Shoba Narayan is the author of five books. As a journalist and columnist, she writes about health, relationships, travel, food and culture for global publications, winning a James Beard award and Pulitzer Fellowship. She has taught and lectured at universities in India (IIM-B and IISc) and abroad. She is the host and anchor of Bird Podcast: about birds and nature. She enjoys wine, studies Jung and is a gadget geek. Her lifelong mission is to get fit without exercising and lose weight without dieting.
The Dance Between Ego and Soul as You Age
This column is about a simple fact: as you age, the ego becomes both stronger and more fragile. This plays out in ways that can both strengthen and sabotage because you are both secure and insecure. On the one hand, all the petty concerns you had about climbing the corporate ladder and whether you were going to get that promotion fell away. Once you turn 60, you tend to make peace with who you are and what you have achieved. Perhaps this is why studies show that happiness increases when you become an elder or a WisGen. But all is not hunky-dory.
Niggling concerns about health play out in your mind. You worry about staying relevant and being respected by your peers and those younger than you. This can cause you to become more sensitive to what people say. You tend to take umbrage at perceived insults where none exist. You may struggle with the casual language of today’s youth – “Hey Uncle, wassup?” instead of the respectful “Pranaam Uncle-Ji,” greeting that you accorded to all your elders.
This sudden sensitivity to hierarchy and respect has to do with what psychologists call the “ego,” which is the part of you that does “adult” things. Carl Jung who founded a branch of psychology that bears his name, differentiated between the ego and what he called the “unconscious,” which aligns to what Vedanta calls the atman or the soul. The ego has its place—it helps you pay your taxes and get things done. The real fun happens when you allow your soul to talk, when you listen to your unconscious needs and desires, and when you allow the imagination to hold sway. Wasn’t it Einstein who said that “Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.”
How then to tame the ego and make it work for you rather than against you? How then to heed the calling of the soul instead of being captured by the drama of the ego?
For the last four years, I have been taking classes in Jungian psychology. My goal has been to tame my ego and align with my soul. Through these classes, and through working with a therapist, I have learned to recall my dreams, try to figure out what they are saying, and work with my subconscious desires and triggers. I have tried to isolate my triggers and then tried to address them – not easy. Working with a therapist has helped isolate why I suddenly feel mad or sad, and hopefully over time, I can accept these triggers and soften my reaction to them.
Often you have to reach back into your childhood, which seems to be the foundation of all your triggers. Are you someone who cannot commit? Or do you hate being pushed to a corner? Are you triggered if people are not “polite” to you? Pretty much all of this can be attributed to events and people from your childhood. Let me give you an example.
One of my worst memories as a child happened at what would have been a joyous family wedding. My late father came from a large family with seven brothers and three sisters. I have some 30 first cousins just on my father’s side. All of us convened at our ancestral home in Kerala during the summer holidays. We came down from Mumbai, Chennai, and different parts of India. Us cousins had a great time, dancing in the Kerala monsoon, swimming in its lakes, swinging on the large wooden swing in the living area, climbing mango trees and chewing on raw mango with salt and chilli powder in the afternoon. I developed childhood crushes on my older male cousins and shared secrets with all my female cousins. We celebrated festivals, holidays and the annual shraadham for ancestors together. To be held and celebrated in the bosom of a large loving family is a gift that many of us in India have enjoyed.
Then our grandfather died and left vast tracts of land, but only to the male heirs. All of a sudden, the three sisters were asked to sign away their interest in the land. The logic was that they had been given lots of gold during their wedding and so the land was for the ‘boys.’ Two sisters signed away their rights, but one of my “Buas” or “Athais” as they are called in Tamil was married to a lawyer and he knew that Hindu law didn’t differentiate between sons and daughters. This was the beginning of a family quarrel that ended up with a spectacularly ugly splintering of the entire close-knit family during a wedding in Kerala. My father shouted like I had never seen before and dragged us out of the wedding. I can still recall the stricken look on the face of my “bua” or “athai.”
This has resulted in two things that are part of my personality—I have a visceral fear of confrontation and will go to enormous lengths to avoid speaking my mind to people around me. This hasn’t helped my adult relationships at all. Often, I will smart at something my kids or husband will say. But instead of speaking up or showing my anger, I will suck it up till an outburst beyond all proportions happens at an inappropriate time, causing my kids and husband to be startled out of their wits.
Now, I am in my fifties – the age that my father was when his family drama happened – I am actively working to overcome this fear of confrontation and speak out my displeasure or dissent at the time when I feel it rather than bottling it up. Aristotle’s words are my guiding light. He said, “Anybody can become angry — that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.”
For those interested, I can recommend some online platforms where I have been taking these classes. They are the Jung Platform, the Shift Network, the Jung Society of Washington, and the Jung Center of Houston. The classes I have taken in all these places can be found through the keywords “dream analysis” and “creativity improvement.”
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