You Can't Outrun Your Ego

This travel mug that Virginia got me not long after we fell in love is a reminder of who I am.

About 7 months ago, my wise and brilliant therapist, Irma, told me in one of our first sessions: “You are going to have to rebuild your spiritual life here.”

She was right. But I didn’t do that. I tried to port over the structures I had created in Austin.

And that simply and painfully wasn’t working.

In this new place I’m in both geographically and spiritually, capacity and clarity are irreversibly interconnected. With my capacity lowered due to fatigue, stress, and over-stimulation, my clarity darkened with a pervasive negativity. It showed up as intense social anxiety, over-indulgence, insomnia, indigestion, and a kind of fatigue that sleep seemed to only make worse. It felt like depression, but I knew depression well enough to recognize this was something else, something with a spiritual root.

This all came to head last week when I returned from almost two weeks in the US, worn down by travel, worry, and the continued unwelcomed guest of negativity that was leaving a residue on every aspect of my life.

I needed to do something different, immediately.

So the next morning around 6:30am, instead of trying to meditate or scrolling or dozing off on the couch, I decided to fill a coffee thermos with my morning coffee and take it to the park with my journal. The park is not really quiet. It is a mix of birds singing, a smattering of dogs and their owners, and then at 7am, the start of Zumba classes.

But I was able to be quiet inside there. I felt the bubble of tranquility that only presence and introspection can produce. I was able to be brutally honest with myself. “This isn’t working. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Inside that tranquility bubble, I heard this:

“You can’t outrun your ego.”

That was not the answer I expected, which is the most powerful indicator that it didn’t come from my own ego.

How the Ego Plots a Coup

Porting Austin’s spiritual infrastructure into Mexico City felt reasonable at the time. Familiar practices in unfamiliar terrain, a form of continuity while everything else was shifting. What I didn’t account for is that spiritual practices are alive. They either fit the life you are actually living or they atrophy, and atrophied practices leave the interior unguarded. The ego is extraordinarily patient. It waits for exactly that kind of vacancy, and when it finds one, it moves back in so gradually that its voice becomes indistinguishable from your own. You think you are thinking. You are being narrated.

I found myself being haunted by these questions:

• What do others think of me?

• What do I need to survive?

• Who am I?

Those questions belong to the ego, not to the soul. My soul asks whether I am creating from my truest self, whether the life I am building is the one I was actually sent here to build. The ego asks whether it is safe, whether it is seen, whether it is losing ground.

Comparison, survival, and power are not spiritual concerns. They are the ego’s survival mechanisms, and when they are running the show, my interior life pays the price. The output is always the same: worry, fear, guile, pretense, manipulation, dishonesty, unease. I had become self divided against itself, conducting my daily life through a low-grade static it has stopped recognizing as interference. I had been living inside that static for months, telling myself it was the cost of building a new life in a new country.

The Second Mind

Pervasive negativity is not a circumstance. It is additional evidence that the ego has hijacked your spiritual system. Paulo Coelho calls the ego’s internal narrator the “second mind”; the voice that takes everything the ego generates and makes it sound like self-knowledge. It is fluent in your specific fears. It knows your history, your insecurities, your fixations, and it uses all of it to make the ego’s version of reality feel like the truest one, the one that feels foolish to question.

For me, the second mind narrative was some variation of:
If I was called here, why is everything so fucking hard. What am I doing wrong? Maybe I’m just defective.

Richard Rohr identifies the theological root of negativity. He points out that Jesus spent two-thirds of his teaching on forgiveness, because the ego’s primary operating mode is oppositional, and opposition feeds on grievance. “To live oppositionally is to be holding some degree of resentment or unhealed negative energy that we have not brought to the divine presence for transformation.” Six months in a new city, a new language, with expired practices. I had been living exactly that; calling it an adjustment period, assuming it was the price of change, and believing that what I knew spiritually was already enough.

I claimed to want my life to be about joy, abundance, and adventure. But these require spiritual and inner work first; work that I had not done. So instead, I found myself backsliding into impulsivity, pleasure-seeking, being haunted by self-doubt. I vacillated between delusional hope and fatalistic despair because I am not grounded in my center, which is the soul.

No center, no presence. No presence, no center.

Intuition Is the Boss

The primary job of a spiritual practice is to keep intuition and wisdom in charge and the ego in its proper place. When that order holds, the interior functions the way it was designed to: intuition sets the direction, wisdom informs the judgment, and the ego executes.

The ego has a rightful role. It is an extraordinary manager of resources, logistics, and planning.I have watched my own ego do this brilliantly: organizing a move to another country, managing the complexity of building a business across two cultures, holding the logistics of a life that has a lot of moving parts. The problem is the ego was never meant to lead. When spiritual practices expire, the ego fills the vacancy the only way it knows how: by taking over. Intuition goes quiet. Wisdom recedes. And what was meant to serve starts to govern.

“Feminine energy refers to the intuitive energy that exists within all of us. The energy that feels softer, more nurturing, and creative. Feminine energy aligns more with feeling into our intuition, our emotions, inner wisdom, and inner-knowing.”
– Camille Styles

You can’t rebuild your spiritual practices with good intentions and journaling. Because I hadn’t done that work, I lost my connection to the seat of intuition, my heart. There is a reason that intuition and wisdom have traditionally been referred to in the feminine. Your intuition is your most valuable asset. She is the voice and guide to the heart. She makes the mind a precision instrument for nuance, discernment, and critical thinking. She is the mother of autonomy, creativity, wisdom, and clarity, the four faculties that make a human being most like a god and most dangerous to any system that requires your compliance, exhaustion, and confusion to function.

The heart has a quiet interior voice that knows before the mind knows. I made decisions without her that I wouldn’t have made with her, said yes to things that depleted me, said nothing when I should have spoken, kept moving when everything in me was asking for stillness. Her absence doesn’t announce itself as absence. It announces itself as noise, as reactivity, as constant urgency that I need more information before I can trust her.

Intuition and wisdom are sisters, accessed through listening, stillness, and a kind of spiritual wooing. Intuition is very difficult to access when you’re not consistent in being centered and present. Letting practices expire doesn’t just create a gap. It hands the interior over to whatever is loudest. “Too busy” reduces emotions to their shallowest form and replaces them with chase feelings: stress, impulse, rumination, leaving no room for gratitude, creativity, perspective, compassion, and most of all robbing us of the clarity to remember that “too busy” is a choice.

Spirituality Is Evolutionary

In recent days, I’ve continued this morning practice of going to the park. It has helped me to see that spirituality is evolutionary. It spirals through phases: epiphany, liberation, creation. Each phase requires different practices. The practices that serve one phase expire when the next begins.

Epiphany is the moment the old story cracks open and something you can’t un-know gets through; a truth that reorganizes everything behind it. Liberation does the slow, disorienting work of getting free from what the epiphany revealed: the false beliefs, the inherited identities, the agreements you made with religion, family, culture, and capitalism, any systems that required your compliance and called it virtue. Liberation-phase practices are excavation tools. They are built for going down and getting things out. They are essential, but they have a shelf life. And I now realize that I was stuck in liberation mode because I hadn’t rebuilt my spiritual practices.

Creation is the opposite of survival mode. It is imagination, faith as spiritual confidence, commanding with purity of intent. It is embracing your creative power, where the inner work stops being about what happened and starts being about what is possible. But creation requires energy, and survival mode consumes everything.

The Allure of Waiting

There is a seduction to spiritual awareness. The more you understand the ego’s mechanisms, the more fluent you become in your own bullshit, the easier it is to mistake knowledge for activity. You can spend years in God’s waiting room, and the ego will happily hold the door open for you. Waiting is not a threat to the ego. Waiting is its alibi.

The soul operates on a different timeline. It is not interested how sophisticated your self-knowledge has become. It wants to know what you built with it. It wants to know whether the life you are living matches the truth you claim to have found. At some point, continued awareness without action stops being humility and starts being hiding. The path from healing to creation does not pass through more understanding. It passes through the specific, daily, unglamorous choice to let intuition lead and then follow where she points, even before I feel ready, even when the ego has a very compelling case for waiting just a little longer.

I am done waiting. The epiphany in the park made that clear. Irma made that clear seven months before the park, and I wasn’t ready to hear it. I am ready now, which means the work is no longer about understanding what went wrong. It is about building what comes next, one morning at a time, in a city that is teaching me who I am now, what I need now.