Part 9 of the 20-part Between Mind and Body series

Growing up, I learned a lot from observing our dogs. My mom loved dogs so much that we regularly took in rescues. There was a fox terrier pup from a farmer in Nebraska, an overweight Dalmatian from my great aunt in Palm Springs, and a skinny mixed breed from our next-door neighbors when they moved away. Later, sometime after our fox terrier passed, I got a long-haired black Lab as a gift.

They each had their own personalities, which was always interesting to me, but one thing they seemed to have in common was that they lived in the present, or as Eckhart Tolle would say, in “the now.” They were the same creature whether they were being watched or not. They were never bored. They didn’t care what we thought of them. They just loved us as we were and probably assumed we felt the same way about them.

When they were hungry, they were just hungry. Not in a way where they felt they deserved food or were being mistreated because the bowl was empty. There was no narrative running in their minds. They didn’t hold grudges. When they got into it with another dog and it blew over, they moved on. They did not sit around replaying it. They did not seem burdened by self-consciousness or the kind of mental drama we humans create. They were fully present with whoever was in the room.

The funny thing is that some of these are qualities Buddhist monks spend their whole lives trying to cultivate.

Of course, our brains work differently than a dog’s. A dog’s brain seems built more for experiencing the world, while ours seems built more for interpreting it. Dogs can read emotional states pretty well and respond to distress. We humans go further than that. We try to understand what someone is feeling, why they are suffering, and what it all means. We do not just experience life. We interpret it. We assign meaning to it. And a lot of the time, we make it personal.

That is where ego enters the picture.

Ego is not all bad. When most people hear the word ego, they think of arrogance or being full of yourself. But ego is more than that. It helps answer the question, “Who am I?” It gives us a sense of self. It motivates you to speak up when someone disrespects you or crosses a line. It pushes you when you want to master something, like the trumpet. It can help you hold onto your values when the pressure is on. In that sense, ego is a kind of tool.

The problem starts when ego stops being a tool and starts running the show.

That usually happens in our interactions with other people. Whether they mean to or not, other people are constantly brushing up against the ego. Sometimes they expose it without even knowing they are doing it.

Take something as simple as your work. If nine out of ten people tell you that you are doing a great job, it is that one person who is not satisfied who will occupy your mind. The one critique drowns out all the praise. That is the ego demanding to be accepted by everyone, not just most people.

Then there are the harder moments, when you are going through something difficult and the person across from you makes it entirely about themselves. No acknowledgment of what you have been through, just a pivot to their own experience. Those moments have a way of pulling the ego right to the surface, because being unseen or dismissed is one of the things it handles worst.

These situations are not interruptions to the work of managing your ego. They are the work. It is easy to imagine that growth happens somewhere off to the side of everyday life, in quiet reflection, meditation, or moments of insight. But ego does not usually show itself there. It shows itself when someone pushes a button. When you feel criticized, overlooked, misunderstood, dismissed, or not appreciated. That is when you begin to see what you are attached to. That is when you see the image of yourself you are trying to protect. Those moments are not distractions from the work. They are the place where the work becomes real.

I remember this very clearly from my time playing lead trumpet in the orchestra for Royal Caribbean Cruise Line, backing up all the artists who performed in the main showroom. The drummer at the time would constantly talk about Frank Greene, the player whose chair I had taken when Frank’s contract was up.

Frank had played lead trumpet with the Maynard Ferguson Big Band and was, and still is, a great lead player. The drummer clearly loved playing with him. He would play recordings of charts the Royal Caribbean orchestra had done when Frank was on lead trumpet and say things like, “Listen to how he plays,” or, “What a pleasure it was playing drums with him on lead.” He would point out little details, like how Frank held out the last note or the quality of his sound, and he would do all of this right in front of me.

At the time, it really hit me hard. This was my first lead trumpet gig with Royal Caribbean, and instead of feeling like I was settling into the job and being accepted for what I brought to it, I felt like I was constantly being compared to someone else.

What made it harder was that when I listened to the recordings, I knew they sounded great, but I also knew that what he was playing was not beyond my own ability, range, or sound. I am not saying I was at Frank’s level, but the examples the drummer kept playing were charts I could play well too. That is what made it sting. It was not just admiration for Frank. It started to feel like there was something lacking in me.

After a while, it even started planting a little doubt in me. I began wondering if I was really cut out for that gig. Not because I could not play the book, but because I could feel that, for whatever reason, the drummer did not like the way I played, or at least that was my impression.

I remember feeling the urge to say something, maybe to defend myself or push back a little, but I never did. I just kept playing the music I was given and played it well, because that was the job.

Looking back, I can see how much that stirred my ego. It was not only about the drummer praising another player. It was about what I started making that mean about me. Maybe I was not enough. Maybe I did not belong in that chair. Maybe I was being measured and coming up short. Whether all of that was true or not, that was the story it triggered in me.

And that is part of how ego works. Sometimes it is not the event itself that gets us most. It is the meaning we attach to it, especially when it touches something we care deeply about.

This is where ego stops serving you and you start serving it. It is where we take things personally that were never really about us. It is where a casual comment becomes an attack, a difference of opinion becomes a threat, and someone else’s success somehow feels like our failure. The ego is constantly scanning for signs of disrespect, invisibility, or irrelevance. And when it finds them, real or imagined, it reacts.

This is the part the dogs never had to deal with. Nobody insulted their intelligence. Nobody overlooked them in a meeting. Nobody liked someone else’s post more than theirs. They had no reputation to protect, no image to manage, no story about themselves that could be threatened. And because of that, they were free in a way most of us rarely experience.

We, on the other hand, carry around a version of ourselves in our heads, a character we have built over years. Smart. Capable. Funny. Respected. Misunderstood. Whatever the story is, we defend it fiercely, often without even realizing we are doing it. Taking something personally is really just the ego saying, “That threatens the story I’ve been telling about myself.”

To put it simply, have the ego serve you rather than spending your life serving it.