How To Tell the Difference Between Ego and Intuition
What does it feel like to follow your soul?
The clearest sign I’ve found to indicate you’re following your soul instead of your ego is massive resistance. It will generally trigger you a whole hell of a lot. By which I mean, it doesn’t feel good. By which I mean…we don’t like it.
Yeah, I’m not in the business of feeding people a glamorized, toxic-positive, love-and-light portrayal of the spiritual journey. Even with, or maybe especially with, spiritual journeys that are catalyzed by other human beings, because these — relationship-based journeys, which is what I most often write about— make it particularly easy to fall into ego.
We have so many preconceived notions about what they’re supposed to look like. An ayahuasca trip? A Near-Death Experience? Few of us know what to expect with one of those. But a relationship? Oh, we all think we’re experts on that.
And when you think you know everything about a thing, that’s sign number one that you’re all up in your ego.
But when I say following your soul doesn’t feel good I am being a little hyperbolic. The truth is that it does feel good…hopefully, eventually, but we’re so used to the way our ego-mind works, we’re rarely prepared to follow it without resistance. It’s the resistance that causes pain. Yet, it’s the resistance that shows us where to listen.
What is the Difference Between Intuition and Ego?
Intuition is quiet. It requires stillness. It’s steady but unfamiliar. While not based on human logic, it is detached and non-emotional. It has no judgments about anything at all. It just is. It’s, essentially, boring and alien.
In contrast, the ego is loud. It’s very loud. It’s deeply emotional and fear-based. It’s attached to protecting us from harm and keeping us safe, getting our needs met. It judges everything, constantly.
It’s kept control of our mind and, likely, most of our life decisions up until the point of our awakening and yet our awareness of it and how it works within our own minds, specifically, can be just as limited as our familiarity with our intuition.
Step one to deciphering between ego and intuition is getting to know your ego very well, getting to be best buddies with your ego.
Why Transcending the Ego Doesn’t Work
In spiritual communities, practitioners tend to want to bypass the ego or transcend the ego. They think if they meditate enough or they do enough yoga they’ll escape the suffering that the ego-mind perpetuates.
That doesn’t work. I’ll tell you why.
As long as you’re attempting to escape suffering, you’re in resistance to holistic consciousness. The soul doesn’t have a preference for things, even for avoiding pain. It doesn’t care if you’re sad or happy. It doesn’t care if you get that job, or you get married, or you buy that house. It doesn’t care if you live on the street or in the biggest mansion in Beverly Hills. It doesn’t care what you eat. It doesn’t care what you wear.
Your soul does not care if you’re happy or sad.
Sit with that for a second. That is wildly different than the entire framework by which our society lives, even at its best. At its best, the human mind wants to reach for happiness. It wants safety and contentment and security. It’s how our minds are made, and our egos, constructed from a very young age to get our needs met.
Nothing wrong with getting our needs met, especially since as a child we can’t meet them ourselves. The ego-mind is a useful tool then and it remains a useful tool to interface with the world, to say “Hey, I’m hungry. I think I’d prefer a sandwich,” or “Hey, I think I’d like to live by the ocean. That would be soothing.”
The ego gets harmful, however, when its preferences interfere with our soul’s evolution. For instance, when in its preference for not being alone it says, “Hey, instead of standing in my truth, I’ll let this person trample all over me, because I don’t want to be rejected or abandoned.”
Your soul says bump that. Your truth is more important. Your ego scrambles to protect you from rejection because it’s painful.
Do you see how they’re at odds? This happens a lot. But it doesn’t make your ego “bad”. It just makes your ego unhelpful at times.
Trying to transcend the ego, to ignore it or push it away, only makes you less aware of when it is driving you. It is, in and of itself, an egoic intention, because you’re trying to reject pain.
Instead, you want to be more aware so that you can let your soul in the driver's seat more often. That is what greater consciousness is. It’s acceptance and integration of the whole, both the soul and the ego-mind.
When You Begin to Hear the Soul
As I’ve hinted at above, your soul is primarily concerned with its own evolution, more rarely with the evolution of others. The more you know what the ego sounds like, feels like, the easier it will be to determine when your soul is speaking to you through your intuition.
Once you’re on an awakening journey, paying very close attention to what triggers you and why is a fantastic start to unraveling ego response. When you get past that instinctive ego reaction, usually you can hear the soul speak quietly underneath. Triggers are actually a good sign your ego is being broken down further, which inevitably aligns you with your soul.
So you’ll wear the ego down a bit and you’ll be so familiar with how it works, so non-reactive, that when the soul speaks you’ll be like…huh…that feels weird. That feels like something I should pay attention to.
Generally, at first, you won’t. Your soul will nudge you and you’ll ignore it. It will nudge you again and you’ll ignore it. Eventually, ignoring it will cause you pain. Then you’ll say “Ow, how do I stop this pain?” and your soul will scream at you. Then, maybe, you’ll listen for once.
Then you’ll go back to ignoring it.
Essentially, what I’m saying here is that it takes practice, like anything, to really start to engage with and listen to your intuition. We are not well practiced in this; you are learning to speak a dead language here. Be kind to yourself as you do.
I’m also saying that as human beings we have less investment in the evolution of our soul than our own comfort. That’s just how we’re built. At some point, it gets more uncomfortable to live from your ego than your soul, but that’s not how it starts. At the start, listening to your soul will be deeply uncomfortable.
So, the primary way you know it’s your soul is when, even after having quieted your ego enough to hear it, your ego roars back in to fight it. And that brings you back around to recognizing triggers and seeing the ego for what it is. You can not know one without the other. You need the ego to know the soul.
How To Access that Quiet Voice
There are lots of ways to grow your connection to your soul or strengthen the voice of your intuition. Some tools that I’ve used are meditation, yoga, dream interpretation, journaling, self-inquiry, and tarot cards. There are many more tools, but these are the ones I’ve felt drawn to and they’ve worked for me.
My advice is to try anything you feel drawn to and leave what doesn’t stick. As Rumi says “There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” There’s no right or wrong way to do this.
The more you practice, though, the easier it gets to let your soul take the reins in your life and you’ll see, once that happens, how life starts to work for you. That’s when the Universe really opens up and begins to bring you exactly what you need when you need it.
You start to feel abundant and supported by something much larger than that ego in your head. Getting there, to me, is worth the work of becoming more aware.
❤
If you have any questions, feel free to comment below! I’m always happy to engage in discussion.
