John Walt

Larry Mills is a mentor of mine and a master at asking challenging questions that lead to deep thinking and changed lives. When people come to him with their frustrations and challenges, he often asks, “Is this situation life-threatening or ego-threatening?” It turns out most challenges we face in life are not life-threatening. Usually, when we are frustrated, disappointed, angry, or let down, it is because our ego is threatened. This simple but profound question has led me to see that most of what I see as suffering is really just the suffering and discomfort of my pride and ego.

I have written a lot about dying to the false self so that you can step into your true self, the person you were created to be. What does the process of that dying actually look like? Dying to self is first and foremost about letting go of self-obsession. Most of us have spent our lives focused almost solely on ourselves, and our culture has told us that is how it is supposed to be. Even when we are serving others and “being selfless,” we can often still be doing it for ourselves as a form of self-obsession. Most self-obsession is an effort to feel good and avoid feeling bad. We spend immense amounts of energy trying to avoid suffering of any kind.

Suffering is defined as “the state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship."

When we embrace the concept that parts of us need to die so that new parts of us can come alive, we are talking about our ego death.

Ego is defined as “a person's sense of identity, self-esteem, or self-importance.”

False identity is built on insecurity. We aren’t sure who we really are, so we hold tightly to who we think we should be or who we wish we were. When we are secure in our true sense of identity, our ego doesn’t feel threatened as much. As a result, we don’t experience as much suffering. Most of what we label as pain in life, and most of what causes our suffering, is really just our ego being threatened. It’s not even real.

Here is one of my favorite thought experiments around this topic. Let's pretend that you could get a surgery to remove your ego. The brain surgeon opens up your head and cuts out your pride filled ego and then screws your head back on. Once you recovered from the operation, how often do you think you would get offended? How many things that people say would hurt you?

Most of the pain, suffering, and discouragement we experience in life is just our ego feeling threatened. Real pain and suffering is losing someone you love, facing a health crisis, or experiencing another form of real loss. The rest of what we call pain and suffering in life comes from what people say and do to us, failures we experience, and ways we feel insecure and inadequate. If we could remove our egos from our brains, then we would only experience real pain and suffering. How often do we actually face real pain and suffering? How often are we actually facing life-threatening situations in life? For most of us it's not very often.

Look at the challenges in your life over the last few years, where most of them life-threatening or ego-threatening? Most of the time we are hurt by what people say and do, we are not treated fairly, we fail where we wanted to succeed, and we are let down by those we trusted. As hard as those things are, they are not life-threatening, but they are very ego-threatening.

When we go on a transformation journey, we are embracing the process of ego death. But what happens when we truly understand the difference between real suffering and ego suffering? The ego stuff loses its power to hurt us. It may still sting at first, but then we realize it’s not real, its just our ego complaining because it wants power and control.

As I have gone on my transformation journey, I have become so much less offendable, so much more gracious of other people's actions and words, I am less sensitive and defensive. When someone does try to hurt me, I may at first want to strike back, but I remind myself that this is another opportunity to die a little more. Quickly, I find compassion replacing frustration. Often, this leads me to pray for that person. Not because I am superior, but because I can see they are in pain, and I want freedom for them.

Ever since I embraced my own ego death, I am slower to actually get mad. When I am feeling personally insulted for no reason, my sense of justice will still go through the roof pretty quickly. This doesn’t happen very often, thankfully, but what is interesting is that during these situations, even though I am getting mad, I find myself thanking God for allowing me to see a very immature part of me that needs to die. These have become a welcome experience that gives me something I deeply want more of… Freedom. When Jesus talked about turning the other cheek, He really knew what we needed was to free ourselves from the prison of our egos.

When we embrace ego suffering and can differentiate it from real suffering, then we are on the path to freedom. After all, it is a heavy burden to carry around a score of what everyone says to you and about you. Every disappointment, failure, and fear adds up quickly. The worst part is that while our mind tells us that protecting our ego will keep us safe, it is really just racking up more hurt, pain, and shame. So this ego that must be protected at all costs becomes a very fragile identity riddled with bullet holes, dragged through the mud, and carrying tons of baggage. When we let it go, mean words don’t stick, failures become growth opportunities, and when someone lets us down, we don’t take it personally.

Sailboats have sea anchors that they use in storms to help them stay pointed straight into the waves so they don’t get turned sideways and flip. I have found that Larry’s question is like that for me. When I find myself in a storm, whether it's in my own head, in relationships or at work, asking myself “Is it life-threatening or ego-threatening?” helps me identify the real problem and face the waves head-on. Very rarely are my challenges life-threatening. Most of the time, my ego is feeling threatened, and that means that the real problem isn’t someone else, it's me.

- John Walt

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