Breakthrough #2
Love Awakens the Soul

A breakthrough at the soul level expands love, but it also brings challenges. The soul takes God’s infinite love and steps it down to human scale. How much intensity of love you can receive depends on many things. Most people dream of more love in their lives, yet in reality the amount they have right now is what they have adapted to. There’s also the issue of how acceptable it is to show intense love. Not everyone would be comfortable if you suddenly confronted them with an onrush of unconditional love. They would wonder if this new kind of love could be trusted. In their heart of hearts they would worry that they didn’t deserve such open, complete love.

Many people have made momentary contact with the soul’s more intense, purer love. When they do, there’s a wonderful sense of awakening. Love awakens the soul. This happens because like is attracted to like. The soul isn’t passive. It vibrates in sympathy with you anytime you try to free yourself from limitations. There’s a similar sense of expansion and liberation when you experience beauty or truth. You are freeing up soul energy and letting it flow. The electricity in your house doesn’t provide light and heat until you flick a switch. Something very similar happens when you awaken the soul’s energy.

People experience a surge of the soul’s energy without knowing exactly how they did it. Without warning they glimpse unconditional love or feel God’s presence. There’s a sense of being blissful and unbounded. It suddenly feels real to go beyond all boundaries. Why, then, does everyday life draw them back down again? These privileged journeys into expanded awareness are almost always brief—a matter of moments, perhaps a few days, and rarely more than a few months.

Year after year the brain has adapted to a way of life in which it is normal to be much less than loving and joyful. Since you can’t force yourself to embrace something new, what will do it? The answer, I believe, is desire. The desire to love and be loved constantly urges each person forward. When that desire is most alive, we seek the most from life. When that desire flickers out, life becomes static.

Countless people prefer to exist without love because they are too afraid to risk whatever comfort they have; others have failed in love and feel wounded, or have grown bored with someone they once loved. For all these people, love has come to a stop, which means that an aspect of the soul is numb. To tell someone in that condition that love is infinite may be inspiring, but the inspiration is empty unless they can experience not infinite love, but the next step. And the next step is always the same: to awaken the soul. Because everyone is different, there’s no cut-and-dried method to achieve this. It may work to tell a lonely person to get out of the house and meet new people, go on a date, or join an Internet service that matches couples up. And it may not work at all.

The secret of desire

Why is love like water to one thirsty soul and yet rejected by another? I’m reminded of a poignant story told to me by a woman from the Southwest who retired from a lucrative media job to become a builder. She chose to buy land in the most dilapidated section of the barrio, where she intended to renovate a group of adobe houses. “It was a hard choice to be a builder in those surroundings,” she recalls. “I hired local workmen, but there was a lot of theft from the site. Many of the men were out of work and resented having a woman boss. Every day the kids on the block would gather at the curb to stare at me framing out a roof or plastering a wall. None of them had ever seen a new house being built, I imagine.

“Two kids caught my eye. Antonio was older than the others, maybe fifteen. He had a drug history and a string of arrests. But one day I came to the site and found a mural of the Virgin Mary painted on a wall. When I asked around, Antonio confessed that he had done it. So I made a secret pact with him. I bought him the materials that local painters used to make traditional retablos, holy pictures painted on tin. He eagerly went to work, and it wasn’t long before he had an active little business going. Nobody talked about what I’d done for him, but they knew.

“The other kid was a little girl, Carla, who was eight or nine, very bright and very curious. We got to be friends, and I met her mother. I was so touched by their sweetness, people who had almost nothing, that I went to the best private school in town and got the principal to agree to admit Carla on a full scholarship.

“I took time off and helped her mother send her off that first morning, and then I went back to work. Around one o’clock I looked over and saw Carla where she always was, standing with the other kids watching the workmen. She was no longer in her school dress. I felt very upset and ran down the street to the trailer where the family lived.

“I asked the mother what had gone wrong. Did Carla misbehave? Did the other kids pick on her? She looked away, not wanting to meet my eyes. ‘I went back at noon and took Carla home,’ she said. ‘You tried to do a nice thing, but she doesn’t belong there. She’d never fit in.’ I tried not to get angry. I coaxed and cajoled, but the mother was firm, and her little girl never went back.”

The moral of this story is that love and desire must match. The spiritual path unfolds when you follow your heart’s desire. Inside everyone is a place that is intimate, alive, and full of yearning. It doesn’t focus on God, or salvation, or unconditional love. It focuses on the next thing it desires. If that next thing is fulfilled, there will be another next thing, and then another, and on and on. Religious traditions miss this very pragmatic point. They offer the final, glorious reward to people who can’t figure out how to get the next small reward. No religion can dictate from the outside. Only you are in touch with the living impulse of desire that wants to move ahead.

But what if the next thing you want to do is eat chocolate cake? What if your deepest hunger is for a second house or a third wife? The soul doesn’t judge your desires. It works with who you are and where you are now. The trick is to turn the path of desire, which for most people is focused on worldly things, and redirect it to a higher plane.

The problem of boundaries

As much as you may love chocolate cake or a second house, there’s a limit to the joy that material things bring. The great disadvantage to desire is that repetition kills joy. Couples face this problem in marriage, because daily life with another person, however much you love that person, involves a great deal of repetition. The standard advice is to add spice by doing something new. Surprise your husband with new lingerie. Surprise your wife with a vacation in Bermuda. This advice may work in the short run, but it’s only a temporary diversion. There’s a deeper answer based on the soul.

As your soul sees it, desire has no interest in repetition. It wants to go deeper. It wants more intensity, more meaning, more expansion. What keeps a marriage alive is that you see more to love in your partner; the possibilities grow over time. Intimacy with another person is an incredible discovery, for which there is no substitute. When you find such intimacy, you naturally want more—you want it to grow closer. On the other hand, desire that doesn’t go deeper, which circles around repeating the same pattern over and over, has somehow been diverted from its natural course.

If this description brings images to mind of a dog chasing its tail, or racing cars endlessly marking laps on the track, you have grasped the point perfectly. Desire that pursues its object while never gaining ground is stuck. A boundary acts like an invisible fence or a line that is not supposed to be crossed. Why do we put boundaries around our desires? First, to keep out uncomfortable experiences. Think of the times you’ve passed a panhandler or beggar on the street—or a Santa ringing a bell for charity at Christmas, for that matter. If you decide to freeze out their pleas, you put up an invisible barrier. Because it is psychological, a boundary can have emotional implications for the person who sets it in place. Imagine yourself as the panhandler instead. When you say “Spare change?” some people will simply ignore you; others will hurry their steps out of guilt; many more will be irritated or angry; a few might ironically toss you a penny or act deeply offended.

The second reason for putting up a boundary is to protect your comfort zone. Inside this zone you feel satisfied. You also feel safe and protected. There are many kinds of comfort zones. For every person who feels safe only when he or she is alone, there’s another who feels safe only when other people are around. But whatever kind of zone you have created, you are making it much harder to allow change into your life. When I was a medical intern rotating through various departments of the hospital, I learned some acute lessons about why people don’t change. One of my most vivid memories from a veterans hospital outside Boston was of leaning out the window of the cafeteria, watching patients down below.

Each patient was wheeled to the front door of the hospital, at which point he got up and walked away. A happy sight, you would think. But one day I saw a lung cancer patient under my care cross the street and enter a drugstore. Two minutes later he came out with a carton of cigarettes under his arm. He had already ripped open a pack and lit up the first smoke. When I pointed this out to a second-year oncology resident, he shrugged and told me that if he looked out the window, he’d see half of his patients doing the same thing. He had learned not to look.

This was thirty years ago, and fortunately the tide has turned against smoking. But the deeper point is that people will go a long way to protect their comfort zones and to fence out painful reality. Another memory from those days, this one from a time when I was on psychiatric rotation: a woman came in for evaluation, and as I was doing her workup, she revealed that she had four young children at home and a husband who had lost his job and started to drink. She was diabetic and many pounds overweight. I felt overwhelmed at what her life must be like, but when I asked her why she had come to the clinic, she said, “I have a feeling I’m depressed, but I can’t figure out why.”

Back then I assumed that offering kindness, sympathy, and caring would nourish everyone—I underestimated how protective boundaries really are, thinking they would be easy to tear down. Boundaries are made of frozen awareness, which is very elusive to understand. I had a very warm-hearted mentor on my psych rotation who was considered the most empathetic doctor in the hospital. He could get people to open up who seemed frozen and out of reach. He himself was a delightfully open, carefree person, and he used his natural charm to disarm frightened patients.

But he also had deep understanding of why these people were unreachable. It’s one thing to feel unloved, he said, but for some, “I am unlovable” is such a deeply ingrained belief that it feels like part of who they are. So when you expose them to love and caring, they flee. Why shouldn’t they? You are threatening to take away part of their identity, which would be threatening to anyone. Try going home next Christmas or Thanksgiving and being kind to the relative who bothers you the most. When you radiate love where once you radiated dislike, their response will probably be suspicion, and if you persist, they may become anxious or angry.

In short, our boundaries are part of our identities. The soul can change that identity, and the process begins by negotiating with your boundaries. You know, in your heart of hearts, that you aren’t truly safe, protected, or fulfilled. If you want those things to be real, several new assumptions come into play:

• You are not so afraid of risk.

• You don’t have to be right all the time.

• You trust that love is meant for you.

• You welcome the opportunity to expand.

• You see abundance as natural to life.

• You don’t expect anything.

These are powerful beliefs, and they all melt boundaries. Let’s take a closer look at how they work.

You are not so afraid of risk. Taking a risk is the same as stepping outside your boundary. We all want to be free, but anxiety holds us back. Every mother knows the look a toddler wears when it first tries to walk—it’s a mixture of curiosity, intention, anxiety, and open-eyed wonder. “What am I doing? I know I want to try this, but it feels wild.” That’s the look of a risk-taker. It expresses the mixed feelings that are inescapable when you abandon what you know for what you don’t. Boundaries try to convince us that risks are too dangerous. In truth, risk-taking is desire coaxing you to reach for something new.

People who avoid all risks are making a devil’s bargain. In exchange for limited fulfillment, they gain safety. But that safety is an illusion. The reality is that they are stuck, immobile. Think of an agoraphobe, someone who is afraid to go outdoors or into large open spaces. Staying at home feels safe at first, because the outside has been walled off. But as time passes, even the safety of being in the house starts to lose its effect. Now the agoraphobic sufferer finds himself feeling comfortable in only one room, and then a smaller room, until only the smallest room in the house brings any feeling of security. Why does the phobia progress this way? Because the desire to be outside can’t be stifled, and as it builds up, the phobia counters by creating tighter and tighter boundaries. Learning that risks are positive, that they allow you to grow, is an important step.

You don’t have to be right all the time. Being inside a limiting boundary is like being the ruler of a small island. You are in control, and the essence of control is always being right. I once met a strong-minded man, an executive in a large corporation, who had the annoying habit of contradicting everyone who tried to talk to him. His automatic reaction to any statement, no matter how obvious or innocuous, was “That’s not true” (or “There’s another way of looking at this,” “I’m not sure about that,” or “That’s a weak argument,” etc.). Apparently he was unaware that he did this. He had just gotten into the habit of making everyone else wrong so that he could always be right. An associate of his asked me to assess what was going on. I sat and listened while this man spent an hour contradicting each person he came into contact with. I decided to try the direct approach and pointed out that he had said “That’s not true” at least twice a minute all morning. Without the slightest hesitation he turned to me and said, “That’s not true.”

Notice how much is contained in those few words. “That’s not true” allows someone to shut out anyone who disagrees, and to put up a warning sign that reads, “Keep out. My mind is already closed.” Boundaries, it turns out, serve very complicated purposes; they can’t be defined purely as psychological defenses. In this case, learning that you don’t have to be right means learning to trust, because the basic need expressed is for control. The boundary is only strengthened if you challenge it; trying to prove to a control personality that he is wrong is futile. Instead, you must show, over and over, that your love can be trusted.

If this boundary is your own, the best approach is to trust someone else in a small way every day. That means not telling them in advance how to do things, not nitpicking and indulging in perfectionism, not contradicting and insisting that only you know what’s right. Reversing our habit of being right will feel uncomfortable—that’s only natural. But for every time that your trust is rewarded, you will have one reason fewer to put up your old wall.

You trust that love is meant for you. Many kinds of boundaries hide self-judgment. People who reject intimacy feel that they don’t deserve love. They fear exposure, not wanting other people to see how unlovable they are. Putting up a boundary also allows them not to look at why they feel they don’t deserve love. (In place of love, you can substitute respect, admiration, acceptance, appreciation—these are all offshoots of love.) The most fortunate among us have been loved since birth. But that is rare. Most people have experienced a combination of love and rejection, even when very young. They have been exposed to negative situations in which their worthiness remains a question.

The only cure for this doubt is to be loved, and that won’t happen if you shut yourself off. Unfortunately, the more you feel you don’t deserve love, the more you isolate yourself, and then the certainty that you don’t deserve love grows stronger. In essence, you can only attract and hold on to as much love as you feel for yourself. One sees evidence for this when a woman says, “I keep dating the same man over and over,” or “I only meet men who wind up rejecting me.” In the case of men, the complaint is the same, but with gender variations: “I meet a lot of women, but nobody I’d marry,” or “I love women, but I don’t want to be pressured to settle down.” Society provides all kinds of ready-made responses behind which a person can hide from his or her own self-judgment.

This limiting boundary can be taken down by trusting that you are lovable, not completely (that would be asking too much), but enough to remain on the outer edge of your comfort zone. You can help a needy child, work for the poor, tutor a high-school dropout—these are acts of love that bring rewards just as big as going on a date, and usually more. As love comes to you, it will become part of your identity. Love wants to grow. You only need to plant the seed.

You welcome the opportunity to expand. People who live behind boundaries are suspicious of expanding. Human beings are unique in that expansion for us happens in awareness. For example, it’s expansive to share and give. But the matter is complicated: the physical act of giving isn’t sufficient. It’s possible to give away millions while still being greedy and selfish at heart. There seems to be an innate mechanism that makes it almost physically necessary for some people to contract, withdraw, and hide. A recent social science experiment took a group of people and showed them a series of slides depicting gruesome events, such as war and automobile accidents. Each person was monitored to measure his or her response, using blood pressure, heart rate, and galvanic skin response. Everyone in the group found it stressful to look at the harrowing photos. But at a certain point some subjects became inured to what they were seeing. Their stress response tapered off, while for other subjects it didn’t—they were just as upset by the last horrible sight as they were by the first. On the surface this experiment showed how quickly some of us build barriers against experiences that we find fearful. Another result turned out to be counterintuitive, however.

The people taking part had been asked beforehand to state their political preferences. As it turned out, those who labeled themselves liberal were the ones who quickly overcame their initial shock and got used to the gruesome pictures. Those who identified themselves as conservative were the ones who remained distressed. The experimenters struggled to explain this result, because the stereotype of bleeding-heart liberals would lead one to assume that they would be the most sensitive. But perhaps it takes a strong ability to accept the existence of pain and suffering in order to try to fix it, whereas people who remain shocked by pain and suffering only want to stop seeing it. You have to be comfortable with painful reality before you can actually help to do something about it.

The same applies to helping ourselves. It takes willingnes to face the darkness before the light can come in. Your soul treats your boundaries with utmost care. It never demands healing. It never crashes through, even with love. Here, I think the mind leads the emotions. Expansion happens on its own, but first your mind must give permission. Contraction is always based upon fear, and fear’s grip is entirely emotional. Like a parent who coaxes a timid child into the water, you can negotiate with your fearful, contracted self. It takes skill.

The key step is to realize that even the tightest, most constricted part of yourself wants to be free. With that in mind, you ask yourself, “What do I want?” The answer doesn’t have to be grand. You don’t have to want total fulfillment, joy, and love. Find a feasible desire. The next thing that brings you joy, whatever it is, brings you closer to your soul. It may be mixed with discomfort, but if you can give yourself a truly expansive experience, your need to contract will begin to diminish. The more joy you are open to receiving, the less you’ll need to have any boundaries at all.

You see abundance as natural to life. If you believe in scarcity, you cannot help but live in fear. Most of us consider our jobs, houses, bank accounts, and possessions defenses against scarcity. But inner lack is the real threat. Your body is an obvious example of Nature’s abundance. Hundreds of billions of cells are provided for. Your blood surges through your arteries like a tidal wave. Likewise, your soul is a reservoir for infinite energy, creativity, and intelligence. It can’t possibly run dry. This means little, however, if you believe that you are living in scarcity.

When that belief takes hold, it takes enormous struggle just to squeeze enough out of life to survive. This belief is common, ironically enough, among very wealthy people. Their riches keep them satiated externally while on the inside they feel famished. Hence they crave more and more of what didn’t satisfy them in the first place.

There is a huge discrepancy, then, between what the soul is providing and what we receive. I find that when someone feels poor inside, the following exercise is very helpful. Take a piece of paper and write the word Abundance, then draw a circle around it. Now write five words around the circle, each one standing for an area that would make your life feel more abundant. (When I do this exercise with people, I ask them not to write material things like money, houses, or possessions. Career, work, and success are good substitutes, because they have an inner meaning.) Let’s say the five words you wrote were:

• Peace

• Fun

• Compassion

• Well-being

• Family

One man actually listed these five things. For him, life would be abundant if all of these areas were more fulfilled. Now, taking each item in turn, write down three things you can do, starting today, to make these areas more fulfilling. Here’s a sample of what this man wrote:

It’s not enough to yearn for more in your life. Your desire must be specific; it must point from where you are to where you want to be. Such a desire isn’t chaotic or out of control. Rather, it exerts gentle pressure for change.

You don’t expect anything. Nothing creates more unhappiness than failed expectations. The job promotion that doesn’t come through, the proposal of marriage that is postponed one more time, the image of an ideal family that never materializes. Expectations are an attempt to control the future. An expectation says, “I won’t be happy unless x happens.” Here we must be careful, however. Having no expectations is a familiar way of saying that life is empty and without hope. That is not the goal. Instead, it’s a kind of openness in which anything can happen and be welcomed.

Recently I had a vivid experience of this. A book tour had taken me to the tenth city in as many days. To survive the grind of traveling from airport to airport and hotel to hotel, I had created a routine. But on this day no part of the routine went well. I got up early to exercise, but the hotel’s gym was closed. I went to breakfast for juice and toast, but, this being a Sunday, all they offered was a lavish brunch buffet. The staff had forgotten to deliver the morning newspaper, and the car that was supposed to take me to where I was speaking came late, forcing us to rush through traffic and keep the entire audience waiting.

Hunched in the back of the car, I wasn’t happy, and I knew why. It wasn’t just an interrupted routine; it was failed expectations. I had posted a mental plan about having a good day, and piece by piece the things I expected didn’t come true. My desires had been blocked. This happens to everyone. Expectations don’t come true, and the result is disappointment. Afterwards I realized that I could have enjoyed my day more if I had approached it without any expectations.

1. I could have been more centered. When you are centered, you aren’t so dependent on your circumstances. The ups and downs of everyday events don’t throw you off.

2. I didn’t need to dictate in advance what a good day would be. One can never see the whole picture. Room needs to be left for the unexpected. In that way, when the unexpected comes, it upsets nothing.

3. I could have let go of outcomes. The only thing any of us can control is our own actions. Outcomes are beyond our control.

4. I could have taken things less personally. Life comes and goes. The universe gives and it takes away.

Nurturing these attitudes in yourself helps you not to build up expectations. I’m not suggesting that you can totally avoid disappointment. Our minds are stocked with images of things that we identify with happiness, and by expecting those things, we expose ourselves to letdowns. Yet we also know that a better sort of happiness exists. Next Christmas, which would make you happier, a gift that comes from a list you wrote, or a gift that comes as a complete surprise? Your soul doesn’t exist to fill a mental list constructed in the past. Its gifts are unexpected. The happiness it brings is fresh because it comes from outside our expectations.

The magic of desire is linked to the freshness of life as it constantly renews itself. The soul isn’t a suitor who whispers “I love you” in your ear. The soul has no words, no voice. It expresses love through action, by bestowing the next thing that will give you joy. The next thing may be insignificant; it may be earth-shaking. Only one thing is certain: love awakens the soul and brings its love in return. That’s the experience you will have once your boundaries begin to soften. Ultimately, the possibility opens up of a life without any boundaries. It’s this possibility we need to explore next.

In Your Life: Letting Your Soul Shine Through

The influence of higher awareness is constant and always beneficial. Like a warm light melting an ice sculpture, it doesn’t matter if the ice is carved into a fearsome monster; all that matters is melting it. If you can’t feel the warmth of your soul shining through, it’s being blocked. Resistance can always be traced back to the mind. These obstacles, being invisible, are difficult to spot. Your mind is expert at hiding from itself, and your ego insists that building boundaries is one of its most important jobs. So the best way to observe what you’re doing is through the body. Your body can’t fool itself the way your mind can. It has no access to denial. Fear and anger are its responses to the most powerful threats. When your body registers either emotion, some outside force is pushing against your boundaries.

Fear is physically debilitating, and when it turns to terror, it paralyzes. Fear is registered by a tight stomach, cramps, coldness, blood rushing from the head, dizziness, feeling faint, and tightness in the chest. Anger is registered by warmth and flushed skin, tense muscles, a clamped jaw, quick, irregular breathing or loud breathing, a faster heartbeat, and a pounding in the ears.

These are unmistakable signals, but the mind can ignore them anyway. Notice how often a person will say “I’m okay, nothing’s wrong” when her body is blatantly contradicting her. You need to trust your body’s cues, even when your mind is saying otherwise. Trust begins by recognizing the signature of each emotion. Each one is a sign that you are resisting. An experience is creating stress, and that happens because instead of flowing through you, that experience has hit a barrier. Maybe you can’t see what’s going on, but your body can feel it. Feeling is the first step of tearing down barriers and no longer needing them.

It’s helpful, then, to explore more of these physical cues. When two feelings are related, like anger and hostility or grief and depression, I’ve given the primary emotion a longer explanation.

Humiliation is like fear in that your body feels weak, but in this case it isn’t cold. Your cheeks redden and your skin warms. You shrink and feel smaller. Extreme fear makes you want to run away; humiliation makes you want to disappear. Humiliation lingers in the body and can be triggered by the slightest memory from the past. Someone who has been severely humiliated, especially in childhood, will be listless, unresponsive, and withdrawn; the body will feel chronically weak and helpless.

Embarrassment is mild humiliation. It shows the same physical signs but passes more quickly.

Frustration is like anger, but more bottled up. It feels as if your body wants to be angry but can’t find the switch. Movements become rigid, another sign that the outlet is blocked. Frustration can also be anger combined with denial, in which case you will experience signs of denial—averted eyes, quick, dismissive speech, shrugging, tightened jaw muscles, labored breathing. In other words, the person’s real feelings are dammed up. Some people show subtle signs of being angry, such as being too restless to sit still. Not all frustration is linked to anger, but even when someone complains of being sexually frustrated, for example, irritability and anger are rarely far away.

Guilt creates a restless feeling, like being trapped and wanting desperately to escape. You feel confined or suffocated; breathing can seem difficult. The chest tightens and wants to explode, to release pent-up guilt as if it were physically trapped. We say that guilt gnaws at you, which the body can register as chronic pressure on the heart.

Shame is another warm feeling, bringing flushed cheeks and warm skin. But there’s also a sense of numbness inside that can feel cold and empty. Like humiliation, shame makes you feel smaller; you shrink and want to disappear. Shame is related to guilt, but it feels more like a dead weight, while guilt is a beast that wants to explode out of you.

Anxiety is chronic fear; it’s an emotion that weakens the body. The more acute signs of fear may not be present because you’ve grown used to them; your body has adapted. But the body can’t adapt completely, and so the fear creeps out in signs like irritability, tuning out, numbness, and sleeplessness. The body can be listless or restless, which sound like opposites. But when anxiety persists for weeks and months, symptoms have time to shift and adapt to each person’s circumstances. In all cases, however, if you lie still and go inward, fear will be present just beneath the surface.

Depression feels cold and heavy, lethargic and lacking in energy. There are many varieties of depression, because like chronic anxiety, this condition can last for weeks, or months, or even years. Your body has time to build up its own unique defenses. For example, someone who is depressed typically feels tired, but that’s not always true: high-powered types can continue to function by forcing themselves to be energetic despite their depression. When allied to a sense of hopelessness, depression can make you listless and dull; why move when the situation is hopeless to begin with? Depressed people may complain of being cold all the time. They flounder physically when confronted with challenges, as if confused or helpless. Many people balk when depressed, refusing to react; others lose all motivation. Their bodies signal those attitudes by moving slowly, rigidly, or hesitantly.

Grief is like depression but even more cold and numbing. The body can feel so heavy and listless that the person feels dead while they’re still alive.

Hostility is like anger, but needs no trigger to set it off. There are angry cues all the time, combined with a kind of simmering vigilance, alert to the slightest excuse for full-blown rage. The body feels tight, tense, and ready for action.

Arrogance is disguised anger, like hostility, and it is also chronic. One sees signs of it all the time, and the person needs only the slightest trigger to start acting proud, dismissive, and aloof. But arrogance buries its underlying anger deeper than hostility, so deep that this normally warm emotion turns cold. Being bottled up and in control, arrogant people don’t explode; instead they deliver a measured dose of cold fury, marked by clenched jaws, a cold stare, and rigid facial expressions.

When you detect these physical cues in your own body, the first step is to trust them. The second is to examine their motivation. Boundaries make you act in ways you aren’t fully aware of. Often your ego has an agenda of its own, and it is trying to push that agenda, even though your body isn’t buying it. Here are some examples of ego agendas:

Self-importance is an overall strategy for seeming bigger, stronger, more in command or control. The physical giveaways tend to be arrogance and other signs of controlled anger. Signs of frustration indicate that nothing is ever good enough. The body is often rigid, with a stiff neck and head held high; the chest can be stuck out or expanded. Along with these cues, self-important people display typical behaviors of impatience, belligerence, aloofness, and cold dismissal. When challenged, they pontificate; if overmatched, they withdraw and balk.

Prickliness, easily taking offense is the ego’s strategy for dealing with fear and insecurity. The person tries to project a self-image that’s stronger than he or she actually feels. Therefore, the smallest slight feels like a threat or a wound. There are degrees of this strategy, as with everything the ego does. Curmudgeons are chronically prickly and need no trigger; they feel angry and disgusted all the time. Egotism, which is insecure self-centeredness, always comes with a sense that one is a fraud; therefore, taking offense is the egotist’s way of attacking first in order not to be found out.

Criticism and perfectionism constitute another variation on attacking before someone else attacks you. In this case, the critic fears being seen as imperfect. There’s an underlying sense of being wrong or defective. The sense of being never good enough is projected outward: “Nothing can be right with you if I’m not right.” When our ego adopts this agenda, it thinks it’s protecting us from anxiety and humiliation. Perfectionists hold up impossible standards so that nothing can ever be good enough, thereby proving that they are right to feel that they can never be good enough. There’s obviously an element of anger here as well, since the critic and perfectionist are attacking their victims, much as they always protest that “it isn’t personal.” It’s always personal—to them.

Dependency is the ego’s way of pretending to be helpless because it doesn’t want to face its fear. Dependent people cling and act needy. They refuse to take responsibility. They idealize stronger people and try to latch on to them (if only in fantasy, as hero worship). The underlying physical cues are those of anxiety, depression, humiliation. When they are happy, dependent people warm up; they love being loved. When they have no one to lean on, however, they become cold, withdrawn, and depressed. There’s often a sense of vagueness about them, because they don’t know how to get what they want. They depend on someone else to get it for them, as children do. The body will often show signs of being childlike and immature by being weak, clumsy, uncoordinated, and prone to injury and sickness.

Competitiveness, overachieving, and acting overbearing is a very general ego strategy, one that externalizes fulfillment and makes it dependent on winning. The underlying feeling can be hard to read. It could be anger or fear. It could be anything, really, since the person is so fixated on outer accomplishment that there are no windows looking inward. The physical cues are also hard to read, because competitive people exert constant efforts to be energized, up and running. They are easy to read when they fail, however, since this leads to anger, frustration, and depression. Instead of examining those feelings, the born winner waits them out until he has recharged his batteries and is up again. But no matter how exuberant and energized they appear, overly competitive people secretly know the price they are paying for being number one. Climbing to the top excites them, but they feel exhausted and insecure once they get there, anxious about what tomorrow will bring—which is inevitably newer, younger competitors just like them. In time, winners can wind up baffled and confused. They have built so many inner barriers to protect their “weak” feelings—as they would label them—that when they decide to look inward at last, they have little idea how to go about it.

Failure, underachieving, and checking out is the opposite strategy from being a winner. The ego, never competing or fully engaging, prefers to sit on the sidelines. It lets life pass by while hanging out. The physical cues are generally not hard to spot. Because they are listless, such people show signs of anxiety, a chronic hidden fear that makes them cold, sluggish, limp, undefended, and vulnerable. Their bodies look slumped as if in defeat. The chest is sunken, the posture stooped. Their eyes are averted or look at the ground. There’s a general sense that they don’t want to be seen or noticed, so their bodies often appear to shrink. It may be that the person is actually holding a job and supporting a family, but inside, their sense of failure is chronic; it makes them feel small, weak, and immature, as if they mysteriously failed to grow up.

To expand in awareness, you must see past these ego agendas and learn to be honest about your motivations. There’s a sort of negotiation constantly going on between your ego and your body. When you become aware of what your body is trying to tell you, then your ego can’t keep reinforcing its agenda. You have physical proof that you are blocking out the flow of experience, which should be easy, carefree, and spontaneous. So when you see yourself falling back on a fixed ego strategy, see it for what it is, and stop. You must catch yourself at the very moment that you begin to act self-important, dependent, or overbearing. Your ego will kick into its prearranged behavior automatically; like muscles, behaviors have memory. Once you trigger them—even slightly—they jump into action.

Simply by being aware, you can check on your body. There will always be signs of an underlying emotion. Feel that emotion; be with it. Contact allows the physical sensation to dissipate naturally; your discomfort lessens as your body lets go of distorted or stuck energy that you have been holding on to. Only in this way can you melt away your defenses. Unless you are aware, change is impossible. But when you bring awareness to your body, you can start becoming undefended. Reality starts to be more acceptable as it is, not as you try to force it to be.

Congratulate yourself for being willing to change. Awareness is capable of overcoming the most restricted boundaries, because every boundary is made of nothing but awareness that has decided to contract instead of expand. Also, appreciate your body for its honesty. It has been letting your soul shine through when your mind refused to. You are making a connection to your body, and each connection, however small, brings you closer to your soul as the level of life where you can reside permanently and with total ease.