopping for food, exercise, and rest.

You also have your soul in the car. While your soul can be one of your quieter car companions, when it gets a chance to sit in the driving seat, it hits the pedal to the floor, zooming you forwards. The soul can be pretty feisty and when it knows what it wants, and where it wants to get to, it can be ruthless in its pursuit to get you there.

Finally, you also have your ego in the car. This is the one who does all the talking and loves to be in control. It doesn’t really want to get anywhere, it just wants to keep you safe, so it will do everything it can to talk you out of the journey, sometimes even going as far as to sabotage the car so that it won’t even drive forwards.

All of these are players in our lives, and they all take turns at the steering wheel of the car. Yet, we always want to have a healthy balance between the three of them, so that we can stick to the road and carry on with our journey through life, reaching who we have the potential to be.

However, sometimes we get out of balance, so much so that the ego ends up in the driving seat, controlling us and our journey, and we don’t even realise.

The Game of Separation and our human design

There’s nothing wrong with the ego, it is an important component of our make-up and is purposefully designed to play a key role in the Game of Separation we play down here on earth.

We have all chosen to come here and experience separation from Source and the bodies we inhabit, and the structure around them. It is all so uniquely orchestrated. As we drop in consciousness from the 12th Dimension of All That Is and come down to our existence in the 3rd Dimension, we have specific limitations on our consciousness, such as our ego, which acts as our glass ceiling that we are here to break through.

We are not here to fear, overpower, destroy, or attack the ego, we are merely here to come into a state of witnessing its role in our awakening. We are here to observe it and lovingly let it be as we expand our own awareness.

This is the purpose of our life here - to evolve, to grow, to expand, to create, to love, to remember and to awaken to the truth of our existence. And, our ego is just part of the make-up of our existence here.

However, more often than not, we aren’t yet able to play the role of witness and observer.

Instead, our ego is so tightly enmeshed into our identity, that we don’t even know it’s there. And this is exactly what I want to cover in today’s post. For most of us, our ego is in the driving seat and it’s blocking our emotional and spiritual growth.

When we come into awareness of our ego’s role in our thoughts, words, decisions and actions, we can then choose differently for ourselves. This is not about coming into control, this is about coming into command of our life and the choices we make.

At its core, the ego fears its own death more than anything, and it’s this core fear that is the root of everything that our ego does. It seeks to always protect itself against its own demise, which is what happens when we stop playing the Game of Separation and come home to the truth that we are all God, which is having an experience of life through the eyes of the soul.

So, let's get into the five signs that show when our ego is in the driving seat, and also, how we can gently get it to budge over so we can again take the steering wheel.

Sign number 1: you can’t find stillness

The first sign that our ego is in control of our lives is when we can’t find stillness.

Nowadays most of us tend to be in a constant state of rushing around. We are all busy living and working in order to provide for ourselves, our families, and also to make the most out of the opportunities we have.

Yet, the pattern I observe in myself, and in many others, is that we keep ourselves busy in order not to stop. We aren’t even aware this is happening, we just know that life feels so busy and there’s so much to do and we have no time for ourselves.

And, most importantly, there is a belief that if we slow down and rest then we won’t receive. This is based on the fundamental programme that is deeply embedded within all of us that the more we do, the more we become. This is a fundamentally corrupt programme that causes us to believe that our worth is tied to our achievements - and so when we stop ‘doing’, we are no longer deserving or worthy.

This commonly shows up as feeling guilty or anxious when we slow down and take it easy, like we’re doing something we shouldn’t be doing (and if you want to deep dive into this, here’s a powerful interview discussing the true definition of self-worth).

Why we keep ourselves busy (and what we’re avoiding)

The reason why we become so busy is in order to avoid slowing down so we can feel what’s really going on deep within us.

It’s only when we stop and become still, that we create space for everything to come up to the surface, whether it’s emotions we’ve repressed, feelings of unworthiness we haven’t wanted to acknowledge, or past trauma that we are trying to avoid feeling.

It can feel terrifying to face our emotions, especially if we’ve been avoiding them for so long. The easier choice is to keep moving, staying busy and staying in avoidance, but the more we do this, the more the emotions build up under the surface.

Most of us weren’t taught how to approach our emotions with love, safety and grace, and so we don’t even know how to truly connect with ourselves emotionally, and that’s ok. It is safe to feel, it just takes a bit of practice, and if you need some help, check out this emotional healing process I created to support you.

The ego operates best when we aren’t aware of its existence, and when we are going through life doing, instead of being. Yet, the more self-awareness we develop, through allowing ourselves to feel and bringing consciousness to our programmes, the more we take back command of our lives.

Sign number 2: you’re stuck in repeating patterns

The second sign that our ego is in control of our lives is when we’re stuck in repeating patterns in our lives that we just can’t seem to break out of.

When we find ourselves repeating the same ‘mistakes’, this is often a learning loop that we are here to become conscious of in order to exit. It may look like choosing the same partner over and over again, in order to teach us how to assert ourselves, put up boundaries or learn to say ‘no’.

It could be a pattern of staying in jobs where we give, give and give, and receive very little in return. Perhaps it’s moving from job to job seeking satisfaction and fulfilment but not realising it, and then moving on to find something new, only to find out the same feelings are there.

It could be a pattern of not taking care of our body, trying to get into a fitness regime and then giving up, starting again, and then giving up. It might be constant dieting, trying new trends, staying on the wagon and then falling off again, and finding it hard to stick to something that really works and feels good.

These are some examples of big patterns in our lives which commonly affect us all - the people we are in relationships with, the work that we do and the relationships we have with our bodies and ourselves. And, there are often many smaller patterns looping around under the surface of these bigger ones, that we aren’t aware of.

The hidden lessons within our patterns

When we’re stuck in these same patterns, we are here to bring consciousness to the pattern to uncover what it’s here to teach us, and how we can move through it, with love and grace, in order to free ourselves.

A lot of our challenging patterns come from the karma in our Soul Contract, and this is always the first place I’d look to gain a deeper understanding of the root cause of the pattern.

The ego operates in the shadows, so much so that we don’t even know it’s there, so again, we are here to bring light to those shadows to see the truth within us. The way we do this is to face into the challenge, or pattern, rather than lead away from it.

Often, we can feel a great sense of shame or guilt when we’re stuck in these patterns. We feel stupid for dating another person who doesn’t treat us well. We feel embarrassed that we’ve moved jobs again and it’s no better. We feel ashamed that we stopped going to the gym.

It’s all of these feelings that keep us stuck - not the patterns themselves. If you allow yourself to face the shame, guilt or other related emotions, you’ll be able to see what’s going on underneath. The ego wants us to stay in avoidance and ignorance, but we are here to bring light to the parts of us that we want to hide.

This is where our power is and how we can begin to come back into command of our lives and alchemise these patterns into something better for ourselves.

Sign number 2: you struggle to be present

The third sign that our ego is in control of our lives is when we can’t be present with our lives.

As I mentioned at the beginning, the ego always wants to ensure its survival and safety, and one of the ways it does this is keeping us in a state of vigilance. Imagine a pendulum that swings from left to right, just passing briefly through the middle.

The pendulum swinging to the left indicates the past, the pendulum swinging to the right indicates the future, and the mere moments it passes through the middle is the present.

The reason why it keeps us in a state of swing is because it uses both the past and future, neither of which are real, to keep us out of the present moment. And, being in the present moment brings us into a state of awareness, connection and presence, which is a higher consciousness state of being.

When we linger in the past, it’s often when we feel regret, sadness, grief and loss. It is a state of mourning for the lives we once had, as well as the rose-tinted glasses of how much better life was then. It’s ok to visit the past, but when we stay too long there, it drains us of joy, acceptance and peace of our lives in the now-moment.

We swing into the past in order to seek out answers, solutions, what we could have done differently, or what we should have done more or less of. It’s like sifting through a pile of memories looking for answers to unlock our present to deliver us all that we want.

How the ego keeps us out of the present moment

It’s the same with the future. Living ahead of ourselves is something that all of us do, and it’s our way of staying safe. We roll through role-plays of scenarios, imagining how things could be, how things could turn out, and all the eventualities and what if’s.

This state of mind is where a lot of fear and anxiety can creep in. When we live in the future we are hypothesizing in order to plan for all the eventual outcomes, yet this can only pull us into fear of not knowing the answers, not knowing the outcome, and not knowing how to handle all the possibilities.

Living in our future is hugely overwhelming, and again, it brings us out of the peace and perfection of this present moment where all is well and all is as it should be.

The most important thing to note is that it is our present thoughts, words, decisions and actions that are crafting the future. So when we are worrying, analysing and overthinking about the future, we are not consciously co-creating, we are unconsciously co-creating more of those exact things that we’re worrying about.

Very rarely do we think about the future with a positive and joyful outlook because it is filled with unknowns, and that feels unsafe for us.

Our ego is constantly seeking to keep us out of the present moment, because only there is the ego out of control. We are here to come into consciousness, and we do this through being present with our lives in the moment. For most of us, this is our greatest challenge, but it also brings the greatest rewards.

Reclaiming command of your life’s journey

When we start to recognise the signs of the ego in the driving seat, the constant busyness, the repeating patterns, the pull into the past or the future, we begin to see how subtly it operates in our lives. It’s not something to fight or fix, but something to become aware of.

The ego’s job is to keep us in a state of limitation, under the guise of keeping us safe, but as we come into greater awareness of its role, we can choose to take back command of the wheel. This doesn’t mean rejecting any part of ourselves, it means allowing all of who we are, body, soul and ego to work together in harmony.

Every time we pause, come into self-awareness, and come back to the present moment, we invite balance back into our lives, and from that place, life starts to feel a little lighter, a little more spacious, and far more aligned with who we truly are.

If you’d like support and guidance on your spiritual and emotional healing journey, you may like to book a Soul Contract Reading, book a Divine Healing session, or sign up to my newsletter to stay in touch for more similar posts.

---

Carry on exploring