Coping with Ego

  I remember reading a story about a retreat participant at Master Sheng Yen's retreat, who said she wanted to 'get rid of the ego' or the self when meditating. Master Sheng Yen responded by standing in front of her where his shadow was cast along the wall, and then asking the participant, "can you get rid of the shadow?" The ego, I surmise, is just like this: the more a person tries to get 'over it' or rid of it, the more it tends to come back to haunt the mind. And why is this? If one thinks of the ego as the master illusionist, then it it bound to be threatened  in very strong ways when there is any threat to its sense of being.
   I have found that it is near impossible to ever combat the sense of self, and that a better approach is to observe it in a relaxed way, without identifying too much with it. How one does this is by not identifying with one's thoughts or even with the sensations of the body. If I take the tension in my body as 'me', soon enough my self will also start to feel like something that is contracting inward, in need of protection. But if I simply see the sensations as 'just feelings' or 'just thoughts', then I no longer take them to have anything to do with me. In that way, I can start to relax in the presence of feelings and thoughts.
     Another approach comes from REBT therapy, and that is not to succumb to absolutistic 'shoulds' or demands related to how we want to be seen or treated by others. Albert Ellis and, to some extent, Stoic philosophers, have tended to focus on the self's desire for approval, recognition and even praise from others. While the Buddhist approach tends to see people's ego as enmeshed in greed, desire and aversion, the Stoic and REBT philosophy tends to focus on the demand for recognition and approval as a high priority for the self's sense of worth. It is as though the self is so desperately craving recognition to confirm its own existence and validity. Ellis in particular tends to focus on disputing the idea that we absolutely require approval of some kind of survive. For instance, he uses shame disputing exercises to expose his clients to shame-producing behaviors, with the intention of showing that shame does not "kill" a person, and there is no harm in performing less than one's expected standard.
  Perhaps the bottom line for the above approaches is that the self does not need to be gratified, and the ability to gently frustrate the sense of self by creating space around it is one way to diminish the cravings of the self. This is an indirect approach to diminishing the self's demands, whereas the approach of trying to control or suppress the self's demands often ends up only strengthening the resolve to have things in a certain way. Another thing to consider: one should perhaps not turn the 'fight against the self' into another form of self or pride.