Belonging Somewhere: An Exploration of the Ego

I wanted to belong somewhere.

When I was 29 years old, I signed up to volunteer at a Level 2 trauma hospital. I first volunteered as an aide to the Post Anesthesia Care Unit, assisting patients who were just recovering from surgery. Here, I was able to practice the hands-on skills I learned in nursing school. The registered nurses on the floor appreciated my help and looked for teaching opportunities for me, hoping that maybe one day I could join their ranks. After I had fulfilled a certain amount of hours on this floor, though, I transitioned to the Integrative Healing department as a Reiki practitioner. I was exploring the boundaries of what I was capable of achieving with Reiki.

There was one slight problem. Besides being an official hospital volunteer, I needed to provide proof of certification as a Reiki practitioner. The problem was that my certificates were destroyed in a house fire a couple years ago. Getting new certificates in a timely manner was implausible because I would have to retrieve them from 460 miles away.

The Reiki Masters in charge of the program were understanding to this. They watched me perform Reiki with patients in the hospital to observe my skills. They also gave me a miniature interview to vet my knowledge and experience.

Pearl and I sat at a round table in the front lobby of the hospital.

She asked me a variety of questions and then finally, after a brief silence, she asked, “Do you see anything when you do Reiki?”

I got triggered. My eyes began to well up and my chest trembled with emotions. The sleeves of my hospital volunteer uniform began to shake as I held back tears. This was the first time openly telling someone something precious. At that time, I was in the closet about a big secret.

“I see angels,” I confided, “I can see my own guardian angels and I can see chakras.” A previously unknown pressure seemed to dissipate from my shoulders.

Pearl closed her eyes with a finished look on her face. The interview was over, and she had made a final decision that I would provide Reiki services to patients and nurses on the Rehabilitation floor. It wasn’t so much about my psychic abilities, but perhaps more about having figured out my lineage by my answer to that question.

Pearl was not only a Reiki Master with her own school in the area, but also a leader of the Integrative Healing department at the hospital and a retired registered nurse from the Emergency Department. I felt that this one person had so much in common with me, and maybe with her years of life experience, just maybe, she could provide some wisdom of belonging somewhere.

“I feel so different from everyone,” I added, “Do you feel that way, too?”

“I don’t,” she said matter-of-factly, “because I know who I am and where I am meant to be. You’re young, it is normal for your age to question who you are, but this will come to end, I promise.”

“But even among Reiki practitioners, I don’t feel the same. I used to do research, and I didn’t feel like I belonged there either,” a tinge of resentment seeped into my tone, “and I don’t feel like I belong as a nurse. There’s just so much about my spirituality that other people don’t understand. People just aren’t spiritual like me. I feel like an old soul at times…”

Ah, there it was. The iconic Star seed quality. Pearl was a 50-something-year-old white lady with a maternal benevolence to her aura. If I could describe her energy, it was like a mighty warm, fluffy blanket fresh out of the drier - one you would want to wrap yourself in for safety and to simply feel good. Soft and cozy was her energy.

I was a spunky little Asian girl with a pixie cut with so much to say about the world. Pearl was settled in the world, integrated, and accepting of the world. I questioned the world instead. I often felt like a little creature lost in the world. 

Pearl held space and listened to me without offering any solutions. When I was done with my mini tantrum (what a way to make an impression), Pearl started:

“It’s because you are Reiki,” she grinned.

This much assuaged my turmoil, and the interview concluded. 

My stem cell research mentor in undergraduate college scoffed at my practice of Reiki. My supervising physician in the clinic joked about which crystal to use to heal a medical diagnosis. Reiki practitioners frowned on my credentials and my involvement in science and medicine. Christians believed I was working with the devil and I needed to be saved.

Nowhere felt safe. And I was alone. Misunderstood.

Years later, somewhere in my meditations, in that space of despondency, I had come to understand that it was my ego obstructing the way. It had nothing to do with them, and everything to do with me and my ego.

The ego is the opinion of one’s self often, but not always, an unconscious state of the soul. It is busy fixating on its own strengths and weaknesses. It is one’s self-esteem. The ego is always measuring its self-importance, its achievements in comparison to its environment. In the background, it busies itself creating a structure of its identity while others couldn’t care less.

The ego craves identity. I. The one. It is I who craves identity. Having an identity soothes and inflates the ego. When imbalanced, this thing called the ego always, always wants more attention drawn to it. But if you remove the ego, who then craves identity? Nobody then craves identity.

 I was busy with labels of…

“I am a scientist”

“I am a scholar”

“I am a nurse practitioner”

“I am a Reiki practitioner”

etc.

And then complained about why am I not understood by others? Because for reasons of the ego, I assigned importance to these labels. Separate forms of identity.

These are instances of the ego at play. It’s important to be proud of your accomplishments. However, these roles only exist to be of service to the greater community. They exist to co-create with God in ways you were called to fulfill according to your soul’s mission.

Back then, I didn’t readily understand this. It was sort of a rite of passage, if you will. I needed to go through the hardship and process these feelings of loneliness, of being misunderstood, of being isolated by myself and others. Only then could I grow organically and begin to heal. Only then could I understand the meaning behind Pearl’s words.

I saw that I was putting fragments of myself into separate boxes. Social circles would subsequently see just those fragments they were allowed to see - tiny pieces of data of a greater soul. The ego felt that certain pieces of information about me would not feed my ego in certain groups. It tightly shut them away into their own respective boxes because anything against the cultural norm of that group would hurt the ego and lower my self-esteem. I was suppressing critical parts of me in order to blend into scholarly circles, medical circles or the metaphysical ones.

I began to ask the question: Why do the opinions or reactions of others matter to you? The short answer is that it is the ego who thinks this matters. The long answer is that you were meant to step forward and shine a light. After all, who else can say they had all these achievements? I was strategically positioned with a unique skillset to teach others and pave a way forward for those seeking higher consciousness and enlightenment! I had dedicated my life to be of service to others, so why should I make it all about me? That seems unbecoming and a vestige of broken logic. I would argue that those achievements were not through my hard work, but through the hands of God guiding me forward to awaken the gifts bestowed upon me since the inception of my soul.

Meditation, self-Reiki and journaling led me to these realizations over time. No medication or major changes in lifestyle or didactics were needed. All it took was a shift in mindset, and now I can carry myself as a “woo woo” Reiki practitioner in the midst of practicing endocrinology with my diabetes patients. I can be a spiritual teacher while teaching the scientific benefits of Reiki according to published studies. I can smile and laugh lightheartedly when someone makes fun of my crystals because sometimes the idea of talking to my crystals and assigning them job roles actually sounds funny! When someone sarcastically says, “Joyce, clear my chakras,” without skipping a beat, I hold out my arms in a flailing fashion while saying “Wooo…!” to make people laugh.

I carried myself with a lighter step and with more positivity. No more tiptoeing around eggshells about closeted secrets.

When you are in this world but not of it, suddenly you don’t need to fuss over your differences. Rather, you can see things as they are.