I used to believe that the ultimate goal of spiritual growth was to annihilate my ego. In my mind, ego was the villain behind every insecurity, conflict, and flaw I had. If I could just live without ego—be purely humble, selfless, enlightened—then surely I’d be happier and “above” the ordinary human pettiness. So I tried. I meditated for hours to silence any trace of pride or desire. I caught myself in conversations and deliberately downplayed my accomplishments, hoping to feel more “egoless.” I even remember a phase when I would chastise myself for any thought or feeling that seemed too self-interested. I was earnest, determined, and convinced I was doing something noble. But instead of feeling free and peaceful, I found myself tangled in a paradox: the harder I tried to rid myself of ego, the more self-absorbed and frustrated I became. It took years—and some blunt guidance from a Brazilian shaman—to understand why my quest to live without ego was backfiring spectacularly.
Let me start with a personal confession: my name is Justin, and I have an ego. Saying that might seem obvious or even trivial, but for a while, I didn’t want to admit it. I wanted to believe I was somehow beyond ego. I’m an entrepreneur and co-creator of The Vessel, a platform for personal transformation. I’ve spent years immersed in self-development and spiritual teachings. Along the way, I absorbed the popular notion that the ego is something to be defeated or even “killed.” The narrative goes that the ego is the source of selfishness and suffering, and that true enlightenment means obliterating the ego completely. I embraced this narrative wholeheartedly. After all, many spiritual philosophies—from Buddhism to New Age thought—speak of transcending the ego. I thought I was on the fast-track to wisdom by attempting to live as if I had no ego at all.
However, life has a way of humbling you when you get too wrapped up in an idea. In my case, the cracks in my ego-free fantasy began to show in subtle, uncomfortable ways. I recall attending a meditation retreat a few years ago, where the instructors extolled the virtues of egolessness. We were told to “leave our egos at the door.” I diligently practiced emptying myself of any sense of “I.” But then, during a group sharing session, I found myself secretly proud of how well I was doing at being nobody. I wasn’t speaking much; I was appearing totally serene. Inside, though, a voice was whispering smugly, “Look at you—so spiritual, so beyond these other folks struggling with their egos.” When I caught that thought, I felt a sting of irony. Was this not my ego, sneaking in through the back door, proud of its own absence? Alan Watts, the great philosopher who helped popularize Eastern wisdom in the West, perfectly captured my predicament. He wryly noted that “the biggest ego trip is getting rid of your ego”. I had to laugh (and cringe) at the truth of that statement. In trying to have no ego, I had simply given my ego a new mask—that of the spiritually superior person who has no ego. The joke was on me.
That was one of my first clues that something was off in my approach. Another clue came from the emotional turbulence I experienced. Far from feeling blissfully selfless, I was becoming more anxious and disconnected. In denying my ego, I was also denying genuine parts of myself—my desires, my opinions, my boundaries. I thought I shouldn’t have those, since a truly egoless person would be infinitely giving and never assert themselves. The result? I would agree to things I didn’t truly want to do, then quietly grow resentful. I’d suppress feelings of anger or competitiveness (those were “ego feelings,” I thought), but that only made them erupt in unguarded moments. It’s like trying to hold an inflatable beach ball underwater: you can push it down for a while, but eventually it pops up with force. Psychologist Carl Jung understood this well. He observed that every person carries a shadow—a hidden side of the psyche—and, “the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” In fact, if something is repressed and isolated from consciousness, “it never gets corrected, and is liable to burst forth suddenly in a moment of unawareness”. In my attempt to live without ego, I was inadvertently pushing my ego into the shadows. And as Jung would predict, it began to “burst forth” in ways that were actually less controlled and more harmful than if I had acknowledged it openly.
At this juncture, I was fortunate to have a mentor and friend to call me out. Enter Rudá Iandê, a Brazilian shaman and my long-time collaborator. Rudá has a way of delivering uncomfortable truths with both compassion and a sort of humorous bluntness. We met about a decade ago, and he’s been a pivotal figure in my life ever since. (Together we’ve launched courses like Out of the Box, based on his lifetime’s teachings, and even co-created The Vessel as a space to share authentic self-development wisdom.) One memory stands out: years ago, after a long day of working on our first online course, I was waxing poetic to Rudá about my goal of being “above my ego.” He listened patiently, a small smile forming. Then he said, “Justin, don’t try to be an angel. Just be a real human.” I was a bit taken aback. He continued to explain that trying to be too good, too pure, too beyond all the messy human stuff was actually a subtle form of arrogance. At first, I resisted that idea—how could wanting to eliminate my ego be arrogant? Wasn’t it the very definition of spiritual humility? But Rudá’s point (which I only fully grasped later) was that pretending not to have an ego is a way the ego hides behind a halo. It’s like saying, “I’m not like those other flawed people; I don’t have an ego.” That attitude, even unspoken, is itself a superiority complex – the very opposite of humility. Or as Rudá later told me, “Don’t try to be beyond the things that make you human… such an idea may sound noble but is nothing other than arrogance.” Denying your ego “may blind you to your own destructiveness and turn your denied ego into a beast to yourself and to others”.
Hearing this from him was a wake-up call. I had to dig deep and really examine what I was doing and why. I realized I was driven by fear. Ironically, it was fear that was motivating my quest to kill the ego—a fear of not being good enough, a fear of being seen as selfish or flawed, a fear of my own human impulses. Rather than facing those fears head on, I was trying to take a shortcut by simply excising anything that scared me about myself and calling that “spiritual.” But as Rudá frequently emphasizes in Out of the Box, true growth isn’t about running away; it’s about courageously turning toward those inner beasts. Out of the Box is a 16-week journey that he created to help people connect with themselves selves. A core principle of the course is to confront your fears and insecurities instead of suppressing them. In one of the modules, Rudá asks pointedly, “What are you avoiding by staying inside that box?” In my case, I was avoiding my fear of being ordinary, my fear of facing conflict, and my fear of my own emotions. My attempt to live without ego was an avoidance mechanism—an attempt to leapfrog over the hard work of dealing with my inner multiplicity.
Ah, inner multiplicity. This was another game-changing insight for me. We often talk about the ego as if it’s a single thing—a monolithic entity to be kept or discarded. But one of the most liberating lessons I’ve learned (both from Rudá’s teachings and from psychological frameworks) is that I am not a unified, unchanging self. I contain multitudes. Inside Justin, there’s a kaleidoscope of sub-personalities, desires, and voices. There’s the ambitious entrepreneur who does enjoy recognition and achievement. There’s the vulnerable child who just wants to be loved and is afraid of rejection. There’s the rebel who hates being told what to do. There’s the empath who wants to help others. And yes, there is an ego—or perhaps more accurately, an ego function—that tries to mediate between all these parts and present a coherent “me” to the world. Trying to live without ego was like trying to remove the captain of a very diverse team and expecting the team to function harmoniously on its own. Without acknowledging my ego’s role, the other parts of me either ran amok or fell into chaos.
What I needed was not an internal decapitation, but an inner negotiation. In Jungian terms, the ego isn’t meant to be killed; it’s meant to be right-sized and integrated. One Jungian scholar, Marie-Louise von Franz, put it beautifully: “The shadow becomes hostile only when he is ignored or misunderstood.” We have to get along with our shadow and ego as we would with a human partner—“sometimes by giving in, sometimes by resisting, sometimes by giving love—whatever the situation requires.” In other words, I had to be the “negotiating ego” that stands its ground and respects the other parts of me. This was a radically different approach than my earlier slash-and-burn technique of ego elimination. It’s not as clean-cut as declaring “ego = bad, destroy it,” but it’s a lot more effective (and honest). It meant sometimes allowing my ego to have a voice—like admitting I do want credit for my work—while also ensuring that voice doesn’t drown out my deeper values or empathy. It meant making peace with the fact that I am a mixture of self-interested and selfless tendencies, and that’s okay. In fact, that’s human.
One of the paradoxes I had to embrace is that acceptance, not denial, leads to genuine change. This is something spiritual teachers have hinted at for ages, but it went over my head when I was zealously playing whack-a-mole with my ego. The Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, for instance, warned about the trap of idealism. He said that when a man strives to become a saint from being a sinner, he has only “progressed from one illusion to another”. The whole movement of trying to become this perfected version of yourself is an illusion, because you’re still caught in ego’s game—identifying first as “sinner” then as “saint.” In my case, I identified first as an ordinary guy and then as a spiritually awakened, ego-free guy. In both cases, I was stuck in a story about myself. Krishnamurti’s point (and I paraphrase) is that truth isn’t found in moving from one self-image to another; it’s found in dropping the delusions and seeing what is. And what is for all of us, if we’re brutally honest, is that we have egos. We have an “I” that wants to feel important, safe, and loved. If I suppress that truth under a guise of egolessness, I’m living in contradiction—what Krishnamurti called a conflict between the ideal and the reality. No wonder I felt tension all the time: I was constantly measuring myself against an impossible ideal of selflessness, and thus constantly failing and feeling guilty.
Once I stopped trying to become something other than I was, a lot of that inner conflict eased. Instead of berating myself for having an ego, I started to get curious about it. I began to observe: Okay, my ego craves validation when I post an article or share an idea—what is that about? I realized there was a story underneath: perhaps as a younger man I felt insecure about my voice, so now I seek approval to feel “good enough.” That insight was valuable. It didn’t eliminate the ego desire overnight, but by understanding it, its grip lessened. I could kindly tell that part of me, “I hear you, you want to feel important. That’s alright—you can have a seat at the table, but you’re not driving the bus.” This inner dialogue might sound a bit odd, but it’s immensely empowering. It’s what reclaiming personal power looks like from the inside: you gather all the scattered pieces of yourself, even the ones you used to banish, and you give them space in your conscious awareness. I stopped exiling my ego and started relating to it. In doing so, I no longer felt controlled by the very impulses I was running away from. The power I’d given over to the “struggle with ego” came back to me as a sense of wholeness and ownership of my life.
Around this time, as these realizations were crystallizing, Rudá and I were in the thick of creating content and courses that reflected these lessons. We were increasingly alarmed by the toxicity in the new age/self-help world—much of which stems from well-intentioned ideas taken to illogical extremes. The idea of eliminating the ego is a prime example. It sounds holy, but it often leads to what we call spiritual bypassing (using spiritual concepts to avoid dealing with real issues) and spiritual ego (the very ego inflation one gets by identifying as “more spiritual” than others).
In his masterclass Free Your Mind, Rudá delves into how certain new-age teachings can actually imprison people in new mental cages. I’ve seen people who try to live on “love and light” alone, refusing to acknowledge anger or fear because they deem those as “low vibration.” They end up further from reality—and sometimes further from sanity—than when they began. In Free Your Mind, one of the first things he does is tackle shedding the social and spiritual conditioning that tells us we need to be some kind of shiny, perfect being. We invite people to question the stories they’ve been told—stories like “your ego is your enemy.” Often, those stories are simplistic and originate from a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all approach to spirituality. Real inner freedom, in our experience, comes from undoing those narratives and embracing the full spectrum of one’s humanity.
I want to share a bit about my journey with Rudá here, because it provides context for why I’m so passionate about this topic. When I first met Rudá Iandê in New York City, I was a curious skeptic. Here was this shaman talking about personal power, inner truth, and facing one’s demons. Over the years, we’ve had countless deep conversations, sometimes in the most magical of settings. Once, while in Australia, we literally walked barefoot together around Uluru, the massive red rock sacred to the Aboriginal people. There’s something about walking under the stars in a vast desert that makes you drop your pretenses. We talked about our fears, our visions, and yes, our egos. I admitted to him that night that part of me liked being seen as a thought leader in personal development—that I had an inner storyteller spinning a tale where I’m the “hero” helping others awaken. He didn’t judge me for it; he simply asked, “And what happens if that story disappears? Who are you then?” I didn’t have an answer at the time. But that question stayed with me. It’s a bit haunting, isn’t it? Who are you without the stories you tell about yourself? I’ve come to see that question not as an invitation to delete the story of “Justin” (which would be another form of ego annihilation), but to hold my stories lightly. I am not just the roles I play or the narratives I create. There’s a deeper being underneath, one that doesn’t need constant definition. Some might call that the soul, or simply awareness. From that deeper vantage point, the (Continuing…) From that deeper vantage point, I now see ego not as a monster to slay, but as one aspect of my whole being — a part to be understood and guided, not exterminated. My ego is still very much alive (and occasionally kicks up a fuss), but I’ve made peace with its presence. It stands beside me rather than pretending to be my entire identity. And when it does try to take over — as egos are wont to do — I notice it, take a breath, maybe chuckle at myself, and carry on without letting it run the show.
This brings me to the core insight I want to share: trying to live without ego can backfire because it’s based on a rejection of reality. It’s an attempt to live in an idealized state that isn’t true to our human nature. When we reject an intrinsic part of ourselves, we create division inside. One part is always fighting another. It’s exhausting and, ultimately, counterproductive. In my case, rejecting my ego only empowered it in destructive ways — it became the “beast” in the shadow, influencing me in sneaky, unhealthy forms. By contrast, when I acknowledged my ego and gave it a proper seat at the table, it lost its obsessive grip over me. I could then reclaim the energy and personal power I had been wasting on an unwinnable internal war.
Nowadays, I focus on living with a healthy ego: one that is right-sized and in balance with my empathy and awareness. A healthy ego, to me, means I have a sense of self that lets me navigate the world and assert my values, but I’m not ruled by a need to feel superior or invincible. It’s an ego that serves my humanity rather than contradicting it. This kind of ego doesn’t need to boast, nor does it need to masquerade as saintly humility. It can handle being wrong, it can laugh at itself, and it can step back when my heart or intuition has something important to say. In fact, I’d argue that integrating the ego in this way has made me more compassionate and authentic than I ever was when I was busy trying to have zero ego. By accepting my own humanness, I found it easier to accept others as they are. When you’re not fixated on scrubbing away your ego or polishing your halo, you have a lot more attention free to actually listen to people and empathize with their struggles. You realize we’re all in the same boat, all “perfectly imperfect,” and that feels deeply connecting.
If there’s a final image that encapsulates this journey for me, it’s this: I see my ego now as a wise friend that occasionally forgets itself. When it flares up—say, in a moment of self-importance or insecurity—I don’t respond with harshness or denial. I respond with curiosity, maybe even affection. “Ah, there you are,” I might think, “trying to protect me or make me feel special. I see you. I got this. We’re okay.” In those moments, the ego usually settles down, like a kid throwing a tantrum who just wanted to be heard. It’s a far cry from the old days of slamming the door on that kid and then wondering why I felt inner turmoil.
My long-time collaboration with Rudá Iandê and the creation of The Vessel are direct outcomes of this hard-won understanding. We built The Vessel as a space where people could explore personal transformation without the fake halos and unrealistic pretenses. It’s a community where you’re encouraged to bring your whole self to the table — ego included — and do the real work of self-discovery. Rudá’s teachings in Out of the Box and the Free Your Mind masterclass are all about busting the myths that keep us trapped. The myth of the ego-less human was one of my last traps. Letting it go has been liberating. It has allowed me to step out of the neat little story I had about who I “should” be, and step into the reality of who I am. And who I am is someone still learning, still flawed, still occasionally ego-driven — but also someone increasingly self-aware, sincere, and grounded in my own truth.
In the end, I didn’t become some enlightened being floating above the human experience. What happened was far more meaningful: I became more human, more myself. I learned that humility isn’t thinking you have no ego; humility is recognizing your ego and not letting it run amok. Strength isn’t eliminating weakness; it’s embracing your vulnerabilities and imperfections so they no longer control you from the shadows. By trying to live without ego, I was implicitly telling myself that something was fundamentally wrong with me. By welcoming my ego home, I’ve told myself that I am whole — not perfect, but whole — as I am.
So if you’ve been beating yourself up in a crusade to eliminate your ego, consider this an invitation to stop the fight. Lay down the sword that’s been pointed at your own heart. Acknowledge your ego, with a knowing smile, and direct your energy towards understanding it instead of destroying it. You might discover that the ego, when befriended, has valuable lessons to teach about your needs, your wounds, and your desires. Paradoxically, you might find that you become less egotistical the moment you stop obsessing over ego altogether.
My journey taught me that wholeness trumps false perfection every time. Trying to live without ego backfired on me, but embracing my full self set me free. I suspect the same is true for many of us. We don’t become light by amputating parts of ourselves we deem “dark.” We become light by illuminating those parts with awareness and compassion. In the process, what was once an inner enemy can become an ally. My ego, formerly my adversary, is now a reminder of my humanity and a resource I can draw upon.
I started this story telling you how my efforts to banish the ego went awry. I want to end with a note of hope for anyone who’s similarly struggling with this paradox. It’s okay to have an ego. In fact, accepting that simple truth might be one of the most profoundly freeing moves you can make on your self-development path. It was for me. It allowed me to step off the treadmill of becoming and relax into being. And from that state of being — messy, human, real — I’ve found it much easier to grow, to love, and to create. It turns out the door to genuine transformation wasn’t labeled “No Ego.” It was labeled “Know Ego” all along. By walking through that door, I finally feel like I’m living from my heart, with my feet on the ground, as a whole person. And that, ironically, was the ego-transcendence I’d been looking for from the start.
In summary: The ego wasn’t a dragon to be slain, but a misunderstood part of myself that needed to be integrated. Trying to live without it only made that dragon breathe fire in secret. Living with it — openly, consciously, and compassionately — has made all the difference. I’m a work in progress, but at least now I’m no longer at war with myself. And if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that making peace with your ego is a far sweeter victory than defeating it could ever be.
