Whispers of the soul
Sometimes I find it difficult to tell the difference between what is my conditioning, what is me rebelling against my conditioning and what is truly me.
Yoga says that when we think, say or do things either under the influence of our conditioning, or as a rebellion against it, it’s our ego that’s calling the shots. When we say, think or do things because they are truly us, this comes from one place and one place only – our soul.
The ego is part of the mind and yoga says it has two parts – ahamkara and asmita. Ahamkara is the part of our ego that recognises that we are separate from everything else – it is simply our sense of “I-ness”. Asmita is the part of our ego that weaves a story around the “I”, it’s the part of us that says things like “I am that”, “that is mine”, “I like this”, “I don’t like that”, “they should have done that for me”.
Ahamkara and asmita are not, in themselves, problematic. On a human level, we need a unique sense of self-identity to achieve our soul’s purpose. In fact, yoga says that when we came into this world, our ego was perfectly calibrated to our soul’s unique mission.
The problem is that we become attached to our identity. And oh boy, do we cling tightly. Our ego protects our sense of self, even if the sense of self it is protecting isn’t particularly helpful or healthy. Our ego determines what in our environment we attend to and what we ignore - it searches for things that confirm what we already feel about the world based on our prior experiences and it perpetuates whatever behaviours reinforce our self-identity (whether they are helpful or not).
The more we attach to the story of “I, me, mine”, the more we cling to something that is not truly us, and the more difficult it is to sense the part of us that is truly us.
So, how can we tell the difference between our ego and our soul? Dr. Marc Halpern says it beautifully “the ego speaks loudly while the soul speaks in whispers”.
Yoga teaches us how to calm our mind, and in the process, we dis-identify with what we are not - we become still and quiet enough to hear what is beyond the mind - the whispers of our soul.
