Ego Softening – Visceral Visualization Audio
Recorded Script :
Ego Death Doulaship
Creating the Space for Grace
Phase I: The Somatic Invitation & Grounding
In which I establish physiological safety and share my credentials and role as the Ego Death Doula.
You are welcomed into a Posture of Surrender: Please ambulate to or create a comfortable place to lie supine on the ground, or otherwise find your most relaxed position, and prepare yourself for approximately 45 minutes of closed-eye visualizations and gentle movement. The research shows that monitoring the visual field requires a massive amount of metabolic energy – nearly 30% of the human cerebral cortex is devoted solely to visual processing. When our eyes are open, our brain is locked into evaluating external boundaries and threats. By closing your eyes, you withdraw that immense energy from the external world, quieting the rigid external projections of the default mode network and allowing your nervous system to turn inward.
A Content Warning: This workshop will involve communications about Ego Death, death in general, possible reflections or disclosures about trauma, including medical trauma and gaslighting, and other states of intensity. There will not be graphic physical details shared.
Honoring the Flight Impulse: One of my main teachings is to honor incarnate impulses as deeply as possible in safe, constructive directions, rather than suppressing the response where it can turn into disease or malady. I am speaking directly to your nervous system when I say, you have explicit, radical permission to leave or take space from this experience at any time. Honoring these impulses is key to a more compassionate corporeal culture, and thus we honor your ‘flight impulse’ as a success, not a failure. Suppression is not success, and compliance is not compassion in this frame.
To provide a sense of structure for you to surrender into for our time together, we began with outlining the container, to be followed by exercises of resourcing and nervous system regulation that you can return to throughout this experience and beyond, to be followed by definitions of terms and scaffolding concepts, and finally, we will engage in an ego softening exercise.
The following communications about pedigree speak directly to the ego, giving it the framework to understand my credentials in facilitating this space and explaining why it can feel safe to potentially soften or take a vacation for a spell.
My Lineage in Brief, or The Authority of the Crucible
Here I will describe a bit about my background and why I have the experience to teach on this topic. I share some of the wisdom I gained in my descent into the underworld to emerge with the pearls of great price.
The Pedigree: Formally, I studied Human Development and Psychological Services as an undergraduate at Northwestern University, and pursued graduate-level studies in group dynamics. Additional graduate studies included transpersonal somatic psychology at CIIS. I am also trained as a death doula. I have been working for over 15 years in ceremonial and in the wild contexts at the outer reaches of consciousness and acting as a mentor for the next generation of risk reduction practitioners as a green dot ranger at Burning Man and in other more and less structured forms, including writing a comprehensive book on the subject called ‘Guide for Guides : Ethical Trauma Informed Psychedelic Support’. My most informative training came from my work in the wild, in intense and intimate circumstances, where psychonauts explore the edges and often push their consciousness to the breaking point at festivals and other gatherings.
The Descent into Disability: I have had a history of holding titles tightly, built up over the duration of my lifespan, but during my recent descent into disability, I had these stripped from me, a mirror of Inanna’s journey into the underworld. I have been an apex healer for high net worth individuals and families, facilitating miraculous cures and profound therapeutic and trauma healing experiences, I have founded temples and retreat centers, been the leader of several communities and cultural movements, and been idealized as someone radically self-reliant (in full transparency, upon reflection, this was a trauma response). All of these accolades were, at least temporarily, forcibly stripped away in my health journey resulting in an intense series of ego deaths.
Now I sense that my existence is resistance – I demonstrate another possibility other than displacing aggression onto someone lower than I in the social hierarchy to lower my own cortisol, the research of Mr. Sapolsky of which I will speak at greater length later. As a previously high-masking autistic female socialized person in burnout I am also not able to submit to oppressive, non-consensual structures. I cannot at this point in time fawn to artificial or contrived hierarchies, unearned power dynamics, or logically inaccurate beliefs. These oppressive organizational social structures are present in both the allopathic medicine industrial compex as well as in the spirutla bypassing of the gaslight workers present in more recent forms of healing. Those who hold tightly to their sense of knowing and control often experience me as a walking ego death because allopathic medicine does not have easy diagnostic processes or treatments for my conditions, and for spiritual gaslight workers, I collapse the Just World fallacy that if they are a good person and do enough self-care nothing bad will happen to them. Thus in turning away from both displacing aggression as well as, in self-preservation, avoiding submission to others who do not deserve authority when it comes to my body, I chose a third path of creating a new corporeal compassionate culture, and if you find this compelling, I hope you will join us on that journey.
Making the Medicine: This descent and process of ego death was necessary. This hollowing out of my bowl anchored me in my own somatic sovereignty because the western medical system does not know what to do with those similar to me, with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome or mast cell activation syndrome. I had to be stripped of my prized tightly held roles to be perfectly carved out to have my skills be of service to help others in a way I could not have planned for. I had to become a blank canvas without preconceptions to be able to listen to my own somatic savantism and to author the Neuro-Connective Instability (NICI) theory of autism. I had to be brought to the level of neuroinflammation that caused me to be stripped of everything, down to the level of mutism, and currently surviving on ten foods that I can only eat in a narrow time window after taking a medication that coats my enteric mast cells to prevent them from degranulating or else I pass out for 12 hours. I ingested the poison of the Western medical complex’s trauma to distill the cure for millions of autistics and those with mast cell disorders. I share this to give you hope on what can be on the other side of ego death.
With all that ego trust conveyed, I now lay these layers at your feet.
The Conduit: I am removing myself as the focal point, which is why I encourage everyone to lay down and close their eyes. It has been rare for me to teach publicly because I would much rather be the ‘guide on the side’ than the ‘sage on the stage’, and this offering is prompted by I honring my friends’ request and presenting this work today to help move our collective evolution forward. This is not about me, it is about you, the collective, and the new culture attempting to be born through our relationship and work together. I am simply the channel sensing your full realization and the guardian angel holding the safe perimeter for this process of your ultimate liberation.
Phase 2 : Resourcing
When we go into deeper or more intense spaces it is key to engage in Resourcing : this is in the lineage of somatic experiencing and is a practice known as pandulation, where we alternate between a sanctuary space or secure home base and returning to a more challenging or activating stimulus, and going back and forthin order to stay within our window of tolerance. The Window of tolerance is a range within the nervous system where we can remain resourced and regulated to respond from a thoughtful space of maximum possibility where the prefrontal cortex is online in the face of any stimulus.
Sanctuary space : visceral visualization
Imagine yourself in wispy mist.
You allow your heart to pull you in a certain direction. You feel the tendrils of your psyche reaching out to solidify a space that you feel the most safe.
Perhaps a place in nature : what water features are nearby, what plants, animals? Are there people? Pets? Are there any structures?
What position does your body want to be in in this space, take that position? Is it reclining? What body sensations do you feel here, perhaps tou are tilting your head back to feel the sun or the wind on your face?
How does your body want to interact with the space?
What colors are present? What are you hearing? What smells what through the air? Was is there to taste? Why nourishment is nearby?
This is your sanctuary space.
If you need a place to be resourced, you can always go here at any time.
Wellness Wellspring
While you are in your sanctuary space you hear water moving.
You approach the wet sounds, and the sound of a steady underground stream grows, echoing off stones.
This is your wellness well. The place you draw wellness from. A steady underground stream that moves as a serpent beneath the earth, a ssalubious entinel under your feet.
There are two ways to access the water, via a spiraling staircase down to the bottom, or through a bucket on a crank. And yes, this is also a wishing well that you can throw coins into, or whisper into the water your wishes.
What helps you access your well ? What lengthens your cord to get the deepest coldest freshest water on an overheated day? What landmarks help you find your way to your well even in the deepest fog?
Descend the spiral staircase or drop down your bucket into your well now.
Look into the water, what do you see in the reflection? Whisper your wishes to the water. Drink deep of your dreams. What does your water taste like? What infusion do you feel diffusing throughout your body, carried to the crescendo of every capillary.
The following is an ecoregulation prompt. The Ecoregulation framework generates Physical Planetary Play Prompts providing embodied edutainment experiences of ecosystemic empathy.
ECORegulation is natural nervous system nourishment. Translating the heady research of somatic psychology into playful physical prompts, ECORegulation makes the therapeutic tools of regulating the nervous system available to all. Grounded in the mountain of scientific evidence in how to create states of calm via vagal tone modulation and developmental attachment theory, ECORegulation teaches us how to practice self-sourcing soothing somatic sensations from the ecosystem. ECORegulation generates touchstones of tactile training in frequently finding our center in low-states environments to ease-fully embody this de-escalation in emergency situations.
Rain Rhythm ::
Eyes closing, choose a question & release answering to storm wisdom.
Imagine you see clouds heavy with rain gathering on the horizon ~ a storm is brewing.
You feel the wind pick up, big breezes blowing the hairs all over your body, gaining strength with each gust & gail. { blow on limbs, longer out-breath then in-breath, emptying lungs to bottom of diaphragm }.
A drizzly mist rolls in, moisture merging with your dewy skin { lightly trace outline of skinosphere }
A thick drop PLOP lands on your head { with one tip of your finger tap head, making drop sound }.
Rain !
Another drop SLOP spots your shoulder { with one tip of your finger tap shoulder, making drop sound }.
The downpour steadily increases in intensity & frequency, gently speckling you with a fountain of freckles all over your body { with tips of fingers tickle tap in dalmatian spot patterns all over, making drop sounds }.
The rain is picking up now ~ shower drumming your skin { starting with one flat finger, start increasing pressure of tapping at your own pace ; add a finger at a time to increase impact, until you are tapping with a full open hand / palm as you prefer, making precipitation sounds }.
You see a flash of lightning, for a split-second an answer to your question is illuminated.
Then thunder rolls, belly laughing across sky { shake yourself & belly laugh } .
You are excited to ride this storm out as long as it takes.
Eventually you feel the rain easing up { patting, tapping getting lighter pressure }.
The wind tousles & caresses gently, & you lean face & body into breeze, quickly finding yourself dry & right as rain { blow on yourself, longer out-breath then in-breath, emptying lungs to bottom of diaphragm }.
If you find you have any droplets left clinging, shake them off like a wet puppy dog.
Give gratitude for storm & soma for revealing the answer to your question & creating resilient relaxation via EcoRegulation.
Phase 3 Defining the Descent (The Neurobiology of the Ego) Before dissolving the ego, we must name what it is without demonizing it.
I have found a helpful definition of ego death to be the dissolution of boundaries and the death of the “smaller self” escaping its limiting containers.
Definitions for forms of Ego Death : I want to draw a distinction between ego death, ego dissolution, and ego softening. Ego death can take manifold forms, much as biological death – it can be a sudden accident, or it can be a lengthy process with time for reflection. Much like biological death, it is much less traumatic to have the time to prepare and go with grace. Ego dissolution is a stepwise gradient during which the ego is sublimated. Ego softening a gentler opening of the permeability of the ego’s edges and the creation of space between your ‘self’ and your identification with the ego.
The Default Mode Network (DMN) & System 1: The ego’s mechanical function is to hold survival efficiency. The ego is tied to the default mode network which is the automatic background pattern assumptions we have developed over time. You may have heard that the Default Mode Network is what gets put on pause under the influence of psychedelics. The ego is tied to the process of separating things into parts and manipulating and optimizing them, and designed for energy efficiency survival analysis. Thus the ego is the main process disconnecting you from the world, creating this boundary to employ it as a construct for self-preservation. As a side note – can you sense a world that is significantly more compassionate and collaborative where this protective separation is not needed or can be relaxed?
The Twig Snap Analogy: The ego has a purpose and intelligence of its own. For example, when we are in the wild and hear a snapped twig in the brush, it is in the interest of biological preservation to act ‘as though’ it is or could be a predator. This fast ‘instinctual’ nonthinking reaction kept our ancestors alive and thus was evolutionarily preserved across time, those tendancies tended to replicate through biological, memetic, or cultural survival and transmission. Thus the goal is not to destroy the ego through violent eradication, but in our current relatively safe context to introduce spaciousness so we can evaluate stimuli flexibly and reset our assumptive baselines. As with everything, the ego has its place, which is likely to be applied much more specifically and ‘smaller’ than the all-consuming steering it exerts under modern capitalism. Ego dissolution allows us to find right relationship to the healthy role of ego. If you are feeling separate from humanity, look to examining the condition of your ego.
Brittle vs. Secure Egos: True security is a lack of attachment to the ego. We can observe this in those deeply seated in their capability, who are patient, curious, and generous with their time. Brittle egos react with rigidity and inflammation. We can thus draw the conclusion that someone settled in themselves and in their value internally without needing the external validation that the ego is constructed on will actually be defenseless, in that they have nothing to defend. Contrast this with the actions of fear and reputation-based concern of defending one’s identity or any perceived misconceptions of slights to one’s position in the hierarchy, resulting in energetic poverty. Conversely if one is able to be ‘defenseless’ and not attached of other’s perceptions of them, they will have an abundance of free-flowing attention and greater bandwidth for presence with what presents itself before them without being filtered through as many interpretive clounded lenses.
The Frames of Dissolution Now we step into the work of repatterning our relationship to the ego. Here are some cognitive reframes that soften the fear of the unknown before we engage in some gentle ego dissolution.
Breaking the Cycle of Cortisol: It is important to note, and I briefly shared about this previously, that reactions to ego slights can be varied and can include displaced aggression. This can occur whether you are seeking to prompt ego death experiences in others consciously or accidentally. What can often happen when an ego is slighted or encounters a survival fear is an unexpected response towards the vulnerability as displaced aggression ( relatedly we can note that below anger is often grief).
There is a fascinating piece of research from primatologist Dr. Robert Sapolsky that explains many of the modern maladies of our time. Sapolsky spent over three decades studying troops of wild olive baboons in Kenya. He chose them specifically because their environment mirrors the modern human condition: they have ample food, few predators, plenty of free time, and highly complex social hierarchies. Therefore, much like us, the vast majority of their stress is psychologically generated by each other.
His findings demonstrated that being an alpha male did not automatically guarantee low stress. Instead, what kept a high-ranking monkey’s glucocorticoids (the class of stress hormones that includes cortisol) low was the presence of specific coping mechanisms – the most common and effective being displacement aggression. If a high-ranking male was stressed – for example, if he lost a fight, was startled, or felt his ego and status threatened – he would immediately seek out a lower-ranking, innocent bystander and attack them.
Sapolsky’s blood data proved the exact mechanism at play: this act of displacing aggression successfully lowered the aggressor’s circulating cortisol levels, while simultaneously spiking the cortisol levels of the subordinate victim. It is literally a biological offloading of stress. The aggressor regulates their own nervous system by dysregulating someone else’s.
Sapolsky draws the exact same conclusion regarding human behavior in his seminal book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. He notes that humans utilize the exact same physiological trick to lower our blood pressure. The classic example is a person being reprimanded by their boss (a higher-status threat they cannot attack), who then goes home and yells at their spouse, who then snaps at the child, who then kicks the dog.
This elucidates much regarding the state of our world – that displacing your aggression onto someone lower in the hierarchy actually successfully does lower cortisol. And while it gives a biological explanation for the bad behavior, it does not excuse it for those attempting to live morally.
Phase 4 Additional processes and emotions that block ego death from occuring.
Many people experience fear at the thought of ego death or losing their identity. This ultimately is fear of the unknown.
The Metaphysical Montessori:
In our compassionate corporeal culture, we reframe the terrifying unknown as a perfectly crafted curriculum, a metaphysical Montessori, designed by the universe exclusively for your growth. The ego looks into the dark and sees a terrifying void, but the mystic looks into the dark and sees a sacred classroom. What if every piece of chaos, every sudden loss, and every closed door was not a punishment, but a meticulously designed, hyper-specific learning module?
Take a slow, deep breath into the spaces of your physical body where you currently hold the most tension, grief, or fear. Feel the exact shape of that resistance in your tissues. What have your greatest moments of challenge taught you? When your ego felt it was being violently destroyed in the past, what profound spiritual muscle was actually being forged in that fire?
In this metaphysical montessori, nothing is wasted. The universe does not deal in random cruelty; it deals in the alchemy of the soul. The cosmos acts as a flawless mirror, introducing exact thresholds of pressure to reveal what must be dissolved for your ultimate liberation.
So, when your nervous system spikes and the ego panics, pause, place a hand over your heart, and ask the infinite intelligence of the void: What is the lesson plan for any given situation or moment of hardship? Is this friction here to teach you radical surrender? Is this intense discomfort here to shatter your brittle armor so that an overwhelmingly deeper capacity for grace can finally emerge?
By shifting our somatic posture from one of rigid defense to one of profound reverence and curiosity, we stop fighting the curriculum. We unclench our jaws, drop our shoulders, and allow the unseen architecture of the universe to teach us exactly what our souls came here to learn.
The Womb Space (The Void): Another common ego death fear is existential concern for the void or empty space. Here we emphasize that the seat of creation requires an empty, generative void to land in prepared fertile soil. If a space for the seed of a new idea is not cleared, it will be out competed by weeds and pre-established plants competing for the sun of your attention and the water of your care. This runs completely counter to the capitalist conditioning that demands we constantly produce or consume, that we are less than if we do not participate in procuring a product or a service. This is such a heavily exploited fear in our current dominant culture that it has generated vast spending impetus that even our measures of the economy are completely bound to. If we follow this through to its logical conclusion it results in an inaccurate framework of growth at all cost – a process that is simply impossible on a finite planet.
The Offering vs. The Sacrifice: I also wish to draw attention to the distinction between an offering versus a sacrifice. While our culture often conflates these two terms, psychologically and spiritually, they represent entirely different states of agency.
An offering is the act of the open hand. It is the conscious, sober recognition that a phase, an identity, or a deeply held attachment has reached the end of its natural lifespan. Within this container, we are making an offering. By practicing a gentle, voluntary loosening now, we retain our sovereignty. We participate in our own evolution, yielding what we must with grace and intention.
A sacrifice, by contrast, occurs when the hand remains white-knuckled and tightly closed. When we refuse to surrender what is dead or dying, it calcifies. It becomes a rigid, brittle structure. But the laws of change and time will not be denied. By refusing to make the offering, we force the universe’s hand, requiring it to violently rip that brittle structure from us later as a sacrifice. The removal happens regardless; the only variable is the amount of trauma and collateral damage involved in the extraction.
Death and rebirth require a real threshold. The architecture of a threshold is narrow by design – you simply cannot carry the heavy, rigid weight of an outdated reality through the door, it is sloughed off like a snake shedding its skin through a narrow passage. Your new life will cost you your old one. You can either lay the old life down on the altar willingly, preserving your dignity and energy for the path ahead, or you can have it violently stripped from you in the doorway. The offering is the choice to step into the fire on your own terms, rather than waiting for the structure to burn down around you.
Phase 5 The Cultural Mandate & The Praxis The transition from theory to the physical experience.
The AI Labor Shift: The necessity of this work is readily apparent in our current AI trajectory, given the likely path ahead. As AI replaces many forms of human labor, the collective will face a massive ego death in terms of determining productivity and value. We must develop the meta-skills of improvisation, adaptability, and flexibility to survive and avoid becoming obsolete or facing an existential reckoning as traditional rigid metrics of value no longer apply.
The Somatic Experience: I will now guide you into a few mini-experiences to do the healthy preparatory work for an easeful entry into an experience on the spectrum of ego death. This and makes ready the way for you to feel the “soft edges” of ego dissolution, which can be quite pleasurable if the ego feels safe – for ultimately it is only seeking to protect you, as misguided as its efforts may be applied too aggressively in inappropriate contexts.
The Ego Death Living Will: In preparation for ego dissolution we have to honor the immense energy and hard-won wisdom of the ego. We do so through an exercise I call The Ego Death Living Will. Within this frame we give the ego a space to bequeath its hard-won survival wisdom to its descendants, allowing it to have a legacy through sharing its wisdom in a way that can be propagated forth. This is akin to grandparent telling the grandchildren stories of hard-won wisdom that the grandparent wants the child to be able to avoid, rather then just forbidding or scaring the child into a behvaior without necessarily explaining why these recommendations are in place. This process, rather then fighting the ego, gives the ego’s massive automatic energy a respectful place to go, honoring the original survival wisdom that caused those tendencies to be put in place and honoring the possible pain of coming to those protective patterns as well.
So now you are invited to settle into an even deeper state of inward focus and think about the layers of your ego like layers of skin around your formless core. Place a physical hand on your body where you feel your ego gripping the tightest right now – perhaps your solar plexus, your chest, or your throat. Feel the dense, buzzing, protective energy there.
What are some of your first memories of individuation? When have you felt your ego boundaries be the most rigid – in what types of situations? What has your ego been formed in response to? What experiences is your ego protecting you from?
For ego death to be pleasurable, the ego needs to know that you will still be protected if it goes on vacation. In your mind’s eye, call forward the specific descendant you are bequeathing this wisdom to. Perhaps it is a younger, past version of yourself who was terrified and desperately needed this armor to survive. Or perhaps it is a future self, standing fully realized and ready to build a new culture. Physically feel yourself lifting that dense, protective energy out of your body and handing it to them as a glowing ember of distilled wisdom. The lesson is passed on; the armor is no longer needed. What phrase encapsulates the knowledge passed down?
Now, we must fill that newly created space with something beneficial. If the ego goes on vacation, what prosocial coping mechanism will stand in its place? Imagine breathing in the warm, regulating presence of co-regulation. Feel your nervous system drop its defenses as you visualize anchoring into somatic grounding, creative flow, or deeply felt support. What formats are you drawn to channelling this energy into?
Now we send the ego on a well deserved vacation so we have the spaciousness to reassign its role. Where are you sending the ego on vacation? Where does it want to go? What does it want to do there? How will interacting with your ego be different once it returns from vacation? When it comes back, how can we assign the ego to a new department or task? Perhaps instead of self-judgment or comparison – because comparison is the thief of joy – we can use the ego to find the beauty in the contrast between yourself and other beings?
The Costume of the Ego: an exercise moving us further along the spectrum of possibility towards ego dissolution into the range of ego softening is to think of the ego as a costume we wear to interact with other individuated beings. Note that our grip on the sense that our ego is real is actually a perspective – one that is trained in us since birth – and there may very well be other frames of reference. Even knowing we are wearing a costume at all can be a profound shift in our frames of what is possible.
So let’s examine this ego costume we are wearing as our outer layer – what is it made up of? what colors and textures is this layer associated with? What time periods or experiences in your life do they echo in response or resonance with? There may also be multiple layers, examine each of them. Take a breath and actually feel the physical weight of this costume on your body. Notice where it feels heavy on your shoulders, or where it tightly constricts your chest and ribs, limiting your capacity to breathe into your diaphragm.
We now imagine that our culture may have spilled some shame, blame, or guilt on our ego and we need to take it off to clean it. Or perhaps we have worn this ego out so thoroughly that it has some holes that need to be patched so we are no longer leaking our energy. Or possibly perhaps the emotional weather may have changed, and so for us to be comfortable we have to change our outfit to be suitable for the current external conditions.
Now, somatically, feel what it is like to reach up and slowly unbutton or unzip this heavy, stiff layer. As you shrug it off your shoulders in your mind’s eye, feel the literal sensation of cool, fresh air touching the bare, formless energy of your true self beneath. Take a deep breath and feel how much further your lungs can expand without the rigidity of that armor pressing against you. Feel the muscles in your jaw and the back of your neck finally release, no longer having to hold up the dense, exhausting weight of that old identity.
How does your liberated formlessness wish to move and express its newfound freedom? What gesture, sound, or phrase is most present in your consciousness?
The Integration: We now conclude with the principle that evolution requires the release of rigid narratives and structural dead ends, and that energy needs to circulate and move to be healthy and grow. Your new life will cost you your old one, may your offering be lighthearted and freeing.
Additional Resources: If you are working with another practitioner who is holding space for your ego death, or you are a practitioner yourself, I have written a thorough ‘Ego Death Living Will’ section in my second book ‘Guide for Guides: Ethical Trauma Informed Psychedelic Support’. It is available on our church’s website earthbody.church as well as on Amazon.
Questions and discussion is welcome in the comments – What could be expanded? What was surprising? Do you have anything to add to the collective wisdom brew?