3 Habits to Gain Conversation With Your Larger Self

If you want emotional clarity, freedom, and more, learn the secrets your ego can’t tell you.

The personal development world loves to talk about the higher self. This is the upgraded version of you who performs optimally 24/7, feels joy in friendship and work, ease in the body, and so on.

But the more you focus on your higher self, the more you confront a sharp contrast between who you want to be and who you appear to be.

Your love for naughty forms of consumption, gossip, staying up all night (or whatever habit you consider “bad”), stands in such sharp distinction from your ever-brilliant higher self that you become prone to shame and self-judgment, which separates you from it even further.

You can build a clearer, more accessible channel to your beloved higher self if you instead turn your attention toward integrating both your higher and lower sides, what psychologist and mystic Carl Jung called the larger Self.

Hello from Your Larger Self

Jung referred to the Self (with a capital ‘S’) as the totality of a person’s being, including their conscious and unconscious minds. He saw it as a source of guidance and orientation — it’s what draws us toward certain people, experiences, and situations and away from others.

Interestingly, unlike the polished higher self, our larger Selves hold our entire character, both our lighter, socially endearing qualities, as well as our shadowy parts.

Relating to the Self represents a significant pattern interrupt. In nearly every conversation, people speak and act as if their ego, this character with survival concerns, fears, preferences, appetites, annoyances, and narratives about the past and future, represents their entire being.

This obsession is the reason we’re so prone to worry, fear, anger, and other not-so-fun emotions: we believe that we’re powerless against these states precisely because we think our egos represent who we are.

But according to Jung, Freud, and other psychological pioneers, if we were to zoom out beyond the ego, we’d no longer experience such strong aversions to the emotions & sensations that haunt our lives.

Why? We’d be in clear touch with the messages they’re seeking to deliver and the purpose they’re trying to serve within the ecosystem of the personal and collective psyche. This knowledge would allow us to drop our identification with them.

The following habits and perspectives will help you gain a connection with your larger Self. By bridging the gap between your unconscious and unconscious minds in this way, you can dismantle creative blocks, find relief from worry, and gain rapid clarity on your vision and the tools to best carry it out.

Habit #1: Metabolize Your Anger, Fear, and Pain using the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)

EFT, also called tapping, is a self-led tool for processing physical and emotional pain. It involves tapping on various acupressure points throughout the body while saying the anchoring phrase:

Even though I [insert source of pain], I deeply & completely accept myself.

By allowing you to confront your suffering from a place of acceptance, the practice serves as an exposure therapy that helps you discharge the fear, worry, and other forms of friction that make you coil in the face of pain, cutting you off from their story-less, sensational nature and intensifying your suffering.

Whether it’s physical or emotional pain, we can face sensation without suffering from it.

By confronting the pain directly, the relief comes as a byproduct of the realization that sitting patiently with suffering lets you witness its transformation into something much different.

Instead of becoming fearful, agitated, and contracted in the face of distressing sensation, when you face it voluntarily, it becomes an initiation into your larger Self, the unchanging witness, rather than the hapless puppet, of your experience.

Habit #2: Talking to Your House Plants: The Art of Re-animating your World

Writer Charles Eisenstein has written about the matrix of assumptions, narratives, and agreements that underlie our cynical mainstream culture, calling it the Story of the World, which says,

There is no purpose, only cause. The universe is at bottom blind and dead. Thought is but an electrochemical impulse; love is but a hormonal cascade that rewires our brains…

Since we are fundamentally separate from each other, my self-interest is very likely at the expense of your self-interest. Everything that is not self is at best indifferent to our well-being, at worst hostile.

This worldview casts a looming shadow on our psyches — when you live in a purposeless, mechanical world, you view your body, other people, and the environment as resources you must exploit for your own livelihood.

One simple way you can exclude yourself from this hellscape is by relating to your house plants, your herbal teas, your coffee cups, and other so-called objects as living intelligences.

Now, you might think of this recommendation as cooky, a sign of insanity, or simply a non-sequitur, but it helps plug you directly into a world animated by beauty, purpose, and intelligence itself.

By engaging with everything subject-to-subject, your world takes on a soulful, buzzing quality.

This is more of an experiential perspective shift than something to be understood intellectually.

This habit helps you break identification with your tight, contracted ego that needs everything to be tightly slammed within concepts to feel alright.

It’s not that you’ll never feel bothered when things go awry, but this habit can serve as a reminder of the elegant complexities that surround you in every moment.

As Terence McKenna said:

“Don’t worry. You don’t know enough to worry. Who do you think you are that you should worry, for crying out loud? It’s a total waste of time. It presupposes such a knowledge of the situation that it is in fact a form of hubris.”

Your world is saturated in mystery, and the more you open to these mysteries, the less wrapped in fear and anxiety you become.

Habit #3: Dream Interpretation: Your Larger Self’s Knowing Wink toward Your Ego

A lot of people see their dreams as if they were quaint little novelties that are interesting but irrelevant to their waking life.

Yet Freud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious because their symbolism represents novel solutions to waking-life problems the ego wouldn’t otherwise be able to access.

In dreams, your unconscious presents all sorts of solutions to the stuck points locking you in repetitive loops. The problem is that the unconscious speaks in symbolism, imagery, and through other channels we don’t necessarily understand in waking life.

To use your dreams as vehicles for understanding your unconscious preoccupations, keep these two key considerations in mind.

• Write down your dreams as soon as you wake up. Record them as faithfully as possible, with all the sensory and rhetorical detail you can. This habit becomes the launch pad to understanding their meaning.
• Review them regularly. This is what most people forget. When you review your dreams, say, once every two weeks, for instance, you notice patterns, which clue you into the dream’s underlying message.
• For instance, say you re-read your dreams and recognize the moon as a regular character. You can ask yourself, what does the moon mean to me, right now? What has it meant in the past? You can then replace “the moon” with the meaning you’ve gathered, and this will help you download the dream’s message in a language you can understand consciously.

Conversing with your larger Self is a lifelong process, and these practices are meant as conversational starting points. But so many life struggles are simply the result of being un-able to see beyond our ego vantage point.

Breaking these entrenched habits becomes much simpler (and more fun) when you commit to dissolving the boundaries between your conscious and unconscious minds.

For more frameworks that unclench your mind from cultural programming and ego identification, read the articles below :)