In This Episode…

In Beyond the Story of Self, Craig guides a series of meditations that gently loosen the structures that define who we think we are.

Most of us move through life with an unspoken assumption—that we are someone, somewhere, located within the edges of our skin. We assume there’s a boundary between “me” and everything else.

But in meditation, a different possibility begins to reveal itself. The edges soften. The sense of inside and outside starts to dissolve. And for a moment, there’s no fixed identity to hold on to—just a vast, open awareness that includes everything and resists nothing. This shift can feel disorienting at first. But if we stay with it, we discover a presence that isn’t defined by the usual reference points.

Through four guided meditations, Craig invites us into a spacious way of being that isn’t shaped by story or held in place by the past.

We encourage you to set aside quiet, uninterrupted time to listen, allowing the meditations to unfold in stillness and presence.

For a deeper experience of Craig’s approach to meditation, consider joining our Awakened Life membership program which offers in-depth guidance, a meditation workshop, and a live online retreat with Craig. Register today to receive your first month for 50% off at AwakenedLifeMembership.com.

If you’re interested in exploring more of Craig’s meditation experiments, you’re invited to tune in to a 90-minute online workshop Craig will be hosting called Meditation 2.0 – The Miracle of Direct Awakening. Register for free at FreeMeditationWorkshop.com.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Meditation #1: Letting Go of Any Idea of Who You Are

For this opening meditation, I want to invite you to let go of any idea of who you are—any idea, image, concept, or story about the person who is doing this meditation right now.

There’s meditation happening. There’s letting go and being present, being conscious of this moment, but without any self-reflection, without any need to look at or maintain the sense of self, the picture of the self who’s here doing this.

We’re resting in the freedom of not knowing who or what we are—and not needing to know who or what we are. Just being, as we are.

Letting Go of the Self Narrative

Experiencing the miracle of being alive. Of being present. Being conscious—without a narrative about a particular individual who’s having this experience of being alive and conscious. Just free, open awareness in this moment. No boundary anywhere.

We’re simply practicing being still, present, and conscious, while giving no attention to the tendency to narrate the experience—the tendency to keep bringing a self into the process.

So what that means is, as you’re sitting here, you may notice a tendency to check in on yourself. How am I doing? I wonder if I’m doing it right. Am I having the experience I’m supposed to be having? What does this experience mean about everything else—about me, about my life, about my spiritual path up to this point? Or about my spiritual path in the future? Where I’m going? That tendency to try to find ourselves somewhere in the practice, somewhere on a timeline, somewhere in a storyline.

The tendency to believe we’re the one doing the meditation—and therefore either doing it well or not so well—instead of realizing that the meditation is always already happening. And we’re making ourselves available to it by getting out of the way. By letting go of the need to impose someone into the process. We’re letting this natural process of meditation happen. Just relaxing. Being still. Paying attention. Being awake.

The Self Sense Is Just an Invention of Your Mind

If you find that this tendency to have a self-story, a self-image, this self-sense, keeps coming into the meditation over and over again—or maybe never leaves, always trying to be front and center on the stage of your practice—if that’s happening, it doesn’t mean you’re failing at the meditation. And it doesn’t mean you have to wrestle that imaginary self to the ground or chase it out of your meditation.

From the vast expanse of consciousness in this moment, allow yourself to see that this is just an invention of your mind. It’s simply a process occurring in consciousness—this self-ing, all the time. Self, self, self. Me, me, me. I, I, I. See it as more phenomena arising in consciousness. It’s not necessary to the process, and you don’t need to give your attention to it. You don’t need to empower it with your interest. You can just let it be. Let it carry on as you continue not to get involved in it. Simply be present, still, attentive.

Allow yourself now to gently begin to let go of the meditation.

[Break]

Loosening Our Identification with Ego

You can move your body, look around. Each of the practices we’re doing takes up the task of relinquishing ego—or loosening identification with ego—and approaches it from a different angle. The practice we just did approaches it through the lens of knowing: ego as the need to know, the need to know who I am, the need to see myself, the need to have a story about myself.

I think anytime we talk about ego, it’s always worth reiterating that I’m using the term in a particular way.

Defining the Ego

There are a number of different ways people talk about ego. The psychodynamic and psychoanalytic communities refer to it in one way—or in a set of ways, I suppose. But to clarify, the ego we’re referring to here is the one that’s been described in spiritual texts for a long time as the core obstacle to awakening. And it very much matches the colloquial way we tend to use the word ego in daily life. When we talk about someone who seems to have an ego that’s out of control, or a big, overinflated ego, we’re referring to someone who has a strong sense of self—a big story about themselves that they’re deeply identified with and attached to, and that they want to sell to everyone else.

We all know examples of a hyper-inflated ego and what that feels like on the receiving end. Maybe we’ve seen it in ourselves at some point, and we recognize it from the inside. But the ego doesn’t have to be hyper-inflated to be a problem on the spiritual path.

To distill it all down, I think the key point about the ego is that it’s really our investment in—or our attachment to—a self-image, a self-story, a self-concept. A particular set of ideas about who and what we are, what we’re capable of, what we’re not capable of, and the ways in which we’re special or unique compared to others.

Whether that’s good or bad doesn’t matter. The ego wants a story about me, and it will hold on to that story and fight to defend it. This is an emotional investment in knowing who I am—convincing you of that story, convincing everyone of that story. That’s really the ego—the core of the ego structure we’re talking about. I’m calling it a structure, but it might be more accurate to call it a process. The ego isn’t an entity. The ego is an activity. It’s a process in the psyche—a process of self-narration, self-maintenance, and self-projection.

In Meditation, It’s Easier to Let Go of the Ego

So we’re working in a variety of ways in meditation to try to soften all of that up—to get some distance from it, to loosen its grip, to get its hands off the steering wheel—so that a much more organic, natural, fluid way of living can begin to take over. This is probably easiest in meditation.

In meditation, you could argue it’s relatively easy to start letting go of ego. Ego tends to strengthen and project itself when we’re in social contexts, out in the world, where I have to know who I am. I need you to know who I am. I need to be seen in a certain way so that I can keep seeing myself in a certain way. And all the defenses kick in when that’s challenged in any social setting.

Here, we can drop all of our defenses. We can drop down into a much more fluid, open, free way of being alive. Let down our guard. Let go of our stories. Let the boundaries we’ve erected around our idea of self fall away. And experience what it is to be consciousness, awareness, alive in this moment without identification or fixation on this body and mind.

Meditation #2: Softening the Boundaries of the Self

So with that, I want to invite us into our second meditation practice. Again, allow yourself to settle into a good meditation posture—comfortable, but alert and awake.

With each of our practices today, we’ll build on what we’ve already done. Allow yourself to re-anchor in the previous practice—not needing to know who you are, not needing to know what you are—just being here, having the experience of being alive, free from any narration or story.

To begin this practice, I want to invite you to see if you can notice where you perceive the boundary around yourself to be. This is a felt sense we’re looking for. The last practice was more about knowing and seeing, this is more about feeling and sensing. Where do we feel that the self exists? Where does it feel like you end, and the rest of the world begins? See if you can feel it. Is it right at your skin? Does it feel like you end at the boundaries of the body?

And would you say that everything inside your skin is self—and everything outside your skin is not self, it’s other? Or is it already bigger than that?

You might experiment for a moment. If your eyes are closed, open them briefly and take in everything you’re aware of right now, even visually, in the space around you. You don’t have to look around. Just notice everything that’s within your gaze, and therefore within your awareness. Everything you can see, hear, feel, smell, or sense.

Is there a way in which everything you’re aware of also feels like it’s on the inside of you? I’m not saying you should have that experience, but sometimes we realize: “Well, really, I guess I’m not just the body—I’m this awareness.” And if I’m the awareness, what is me? What’s included in me? Everything I’m aware of seems to be inside awareness, not outside of it. So maybe my boundary ends with the edge of awareness. Maybe everything outside awareness is “other.”

See now if you can allow your sense of boundary to expand to include everything you’re aware of right now.

We could go one step further. I want to invite you to allow your boundary, your sense of self, to include everything you can imagine. Not just what you’re concretely aware of through the senses. Allow yourself to broaden out to include the whole neighborhood around you, the town or village or city you’re in, your whole country, your continent, the whole world, the solar system, the galaxy, the entire known universe, and anything beyond the known universe. Include all of consciousness. And then release any sense of boundary at all.

For some of us, this sense of expansiveness—of no boundary—can be quite intense. We may even feel a bit lost without our normal sense of location and definition. Allow yourself to relax into this unboundaried way of being. Just relax, and soften into it.

No boundary really means no idea where the boundaries are. No need to establish any boundaries or defend them. Just being here, present as consciousness, with no need to find yourself, no need to locate yourself anywhere in particular, no need to feel your edges.

How the Self Structure Reasserts Itself

As you continue to rest in this wide, open consciousness without imposing any boundary around the self, you may notice that your familiar self-structure, self-concept, self-image, or self-story tries to reassert itself. It may try to take control of the meditation, to get itself back on stage again by wondering: How am I doing? Where am I in this? Is it working? Or: Wow, I’m having a big experience—what does that mean about me and where I am on my path? Or in any number of other ways.

It can also be more subtle—concerns about you and your life reasserting themselves, trying to take over your attention again. From this place of vastness, of no boundary, you can make room for all of that activity and simply see it for what it is. Just activity of the mind. Emotional activity. Mental activity arising within the unboundaried, spacious awareness that you are.

In other words, even though it carries the label of self, you don’t see it as self. You don’t relate to it as self. You relate to it as phenomena—activity occurring in consciousness in this moment. You don’t identify with it. You don’t make it into self. And that enables you to stay in this place of no boundary, even as all of the ego processes try to run amok in your meditation. They can’t really interfere, because your meditation is of no boundary.

Allow yourself now to gently ease out of the meditation. There’s no need to reestablish narrower boundaries. Allow the expansiveness to continue. Allow the not knowing who you are to continue.

[Break]

I encourage you to really move your body a bit. Stretch, energize your body so that you’ll feel good sitting for two more meditation periods.

1. Not Needing to Know Who We Are
So far today, we’ve worked with two distinct approaches to relinquishing ego or softening the boundaries around ego. First, we worked with not needing to know who we are—letting go of the need to see the self. This may be the very essence, the very core of the ego drive: to see me, to know me, to have a story about me.

2. Allowing the Boundaries Around Self to Soften
Then, in our last meditation, we explored what it is to allow the boundaries around the self to soften, to expand, and ultimately to find ourselves with no boundary whatsoever. For this next practice, we’re going to build on both of those, especially the one we just did. We were working with the idea of our boundary, our felt sense of where the self is, and what it is to expand that into infinity, until any boundary falls away.

3. Dropping the Defenses that Keep Everything Out
The other way our self-boundary, our felt sense of where I end and the rest of the world begins, asserts itself is through what we allow in and what we keep out. In many ways, the defended self-sense is about protection: keeping certain information out, keeping difficult feelings out.

My pet theory about how the ego came into being is that our natural biological survival instinct accidentally got fixated on the picture of self in the mind—on our idea of self—and started to defend it. Now we have a big, elaborate defense structure built around something that’s just a story in our head. But because of that, we’ve built up all these defenses around this idea of self, this picture of self. And so we tend to be very self-defended.

I’m not going to go into an exploration of all the elaborate ego defenses that have been documented, we all know many of them in others and in ourselves.

What I want to invite us to do with this practice is to work with dropping the defenses that keep everything out. In meditation, we’re going to see if we can allow more and more to be in, to be included. To not be afraid of anything. To not need to push anything away. To not be in resistance to anything or in fear of anything. To not contract away from anything, but instead, to have a wide, open heart. A heart that can include every feeling, every thought, everything that’s occurring, without shutting down or going into defense.

Again, this is much easier to do in meditation than in daily life, for sure. Which is why we’re doing it. Why we’re doing so much meditation—because it’s a place to train our psyche, in a sense, to have a different relationship to the world. A different relationship to life.

Guided Meditation #3: Dropping the Defenses that Keep Everything Out

Allow yourself to settle into your meditation posture again.

Re-anchor in the first two practices we did today—no need to know who you are, no need to know what you are. Just being here, present, awake, available for this moment. And no need to have a story about you having this experience. No need to see the self.

Allow your boundaries to fall away. No need to know where you end and everything else begins. Just wide, open consciousness.

Allow yourself to relax and open your heart. I don’t necessarily mean your physical heart. I don’t necessarily mean your heart chakra or any other idea of what the heart is. I mean that felt sense in the heart—the heart that is so often defended, so often shut down to feeling.

Allow Your Heart to Soften

Allow your heart to soften, open, and expand. You don’t have to feel anything in particular to do this practice. You might not feel your heart. You might not feel what it is to soften or open it.
The key to this practice is simply to let everything in—to not keep anything out. Let everything happen in this moment as it’s happening.

Most of the time, there are certain feelings we don’t want to feel or experience—which is understandable. They might be very unpleasant. So we keep them out, push them away. But in this practice, we’re not pushing anything away. It’s a practice of letting everything be here, letting everything in, and not trying to keep anything out.

There might be certain thoughts or memories that we habitually try to keep out, to keep at bay, because we don’t like the stories they tell, we don’t like their content. But here, we just let them be. We let them in.

Relinquishing Any Idea of an Inside and an Outside

It’s a practice of relinquishing any idea of there being an inside and an outside—inside me, outside of me—what I’m going to allow inside, and what I want to keep out.

We’re letting everything be on the inside. There is just the inside of me, which includes everything. I don’t need to defend myself against anything. I don’t need to keep anything away or out. If there are experiences of tension, I let them be. I include them in this moment. I don’t need this moment to be different than it is.

The ego tries to stay in control by dictating what is and is not acceptable in any moment. So by simply accepting everything in this moment—allowing everything—the ego has no control, and we are free.

Now, without letting go of the meditation, I want to invite you to take a minute to shift positions. Relax your body. Stretch in place. You can even stand up for a moment and loosen up. We’re going to continue with our final meditation in just a minute, but I want to give you a moment to take a quick stretch. Just a minute.

Allow yourself now to settle back into your meditation. We’ve explored how the ego lives in our current concept of self—our defended concept of self. It lives in our sense of boundaries between us and everything else. It lives in our need to control our experience by deciding what can be included and what should be excluded from each moment.

The Ego Lives in Time

The other place the ego lives is in time. It lives in the idea of time—the idea that I’m a self who was born at a particular moment and has had a certain set of experiences. There’s a story about me and everything that’s ever happened to me, and all the meaning I’ve made out of it about me. There’s also a story about where I’m going in the future—about who I’m becoming, what I have yet to achieve, accomplish, or experience.

So, this story of self lives on a timeline, and it locates us somewhere along that timeline, with a past and a future.

Guided Meditation #4 – Letting Go of the Past & the Future

For this practice, I want to invite you to let go of time—which specifically means letting go of the past and the future. Continue with the holistic practice, meaning all three practices we’ve worked with today. No need to know who you are. No need to impose a boundary around the self. No need to control your experience by including this and excluding that. Just letting it all in. Letting it all be, on that foundation.

Allow yourself to have no relationship to the past. No story derived from the past. No idea of a self on a timeline. Awake and alive in this moment. Only aware of this moment. Fully present in this moment. And no thought of the future. No projection into the future of a self who is going to do all this meditation, get very enlightened, and have a wonderful life—an awakened life that’s going to look a particular way, with certain experiences, and feel a certain way.

No story about the past. No story about the future. Just open, free awareness in this moment. Just being and letting be in this moment.

Letting go of the past and future doesn’t mean thoughts will never arise that are related to the past or the future. But in meditation, we simply don’t get involved in those thoughts. We don’t invest any energy in those stories or imaginings.

Of course, we’ve all had a past, and hopefully we will all have a future. This isn’t a denial of reality. We’re simply letting go of the need to have a story about a self that’s derived from the past—and of our projections about the future—so that we can simply be here. Awake and alive. Open to this moment as it is. Fully available for whatever reality brings our way in each moment. Free to be who we are, with no need to know who we are.

I now want to invite you to gently begin to let go of the meditation.

You can move your body, look around, and take a moment to notice the quality of your consciousness here at the end.

The Two Easiest Ways to See the Ego

Some people often ask, What’s the easiest way to see the ego in my daily life, so I can see how it’s operating? There are a lot of ways—but two that are especially easy to spot are the presence of self-consciousness and self-defense.

Anytime there’s self-consciousness, like in a social context, for example, we become self-conscious: How do I look? How are people perceiving me? That very familiar self-consciousness is an easy way to say, Oh, that’s ego. That’s a story about me—how I’m doing, how I’m being seen.

The other really easy way is self-defense. When something happens that challenges our self-image or story, when someone says something that challenges us, and this defense system rises up to rationalize the behavior, justify it, blame someone else, or tell a different story about it.

All of those reactions are places you can keep an eye on in your life. They’re easy ways to spot the ego at work.