475: The Spiritual Ego Trap: How To Notice It + Bring It Into Awareness with Sahara Rose

When we don't notice the ways that racism, colonialism, patriarchy, but also just, like, looking down on people, the way that it shows up in our own lives, then we're really missing the whole point of the spiritual journey, because spirituality is not about separating ourselves from other people and being better than them, because we've figured out some unique lock that no one else has. And it actually really shows we're in an earlier stage of our spiritual growth journey, because I was there too, but that, like, I've figured it out and you still need to. And that's the ego right there. Welcome back to the Highest Self podcast. My name is Sahara Rose, and I am so excited to have you here in today's solo cast because I'm gonna be riffing on a topic that I've been having a lot of conversations with in my personal life. And the way I kind of roll in these solo casts is I just start my own perspective. What I've experienced without any agenda or even belief system I'm trying to convince you of, but really rather exploring a topic that I try to give voice to on this podcast that I feel a lot of us have recognized. But maybe we don't have a community we get to really share about these kinds of topics with, or maybe we just haven't seen them discussed in this more nuanced way. So I wanted to talk about this word that you may have heard around the spiritual community. And this is the concept of spiritual ego. So, first of all, what is spiritual ego? Well, there's no Webster's definition, but to me, the way that I see it is the way that our ego takes a different shape and form, guising spirituality as a way to make us feel superior to others. Now, am I here to obliterate the ego? No. I love my ego. Such a good ego. I love my big ego. Who remembers that song Destiny's Child? So the ego has your personality, it has your preferences, it has your beliefs, it has your values. If we did not have egos, there would be no difference between me, you, or anyone. And from the highest level perspective, that is true. We really are all free from the same oneness source of consciousness. However, we have compartmentalized our fragments of light into different spectrums. And that's why each of our dharmas, our soul's purposes, our values, our preferences, all of these things are going to be unique because they're filtered through the consciousness and the texture of our ego. So to say that I'm here to shatter the ego is, first of all, it's not being honest because you're not. And what happens sometimes when we say, I'm going beyond ego, it becomes another way that our ego tries to make us feel like we are better than other people. So all of us in the spiritual community have had some form of spiritual ego and probably already still have spiritual ego showing up in different ways, myself included. Okay. So I'm not speaking to you as someone who has even moved past spiritual ego. Like, for sure, I'm gonna listen to this episode like five years from now and be like, what the fuck? So there's no need to have our walls up in this conversation. I think that's what makes it fun, right? Like, if we can't critique our own community and our own culture, well, then we're gonna be on defense if someone else does. So, like myself, as a spiritual person who has been part of this culture and part of this community, I find it part of my responsibility to also look at the nuances of it. So this is not pointing and shaming or blaming ourselves or anyone else, but this is really just like looking at something that we may have been overlooking in the past. And I'll start with myself and the way that spiritual ego has shown up in my own life. So for those of you who don't know my background, I actually was on a pathway to be an international human rights lawyer. And I went to school in D.C. and I was working at nonprofits, and I experienced really bad health issues when I was 21 years old. And my body started shutting down and went into perimenopause. And because of that, I had to go to many different doctors who prescribed me tons of prescription medication, hormone replacement therapy, which brought me on a journey of needing to learn how to self heal, which brought me to Ayurveda, the world's oldest health system, and sister science of yoga, which brought me on the spiritual journey. So like many of us, I got on this journey because I needed to learn how to heal myself. Not because I thought it was cool, not because I at all wanted to be part of the culture. I didn't even know about the culture, but it was for my own need. And I think for most of us, it comes from this really pure place of I'm sick or I'm hurt or I feel pain or whatever. The thing is, and what spirituality can give us is this higher level perspective of how things are interconnected. In my own journey, spirituality is what allowed me to see the connection between my physical symptoms and my mental attributes and then connect it to my dharma. My soul's purpose, something even beyond that. So it has been extremely monumental in my life life. However, the spiritual ego started showing up for me when I became very, very regiment in my spiritual practice. So it started for me even before my health problems with Ashtanga yoga. I became very devout Ashtanga yogi, practicing my source style practice for three hours a day. Then became a raw vegan and was like one of those. Like, raw vegan was part of my personality. I started a raw vegan blog because that's just what you did in the late 2000s. And I spent all my time studying spiritual texts. And I kind of only want to talk to other people who are on the spiritual journey. And then as soon as I graduated college, I moved to India. I was studying Ayurveda. I was constantly looking to find new ashrams to stay at or gurus to learn from. And I was hungry for spiritual knowledge. And I shifted everything about myself from, of course, who I surrounded myself by. But even my clothes, I would wear really baggy, loose clothes. Very the monk look. I listened mostly to mantra based music. I wanted to only read spiritual texts. I was just very, very mindful of any media that I consumed. And again, a lot of that came from a beautiful place of, like, fuck, wearing jeans is super tight and constricting. Like, why would I want to wear that? These loose, baggy clothing are so much more comfortable. Watching horrible TV shows is toxic in the mind. Why would I want to watch that? So it didn't come from a place of like, I'm doing this to fit into a culture and community consciously. However, then when I started to take another spiritual path, the outfits would change again. And then I went from yoga clothes to now I was in my more shakti belly dance tantra phase. And now I started wearing these loose, flowy skirts and darker colors. And then it shifted again. And now looking back on it, I can see very much so how my aesthetic, how my worldview, how the people I surrounded myself with really revolved around the type of spirituality that I was resonant with. Now, again, that makes sense. If you're a rocker, you're gonna wear rock outfits. If you're a lululemon girl, that often comes with a certain culture, it's very normal for fashion to depict our worldviews. However, what happens sometimes with spirituality is we think that that's not happening. We're not honest with ourselves. So we think, oh, I only wear white because white is the enlightened, allows all light to stream through you and connects you with one source consciousness. And I only listen to this music because everything else is low vibe. And I only do this. And you see these little threads of ego put in there. And again, it can be coming from even a true place. However, then it's like, okay, the people who don't wear your style of clothing, the people who don't listen to your same kind of music, the people who still go to the mall and you start to look down on them and you start to judge them again. 100% did this too. And parts of me in this day and age I believe still do as well, even if I'm unconscious about it for sure. Like Black Friday shopping sales, like, I can find my own judgment around that. So I'm not saying that I'm over this either. However, in my own spiritual journey and where I am now, I've realized that often what we see as spirituality is a culture. And we can see this so obviously when we look at all the different cultures that exist in spirituality, from the shamanic plant medicine Ayahuasca focused culture, to like the Kundalini culture, to the Starseed Pleiadian light being culture, to the Vedic yoga scripture culture to the nervous system Gabor Mate culture to the, I don't know, there's so many out there and they all have their distinct vocabulary, their distinct opinions and sets of beliefs that you have to adhere to to be part of the community. And if you have things that oppose with the community's shared beliefs, you're ostracized. So in my own spiritual journey of really honoring the sacred feminine energy within me, I realized that we're not all the same, and we all have different pathways that we can take that I put together in creating my five archetypes, which I call the Rose Gold Goddess archetypes. They are the Embodiment Queen, the Womb Whisperer, the Intuitive Oracle, the Expressionista, and the Joy Priestess. And I've put together a free quiz so you can find out what your unique combination are. So the Embodiment Queen is the person who's always in her body, dancing, moving, very connected to her nervous system. The Womb Whisperer always knows where she's at in her menstrual cycle and probably has a yoni steamer in her bathroom. The Intuitive Oracle has three oracle card decks on them, a pendulum, and knows about their past lives. The Expressionista is creating art through everything, through singing, dancing, writing, poetry. Everything for her is an opportunity to create art. And then we've got the Joy Priestess who wants to laugh, dance and not take Herself super seriously. You can find her doing karaoke at an improv class or twerking it on the dance floor. You can guess which one I am. So you can head over to rggquiz.com to learn what your unique rose gold goddess archetype is. Again, that's rggquiz.com and you can find that link in the show notes. And I've created custom graphics that you get in your results so you can share which rose gold goddess archetype you are. I'm super excited to see now whether you're actually, like, physically part of this community. Like, you're part of a club or, I don't know, membership or even a cult or something like that. Like, it could be to that extreme. But there's also unconscious ways of. Maybe it's everyone that you just follow on social media and the content that you consume and the people that you follow and you notice, like, okay, I'm in this ascension culture that we are always talking about ascension and the levels of ascension, and that's our language and that's our vocabulary. But here I am questioning whether any of this really exists. And part of me has a lot of doubt and a lot of hesitation. Well, if you bring that into these communities, they're going to meet you with a huge wall because that's going to trigger their own worldviews and perspectives. So oftentimes we think that when we're spiritual, we're being more open, but it could just mean we're adhering to another preconceived set of values that that spiritual lineage, or even a lot of it, isn't even from a lineage. It's very new. But that group of people has decided to agree on. Right? So, for example, a friend of mine, Kyle and I, we did these, like, funny skits because both of us love to just, like, do improv and make fun of ourselves. And I was like, the nervous system healing girl. And he was like the ayahuasca bro. And we're like, having this back and forth conversation. It was so interesting for both, both of us to recognize ourselves in that and how you could almost predict what that person is going to respond without even knowing them because of the way that that demographic responds to certain questions. Now, again, does this exist in every culture? Yes, absolutely. And I'm not saying that it's right or wrong. We create patterns to make sense of things. The thing that I'm pointing out is that in spirituality, we often think it's ourselves creating them, and we don't recognize that we're just in another culture. So in my own journey now, going from Ashtanga yoga to more of the divine feminine belly dance realm, and then moving back to the US from India and, you know, rediscovering myself in more of the festival scene culture and then moving into the entrepreneurship space, like the conscious entrepreneurship space, and just different dances throughout my life. And part of myself that I sort of abandoned in this journey was the part of me that loves to twerk. The part of me that's super playful and silly. The part of me that loves beauty and getting dressed up and finds makeup even to be beautiful. Those parts of me were shunned out because they weren't part of what was supposed to be spiritual, right? Like, maybe you could dress in a certain way, if that's like the Dakini tantra girl aesthetic or if that's the whatever aesthetic. But it couldn't be just me, right? Because I needed to look the part, I needed to sound the part. So when I started to bring in these other aspects of myself back into integration, such as my dancing, belly dancing, twerking, shaking my love for hip hop and reggaeton music, my just like, jokester, playful energy, the fact that I swear, like, all of these different pieces into it, it was very triggering for people. And to this day, I still get a lot of hate for it because it doesn't make sense in people's perspective of, oh, well, if you're spiritual and you wrote these books on Ayurveda and Deepak Chopra wrote your forewords and this, like, how could you be showing yourself shaking your ass in a drum circle? Like, that does not make sense in people's perspectives because they see someone who dances and is free in their bodies. They have their own set of judgments around that. Mostly the slut shaming kind of judgments. And then people that you see as spiritual and almighty and holy and better than now, it's like, oh, if they take down their hair, then all of a sudden they're no longer in that beautiful cloud, like, realm that you've put them into. So it creates this questioning, creates this juxtaposition. It's hard for people to then classify you, so then they become triggered. That's just been my path, I think, and maybe in this lifetime as well. But it's always been my path of just creating my own mix of things and following what excites me, even if it doesn't fit into the cultural norm. So I'll share an example that happened recently for those of you who don't know, I'm also a DJ, and I was DJing at a conscious festival, and I was playing my set, and my set has everything. It's very multicultural, multidimensional, and it's really focused on, like, Shakti twerk, ecstatic dance. So started with bass, and then I brought in some hip hop music. Because to me, hip hop music is like, like the ultimate way to just release your root chakra. And also, that is where the torque move comes from. It comes from the NOLA bouncing, which has origins from African dance. So to me, it's, you must honor that culture and where it comes from and play that music, because that's part of the entire picture. So I'm playing hip hop music, and people are having the best time ever. And so many people came up to me saying, like, thank you so much for playing that. And when I say hip hop, I mean, I'm playing old school hip hop. Like, I'm playing Missy Elliot. I'm playing genuine. I'm playing my neck, my back. I'm playing, you know, just like the fun 2004 hits, you know, and I play the clean versions too. So people were thanking me, saying, I've never had so much fun at a conscious festival before. Like, it's typically like, when you're spiritual, you have to listen to this, like, super, like, airy spiritual music, and everyone's just like, waving their hands like this, and there's like, no hips involved. So thank you for being bringing that in, because I also played a lot of reggaeton and Brazilian funk and afrobeats. But then later I found out a few days after that there were a number of people who were very triggered by my music. And they complained to the festival and they said that that was ratchet. Okay, so that was ratchet. That it is considered trashy to play hip hop music, to twerk, to express yourself in that way. And I found it very interesting because that festival had people doing tantric orgies. People, full sets of everyone, naked and eye gazing and very sexually free and open. Yet if I play hip hop music, that's off the table, that's now too much. That is considered ratchet. But the tantric orgy is sacred. This show is sponsored by Better Help. 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So you can fill out information about yourself and get matched with your perfect therapist and actually try out different ones until you find your right fit. So to get 10% off your first month, head over to betterhelp.com Sahara Again, that's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P.com Sahara and you can find that link in the show notes. So I share this because that's the spiritual ego coming in of, like, this is what's accepted in our norm, in our community. But anything outside of that, no, no, no, that's not allowed. That's not what we do here. That's bringing down the vibe that's creating the wrong culture that we're saying, separating ourselves from. When my neck, my back is literally just a woman reclaiming her pleasure, she is voicing what she desires. And keep in mind, too, she's a black woman in doing so. And the triggering that happens because for me, as a brown woman, I definitely get a lot of prejudice, but black women even get it more so, which I want to recognize here. And the fact that playing music from black culture was so triggering for people, felt low class for them, shows the internalized racism as well as patriarchy in the spiritual community. And this ties back to the spiritual ego because they have now adopted these new beliefs because they're spiritual. Oh, because we're spiritual. We don't listen to that music. We don't dance that way, we don't dress that way. We don't do those stuff. We've separated ourselves. We are better than those people. But it comes back to the same threads of why are you better than them? Oh, because they're black, because they're brown, because they're women, because of colonialism and these beliefs that dancing in certain ways considered barbaric. But being poised and up here to house music, but then being a freak in the back, that's okay. So I shared this with you because the spiritual ego really is A tricky one, because you create this worldview that the reason why you believe that way is because you have ascended, because you have had these more lofty, expansive ascended worldviews. However, what often comes with them is the same positions of power and the structure of who's at top right, which tends to be the white CIS man. So it's important for us to look at this, because when we don't notice the ways that racism, colonialism, patriarchy, but also just, like, looking down on people, the way that it shows up in our own lives, then we're really missing the whole point of the spiritual journey. Because spirituality is not about separating ourselves from other people and being better than them, because we've figured out some unique lock that no one else has. And it actually really shows we're in an earlier stage of our spiritual growth journey. Because I was there too, but that, like, I've figured it out, and you still need to. And that's the ego right there of I need to show you, because I am inherently right and you are inherently wrong. And it can show up in many other different forms as well. And we could talk about this for hours. So my invitation for you is to just notice how it might be showing up in your life. Maybe ways that you have experienced it at the hands of someone else, but also the ways that we may have perpetuated this. I was having this conversation with my friend Liliana last night. We were at this conscious festival, and we were talking about how plant medicine is such a big focus right now of, you know, I'm doing this ceremony and another ceremony and another ceremony because I need to heal my ancestral lineage and how sometimes, like, the ultimate way to heal your ancestral lineage is just to go visit your family. And you really don't need to do medicine. Just, like, whatever is showing up for you, right there in that conversation are the very aspects of yourself that get to be healed. And sometimes it's easier for us to be in the ceremonial, out of body space and be, like, healing our lineage in our own psyche rather than having these physical conversations with the living people who are right in front of us, because those living people who are right in front of us are gonna have some responses that we might not like. So again, in my own journey, I was telling my mom I was healing our ancestral female lineage and my great, great, great grandmother, and I was, like, telling her about this, and she, you know, I'm alive. And I was like, no, it's like, beyond this, it's intergenerational, and she's like, well, one day I'm not going to be here, and you can talk to me. At first I was like, she doesn't get it. Like, I'm doing deeper work here. But she's so right. She's so right. Because it's easier for me in my own bubble to be healing my relationship with my deceased great great grandmother, who only exists in my consciousness. And frankly, I'm in control of how that feels for the most part. Then having a really triggering conversation with my mom that brings up the little girl in me. And, you know, but she is my living ancestor right here. And I share this because that was the spiritual ego in me that wanted to do this, like, deep ancestral healing work in the realms, rather than looking at what was here available for me to address right now. Like. Like, why can't I have this conversation with my mom? What's showing up in me? Where do I not feel heard? Where do I feel triggered? Where do I start to get angry and reactive? That's the work right there. Like, you don't need to look far. It doesn't need to be so complicated. And I feel like in spirituality, it's like you sometimes need to go through this wave of leaving the way that you saw the world and unlearning everything and then relearning all of these new things, from past lives to karma to Dharma, to ascension, to being a light worker to Mary Magdalene to sensuality, to shamanism, to crystals to Reiki, to whatever else. All the things we talk about on this podcast, you learn about them all, but then you come back down the roller coaster and you're like, okay, integration, conversations with my family, going back to where I grew up, like, looking at my everyday life and how I'm showing up in my relationships and my sense of work and purpose. And, like, that's really what it's all about. Spirituality is not just to have this, like, experience, because that's just like watching a movie. Watching a movie is to have an experience. But to me, it's about integrating your spirit, your soul into this physical realm. And sometimes you do need to acquire new knowledge and new perspectives and learn about all of these things. And some of these tools are gonna be very powerful for you, and you're gonna hold onto them and bring them back down into these realms. And some of these tools have a specific length of time for you, and they served you for a part of your spiritual journey, but then you evolved past them. Not that you're better than them. It's just that they're not what you need in your journey right now. And this could be from like crystals to even belief systems. And it's important for us to recognize this because as we come back into the integration, into the wholeness, into the circle that this is all about, into who we were before all of this, we realize that we already were sacred and that we had everything that we needed already around us and inside of us. But we needed to go on that journey to remember. So I'm curious to hear how the spiritual ego has shown up in your life, how you've experienced it, Any thoughts and reflections that you have on this, please share with me on the Instagram post that has this clip. That's the perfect place for us to have a conversation. And I really think that it's important for us to open up dialogue on the own ways that we are showing up, not pointing the finger at someone else and be like, hey, Sally had so much spiritual ego and that it's a very easy to but that pointing of the finger that we do, that's the spiritual ego right there. So if you do notice that you are looking at everyone else's spiritual ego, what are the three fingers pointing back to you? What are they showing you? So I just dished out a lot of mine, so I'm curious to hear how it is for yourself. Please share with me on my Instagram I am Sahara Rose in the comment section and any other podcasts that you would love to listen listen to here. I love opening up the dialogue to just pressing conversations like this that are in the collective zeitgeist that we get to sound out together. So thank you so much for tuning in. If you loved this episode, I would love to gift you a free womb meditation for leaving a review. So head over to the iTunes store, leave a review, take a screenshot before hitting submit and email it over to me@saharaamsahararose.com you can find that link in the show Notes notes and I will email you back my Womb Guidance Meditation. Please share this episode with anyone that you believe can benefit from hearing it and I'll see you in the next one. Namaste J.