Who is driving your soul’s journey?

Your soul, or psyche, is like the personal vehicle you have been given to journey through the wild ride we call life—with all its beauty, breakdowns, surprises, detours, descents, and sudden openings of grace.

Your ego is the part of you that gives this journey a sense of continuity. It is the voice that says, Today my name is Marcela. I was born in Chile. I am a teacher, a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a student. The ego helps us remember priorities and responsibilities, and move through the world with some coherence.

Without the ego, we would not be able to keep commitments or recognize the thread of our own story.

But the trouble begins when we believe the ego is the whole of who we are.

When I think I am only Marcela—only the woman born in Chile, only the teacher, only the wife, only the grandmother, only the roles I can name and recognize—then I fall into what Jung called the ego complex. The ego is now in the driver seat of my personal vehicle.

I have become identified only with what I know about myself, and I leave no room for everything else that I am—the hidden, the forgotten, the undeveloped, the wounded, the gifted, and the mysterious.

I am also a student. I am also ignorant. I am also afraid. I am also wise. I am also a singer, even if I rarely sing. I am also many things I have not yet discovered.

When the ego becomes too rigid in its self-identification, life becomes one-sided. The pendulum swings too far in one direction. We become biased toward a narrow version of ourselves, and the psyche begins to suffer. Not because there is something inherently “wrong” with us, but because too much of who we are has been pushed into the unconscious.

And what is repressed does not disappear.

If we repress these hidden parts long enough, and intensely enough, they will eventually find a way to be seen. Sometimes they appear as symptoms, illness, exhaustion, anxiety, depression, conflict, or crisis. But depth psychology does not need to pathologize this. Jung understood that these eruptions from the unconscious are moments of spiritual emergence—moments of initiation.

Every initiation requires a death of ego. Not the destruction of the ego, but the softening of its absolute control. It asks for a deep surrender to the unconscious so that what has been buried can surface: not only dangers and wounds, but also gifts, vitality, creativity, and treasures of the soul.

This is how we become more spacious.

As we make room for the unconscious to speak, we become less rigid and more whole. We begin to heal the inner split at the heart of the psyche: the division between consciousness and the unconscious. The task is not to erase the ego, but to make its relationship with its shadow more permeable, more fluid, more alive.

Then we can move with greater awareness and freedom.

And the wild ride of life becomes not only something to survive, but the way we get to know more of our entire Self (with upper case S) or Soul.

How much do you let your ego be in the driver seat of your Soul’s journey, versus being open to explore the fullness of who you are–which, of course, is not separated from the rest of the web of life.

With love,

Marcela

PS. Please share your thoughts. I love reading your comments and feeling the sense of community.