The Ecstatic Dissolution of Ego

aka: The Freedom of Giving Up

I didn’t know I was going to write this essay until just before opening the tab in Google Docs. I thought I might be abandoning this blog again for sometime. But just now, in a session with a long-term client, I was deeply reminded of the immense power of giving up. And it inspired these words to come through.

Specifically, there’s immeasurable power in giving up the burdens of guilt, shame, and other people’s expectations.

Through this blog, I use myself as an example for everything, because I never want to exploit clients for their experience, or breach confidentiality. But sometimes I worry that it makes me seem self-obsessed. Nevertheless, I hear often enough that others find it valuable, so I’ll continue for now.

And, really, it’s actually pretty ego dissolving – more than it is ego affirming – to be genuinely vulnerable on the internet. Have you ever bared your soul publicly just to read comments like, “I’m going to sue YouTube for putting this on my suggested list,” and more misogynistic comments than I care to recount?

It’s some small consolation that studies have found that higher rates of “Social Media Disorder” (yes, that’s a thing) correlate with higher rates of “avoidant, dependent, antisocial… paranoid, and borderline personality features.” In other words, toxic comments usually come from people with moderate to high degrees of mental health challenge. But that doesn’t make reading those types of comments any more palatable.

If you follow me, you may have noticed that for the months of January and February, I was posting more often with much more polished, curated video content. That’s because I paid an online company (an exorbitantly high amount) to edit and post videos for me. This was my last ditch effort at seeing if I could make internet entrepreneurship work for me as a healer.

I’ve had a dream for the past decade that I would eventually get to a place where I was making enough passive income online that I could give sessions for free or at massively reduced rates. So I’ve spent literally countless hours and dollars on internet marketing courses and coaches. But the truth is, I don’t really enjoy social media. Like, at all. It’s noticeably bad for my mental health. And a constant SM presence is kind of everything when it comes to internet solopreneurship.

So I hired this company thinking, “This is the last thing I’m going to try. If I can get someone else to do all the video editing and posting for me, maybe I’ll be able to continue down this road. Otherwise, I’m done.”

And after trying this out for two months, I am, indeed, done. I’ve discovered I’m just not a video personality. I am not a marketer. Really, I don’t even like being a “business woman.” I just want to show up and heal people and write about it when I’m in the mood. That’s it.

And I’m so grateful that this final experiment with online entrepreneurship proved to me that’s the case. It’s so ironic that my last post before this was describing the Parts of my psyche that actually aren’t comfortable with success. I’m sure someone could argue that maybe those parts won out after all. But I actually don’t see this as a “failure.” I mean, I did at first…

Initially, when I decided to give up entrepreneurship a few weeks ago, I was in rough shape for a few days. It really hit up against the Parts that had gotten attached to finding self-worth through outward achievement. But through receiving some beautiful healing sessions, I was able to shift into seeing that I never “failed” at anything. I never did anything wrong. I just made a series of choices.

Some of those choices were in alignment with my true desires and capacities. A lot of those choices came from ideals of what success is “supposed to” look like. And that’s okay. As I’m peeling back the infinite onion of my consciousness, I know that there is always more to learn, and more to grow. And getting caught up in self-judgment-disguised-as-regret is simply a path I don’t need to choose anymore.

Besides, the new path that my intuition says is right for me at this moment in time is NOT something that my ego accepted willingly. For a lot of reasons, I was determined NOT to go into professional mental health. The main reason being that it felt like a concession to top-down, hierarchical structures that put the “practitioner” in a position of power over the “client.” And that “expert-knows-best” paradigm is one that I’ve bucked thoroughly for as long as I’ve had the awareness to do so.

In fact, I chose the “Psycholowitch” name for my channel as a nod to my belief that ancient, egalitarian, partnership-oriented ways of healing the bodymind are the most useful, as they have been for thousands of years, and the vast majority of human herstory. These ways are “partnership-oriented” in that the healer is working in partnership with the client, with the Earth, and with other beings in seen and unseen realms. In the west, we tend to call these ways “shamanic,” but I don’t love to use that term. It was popularized by a white man to label vast swaths of ancient practices and belief systems. One researcher put it simply that “shamanism” is “a made-up, modern, Western category.”

However, ancient ways of healing were similar in that they used natural resources given directly by the earth, and they incorporated at least some consideration of invisible, mysterious, energetic levels of being. It’s only really been through the take over of Dominator Cultures and especially the primacy of patriarchal religions that these ancient ways of healing have been lost and even demonized.

I resent that this is so. And, on one level, that’s why I don’t want to participate in western paradigms that have proclaimed themselves as the one right, real way to heal people. Not only is this arrogant, white-supremacist thinking (oh yeah, I said it), it’s a disservice to humanity.

Iatrogenesis, which basically means mistakes made by healthcare professionals, is the 5th leading cause of death worldwide.

Now, I’m not saying that more ancient, partnership-oriented ways of healing are perfect, let alone remotely uniform across cultures. Nor am I saying that western medicine doesn’t save lives in a lot of cases, because it most definitely does. But I think it’s high time that the self-proclaimed “experts” in modern societies humble themselves enough to learn from the cultures that have been belittled, erased, and scorned for at least the last 500 years of colonization.

And that need for humility goes for mental health as well. Even with our vastly overmedicated society here in the US, somehow there are still “more than 1 in 5 adults (who) live with a mental illness.” Which is, of course, fabulously profitable for the billionaire class, with big pharma earning over $23 Billion in Psychotropic Drugs in 2024 alone.

When I worked at the front desk of a psychiatric office in my late teens, I saw how the revolving door of “med checks” and the literal free lunches provided by pharmaceutical reps was the driving force behind what constituted “mental health support.” It frankly made me sick. And, again, don’t get me wrong, I know that mental health medication saves lives in many cases. But it also ruins lives in many others.

All that to say… I was resistant to say the least when I thought of becoming a mental health professional. I haven’t wanted to be part of the problem, rather than providing real solutions.

However, through being personal friends with many truly incredible mental health professionals, I’ve realized that even within a system that’s not perfect, there’s still ample opportunity to live in alignment with my values.

And, honestly, I simply can’t do the entrepreneurial grind anymore. When I think of being able to take insurance and join a group practice that will do the marketing and billing for me, my heart sings. And I also recognize that maybe I can do more to change the system from within it, rather than from without it.

I also think it will be interesting to document in this blog what it’s like to go through western mental health training while integrating what I consider to be the more holistic perspectives I’ve gained at wildernessFusion, my healing school, and at SeekHealing, the Social Health nonprofit that I work with.

So I’ve decided to go to grad school for Mental Health Counseling. And I’m actually relieved on some inexplicable, soul-deep level. I think I always knew I’d do this eventually. And now that it’s on the immediate horizon, it feels like a midlife re-birth.

In wildernessFusion, we learn that in order to “transcend” a stuck point, we have to fully occupy it. I think by fully occupying my desire to be an entrepreneur, I’ve now been able to let it go. And while there were many Parts of me stuck in fear and resistance around this, they just needed radical loving acceptance in order to surrender into a different perspective.

The work is truly never done. In fact, Karl, my teacher at wildernessFusion once told me that if you’re truly doing the work, it always feels like you’re just beginning. What a wonderful way to make life continually fresh and exciting.