Dissolving the Ego Through Meditation: Why It Gives Us an Energy Boost

On the surface, it appears that spending time in meditation is selfish. You aren’t directly interacting with others or creating anything that builds profits. From the outside, it seems like you’re sitting there being lazy while the world goes on around you. However, mindfulness is a way to understand the world and reality, to touch all that is. Some mystics believe the ultimate in meditation comes from dissolving the ego and becoming energetically one with the Universe.

Science illustrates the physiological changes that meditation can bring, defining how it improves mood and mindset by diagramming structural brain changes and measuring hormone levels. However, those who engage in regular practice feel that the changes go deeper, engaging the spiritual dimension. Here’s why dissolving the ego through meditation so often gives us an energy boost.

How the Ego Gets in Your Way

The problem with the human perspective is that it paints reality within the defined lines of the physical senses. Even our efforts to dissolve the ego often stem from ego-driven motivations. For example, your desire to overcome your fear of public speaking may stem more from a desire to excel in your career than any intrinsic motivation to share your message with a given audience.

However, focusing on your ego-driven motivations could prevent you from giving a rousing speech that moves your audience and wins promotions. When you tie your sense of self to your delivery, you introduce the fear that you may suffer. As a result, you focus more on avoiding embarrassing yourself than crafting the best message. You concentrate more on preventing shame than informing or delighting your audience, impacting your performance.

Buddhists explore this reality through the principle of nondualism. The most prominent seeming duality is between samsara, or suffering, and nirvana, or release from suffering. However, these distinctions only exist in relation to each other — there is no ultimate metaphysical difference. It’s similar to Shroedinger’s cat in quantum physics: is the cat in the box or not, or does the cat being in the box depend on the observer? Is the cat even in the box if there is no observer to observe it?

In the deepest meditation, practitioners dissolve the very difference between the observer and the observed. They simply are, as pure awareness, flowing on the moving energy of life in which all things are connected, like the drops of water in a river.

Being one with the flow of life is the epitome of energizing. You come to realize that you are, in fact, pure energy, the same stuff of stardust.

From there, you begin to see how to live in greater harmony with the whole. You acknowledge the reality of life and death as part of an ongoing cycle and seek ways to harmonize with this cycle. For example, you may become more conscious of the foods you eat, how they affect your body and how to prepare healthy meals that nurture your body while not depleting the earth of vital resources needed to support other life forms.

You build awareness of how caring for your physical and mental self supports life and, thus, your spirit. Through doing so, you have more to give back, to contribute to the ongoing cycle. Meditation becomes less selfish and more of a necessary part of daily self-care, preparing you to best swim in reality’s ocean.

Meditation to Dissolve the Ego: Techniques

Dissolving the ego through meditation is a lifelong pursuit. However, the following techniques can help you achieve a greater sense of oneness with all that is.

1. Focused Meditation

A focused meditation to dissolve the ego uses an external object to center your concentration. For example, you might meditate on nonduality by lighting a candle. As you gaze into the flames, ask yourself where they came from. Can the fire exist without the wick, the match, the wax? When you blow them out, do they disappear forever? What remains of their light, their heat? How is the next flame you light the same? How is it different?

2. Loving-Kindness or Metta Meditation

A loving-kindness meditation to dissolve the ego focuses on your connection with others. Begin by drawing to mind someone whom you love deeply. How do you experience that feeling in your body? Then, transfer that energy, that emotion, to those with whom you are not as close, your neighbors, colleagues, the world and even those you do not like.

Other Techniques to Dissolve the Ego

As you progress in meditation, you’ll find that mindfulness is less what happens on the mat and more a way of life. Walking the noble eightfold path also requires right effort and right action. The following activities can also re-energize you by dissolving the ego.

• Volunteer: Spending time in service to others reminds you that were it not for your good fortune, you may be in the same situation. Would you want others to react with coldness or compassion? Become the love you want to see in the world.

• Work with a group toward a worthy cause: People together can accomplish far more than anyone alone. Find an organization you believe in and work with them to actualize a kinder, more compassionate world.

• Identify and reframe comparisons: Right view is part of the eightfold path. Comparing what you have to others can make you envious, which is destructive. Every time you catch yourself thinking, “They have that. Why don’t I” reframe it with, “and X individual has this suffering. I’m glad I don’t have that.” Shift your focus to gratitude for what you do have.

Meditation to Dissolve the Ego

Meditation may look to outsiders like sitting and doing nothing. Yet practitioners often report how energizing it feels. Why?

Dissolving the ego through meditation puts you in touch with the ultimate reality. Everything in the universe, including you, is part of a moving stream of light. You come to see your sense of self as a roadblock to flow and achieve living in the moment as a part of the endless wonder of creation.