The Ego’s Pain Shield
There is a strange phenomenon that occurs between therapist and patient and guru and student: the core issue is usually something the patient/student doesn’t want touched. They will admit, when honest, that this core issue is the cause of much of the suffering that prompted them to seek help, but they would like that help to be applied to areas peripheral to the subject. But the subject itself? No.
Think about going to a doctor with a fractured leg. It isn’t the fracture itself that usually drives people to the doctor; it’s the pain. The pain is intolerable, so they seek the help of the doctor. In the case of a fracture, the doctor can quickly tell them that the cause and solution are wrapped around the same issue: the fracture.
What if the patient then said, “I don’t want my fracture healed. In fact, when the body naturally begins to heal it, I will go out of my way to re-fracture it to keep it in that state, but I still want you to help with the suffering.”
Does this sound reasonable?
For instance, I am obese. Many times when I go to the doctor for one thing or another, the doctor wants to focus on my obesity. Even if I have a hangnail, it’s related to my obesity. Now, in some roundabout way, this may be true, but I am an intelligent person and can see thin people getting hangnails at a similar rate. So, I suggest that my weight might not be an issue in this specific case, and the doctors that persist in discussing my weight I simply don’t trust. Their judgment seems to be swayed by a disgust response to my obesity.
However, if the issue is related to my weight and I refuse to acknowledge that, then I am the one wasting the doctor’s time. Say I went to the doctor because I was easily tired walking up stairs. Well, it may be because of non-weight-related issues, but because obesity is a clear cause of that, the doctor can’t check for those causes until the obesity is dealt with. It gets in the way of their doing their job. And ethically, if I ask for help in an area clearly related to my obesity and do nothing about that obesity, I am in the wrong. I shouldn’t be asking the question in the first place.
How does this translate to the guru/student relationship?
The ego seeks the guru for suffering relief, then when it finds it is the cause, it does ANYTHING to avoid that fact being discussed or seen by the student.
In the metaphor about the obese patient and the doctor, it would be as if the obese patient, upon seeing that obesity is the issue, went out and bought a carnival mirror that makes them look thin instead of doing anything about the obesity. Then, every time the physician brought up obesity, the patient said, “I am thin, I see myself every day, it can’t be that. Let’s keep addressing side issues like my feet hurting, getting short of breath easily, and my knees aching from walking around all day.” The patient doesn’t need to convince the doctor; that is impossible. The patient just needs to fool themselves.
The only issue with this is it wastes both the patient’s and doctor’s time. If the real issue is not to be touched, then the peripheral symptoms aren’t going anywhere either. So, any request to end them is a waste of time.
The ego does this exact same thing, but in this case IT is the issue it hopes is never touched. Now, what is the carnival mirror the ego uses? What is the go-to distraction it can create to avoid looking at the core issue? Past trauma.
If the ego—or the left hemisphere, as I refer to it in my teachings—can get the discussion with the guru derailed into past trauma, the core issue (its non-existence and the complications that arise from acting on its behalf) can be infinitely avoided.
So, a savvy guru will begin to heal those issues, taking those bullets out of the gun, so to speak, with the goal of one day holding the student to the only real issue.
This separate sense of self they are clinging to is the cause of the majority of their suffering.
Ok, how do we as students get out of this maze?
There are three answers based on my years of teaching, and much of it depends on the student’s earnestness and courage.
The first answer is: you don’t.
If the core issue is more important to the student than the suffering that it creates, this maze has no exit.
The second answer is: you suffer enough.
If the core issue creates enough suffering that it can finally be examined honestly and courageously, then there is an exit to the maze.
The last answer is: you somehow find enough trust in the guru to do the work on faith.
If you can follow the directions WITHOUT DEVIATION and with devotional faith, and those directions lead to the exit, then you will find the exit.
Think of an actual maze. And in this maze, you have a blindfold on. You can either remain in the maze because you are blind and refuse to try, suffer by bumping into things until you notice the blindfold, or lastly, you can listen to someone tell you step-by-step how to exit the maze without knowing or understanding even the progress. Like, “take three steps. Stop. Turn to your right until I say stop. Etc.”
Past trauma is a convenient distraction for the ego because it is both compelling and difficult to confront. The ego leverages these past experiences to divert attention from the core issue of its own non-existence. This tactic is effective because addressing trauma feels like important work, and it is—just not in the context the ego presents it. True healing involves understanding how these past experiences are used as a shield rather than as the root cause of current suffering. The ego doesn’t care about your suffering; it is using it to avoid detection, so it is, in fact, in its best interest for the suffering to continue. The student has to see that their interest should be in healing the trauma, or the ego will use it forever.
The guru recognizes the ego's tactic and gently guides the student back to the core issue by addressing past traumas incrementally. For example, the guru might help the student see patterns in their reactions to past trauma that reveal underlying ego-driven narratives. Or they suggest mindfulness practices, which help the student observe their thoughts and feelings without attachment—from the perspective of the observer, not the ego—gradually loosening the ego's grip.
Then comes the core work: healing the wounds by finding the inner child trapped in the left limbic system’s trauma stories and healing that child as a way out of that horrible cage.
These are the bullets that the guru ultimately removes from the ego’s gun, until the gun is empty and only the ego remains. At that point, any student can use a direct method, like Ramana Maharshi’s “Who am I?” to see that the ego—the classic sense of separate self, the “actor” in our mind-made movies about ourselves—isn’t actually real.
And it all fades away in a “poof” of direct insight.
But until then, and for as long as the ego can get away with it, it uses the student’s trauma as a shield. The student pays the price, while the ego remains untouched.