The ego is the voice that sounds like a broken record, always trying to make conclusions about you or the world around you. It confines you to labels. It’s always trying to stop you from doing something by scaring you with potential negative outcomes, or by pushing you to do something in order to achieve a certain outcome you’ve attached your self-worth to.
Your authentic self, on the other hand, doesn’t jump to make conclusions about you or the world. Your authentic self is the watcher of your thoughts and the manager of them. The ego puts you in a reactive mode because you feel threatened in some way. When my four-year-old niece throws a tantrum because her sister took a bite of her food or because someone interrupted her nap, I could easily overreact and make it about me. But I don’t. I also don’t just walk away. I come down to her eye level, hold her as she’s crying, and validate what she’s feeling. I deal with my ego the same way. My authentic self deals with the ego as a little child having a tantrum, which represents me as a child forming that story about myself, and I observe it. I tell myself I am not my ego. I am aware of it. I can choose to believe what it tells me about myself. And I can choose to say I see where you’re coming from and I see where you’re taking me, but I’m not going with you. Once I do that, I know I’ve elevated myself to an at-home self, which is sometimes called the higher self.
Your at-home self is not at home because it ignored your ego, but because it listened to your ego. When you listen to your ego, you take away its power. You disarm it. - Najwa Zebian, an excerpt from page 271 in Welcome Home