Come Fully Alive By Learning to Die to Your Ego Daily

Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

In the British television soap EastEnders, an elderly character called Dot says that at lonely times in life, she always had herself, so that she was never totally lonely.

Her conce
about the fact she’s aging is: what if she loses herself as she grows older?

All of us are going to lose what we think of as “ourselves.” It’s an inevitable part of aging. Eventually we shall irrevocably surrender up this mortal form we have experienced.

If we haven’t known ourselves for who we really are, and instead identify only with our emotional, mental, and physical form, this will seem like a huge loss.

It will feel like the death of who we imagine ourselves to be.

But insofar as we have discovered some aspect of our essential being—that dimension of ourselves Dot alluded to that can never know loneliness because it’s grounded in the infinite Presence we call God—death is no longer a threat to our essential being.

It’s possible to die now, ahead of our actual physical and mental death, so that we are alive to that essence of our being that lies behind our mortal form.

It’s for this reason that Jesus said that if we lose our life now, we will find it. Indeed, he asserted, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies to its existing form, it can’t come alive in the fulfilling way it’s meant to.

Eckhart Tolle in Stillness Speaks puts it this way:

Whenever an experience comes to an end—a gathering of friends, a vacation, your children leaving home—you die a little death. A “form” that appeared in your consciousness as that experience dissolves. Often this leaves behind a feeling of emptiness that most people try hard not to feel, not to face.

If you can learn to accept and even welcome the endings in your life, you may find that the feeling of emptiness that initially felt uncomfortable turns into a sense of inner spaciousness that is deeply peaceful.

By learning to die daily in this way, you open yourself to Life.

If you want to live fully—living from your essential being instead of in an egoic self-image that’s a social construct and not really who you are—learn to sit with any uncomfortable sensations that arise when events end or people leave your presence.

Let yourself experience your aloneness, and you will find yourself coming alive to who you have always really been.