What Is Ego Death?
And why does everyone want it?
America’s version of yoga is not true to the ancient wisdom teaching. Are you wearing the latest hot brands? $100 water bottle and three times as much for the yoga pants, and maybe more for the haute couture yoga mat. How flexible are you? Can you show everyone in the room that you can reach your toes, that you can bend your spine in half, that you can balance your entire body on your pinky fingers?
The Night Everything Changed
There was one particular night, in the midst of my chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer, that I remember vividly.
Bedridden and hallucinating, I started to see myself sinking down a dark hole. It was so steep, and then there were stairs, and I kept going down the stairs so fast. Then I caught myself, remembering that when my grandfather was on his deathbed, he asked my grandmother if she wanted to go with him downstairs to their “underground home.”
So in this hallucination, vision, dream, or whatever you want to call it, I said, “No, no, no! Go back upstairs. It’s too soon. Not yet.”
I crawled up the stairs so fast, through the tunnel, and then I felt myself go back into my body. It’s difficult to explain in words, but it felt as though my consciousness filled up my human vessel, like pouring water into a bottle, and then I woke up in bed. I thought maybe it was time to prepare for my death, to draft a will and share with my family that I wanted to be cremated and not buried, as the Muslim religion requires.
Then, all of a sudden, I heard a knock on my front door. It was about 9:30 p.m., and all the lights were off because my eyes were so sensitive to light. I was in complete darkness.
I felt surprised. Who would knock on my door at this time? Am I still hallucinating?
Then I heard the knock again.
I felt rattled. I was still in bed and could barely move. How would I be able to walk from my bed to the front door? It felt like such an impossible mission.
I heard the knock again.
“Maha, open the door,” a female voice said.
I kept telling myself, Come on, Maha, you can do this. Just put one foot down on the floor and then the other.
I grabbed behind my knee and lifted my leg. Then I said, All right, now just one step at a time. You can do it. Walk slowly.
I kept visualizing myself walking to the front door before I even moved. I kept going slowly and coaching myself, Come on, you’re doing great, Maha, until I finally made it to the door.
Still nervous and not sure if this was really happening or if I was still hallucinating, I heard the female voice grow louder.
“Maha, open the door right now!”
The knocking got harder. I slowly made my way to the door and peeked through the peephole, trying to see who was standing on the other side.
“Who is it?” I asked.
I couldn’t make out who it was because my vision was still blurry.
“It’s me, Michelle.”
“Michelle? Is that really you?”
“Yes, open the door now.”
So I unlocked the door and opened it.
“Are you really here, or am I hallucinating?” I asked her.
She looked worried. “Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not,” I said.
“I was just having dinner nearby and ordered some food for you. I thought you might be hungry. My husband drove me here, he’s waiting downstairs. I just wanted to give you this.”
Then she hugged me, and I hugged her back, squeezing her tightly in my arms. I just wanted to make sure she was really there, that I could feel her in my arms and be convinced this wasn’t a hallucination.
She looked at me again. “Do you need anything? Can I help with something, take out the trash, clean up the house?”
“You’re an angel, Michelle. You were literally sent from heaven. I was just about to die, and I started walking down the dark stairs, but then I crawled back up, and a moment later you were here.”
She smiled. “I’m always here for you. Do you want me to stay?”
“I’m okay. I’ll just go back to sleep. Thanks for dinner, it smells really good.”
“Yes,” she said. “I brought you some meat because your oncologist said you need to eat more protein. Your red blood cell count was low, and they couldn’t give you chemo because your body was too weak.”
“It smells so good,” I smiled. “I’m going to eat it right now.”
She gave me another hug and left.
That was nothing short of a miracle, the timing of when she came.
Beyond the Physical Body
Paramahansa Yogananda, in his book Autobiography of a Yogi, writes about spiritual masters in India who are said to have developed extraordinary mastery over the physical body, slowing or stopping their heartbeat for extended periods of time, transcending the ordinary limitations of time and space, communicating beyond the physical realm, healing others, and creating what we might call miracles in the physical world.
In No Death, No Fear, Thich Nhat Hanh explores the idea that consciousness does not simply cease when the physical body dies. Rather, what we are continues through transformation, merging with a greater collective consciousness and continuing to expand with the universe.
Buddhists believe in reincarnation, that we return again and again through cycles of birth, death, and rebirth, shaped by our karma, until we have learned the lessons we are meant to learn and lived the lives we are meant to live. Enlightenment is liberation from this cycle. An enlightened soul no longer needs to return to the physical realm and experience the suffering inherent in human existence. This is why Buddhist monks renounce the material world and practice non-attachment, because attachment perpetuates suffering and keeps us bound to the cycle of rebirth.
That day, when I had that experience and was able to control the outcome and return to my body, it was the result of years and years of my yoga practice expanding my consciousness.
When the body is weak, when there is nowhere else to go and nothing can help you, what happens is that you surrender. I am talking about complete and utter surrender.
In that state of surrender, the veil of illusion, known in yoga as Maya, becomes translucent. You release the body and the mind that have been preventing you from seeing just how connected everything is, almost like liquid.
So the near death experience that I had during chemotherapy was really the death of the ego, the death of my ego, not the death of me.
And when the ego dies and there is complete surrender, which people often mistake for giving up or being weak and vulnerable, it is actually quite the opposite. That is how you find your agency again. That is how you access your true capabilities and your sovereignty in life.
The good news is that you don’t have to die to leave your human body and access what, in some wisdom traditions, is known as the Field of Infinite Possibilities, Universal Consciousness, Organized Intelligence, Source of Creation, or, if you want to call it, God. The name does not matter.
In the Tao Te Ching, attributed to Lao Tzu:
“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.”
It is simply the place where you can tap into and unite with Universal Consciousness, access your innate wisdom, and reclaim your power to consciously create your reality.
Through the practice of yoga, and when I say the practice of yoga, I am not talking about Warrior I and Warrior II. I’m talking about Yoga with a capital Y, Yoga as a way of being in the world.
The word yoga is Sanskrit, and it translates into English as union.
Think about that for a second.
Union with what?
It is the merging of individual consciousness with universal consciousness. In Sanskrit, it is called the union of the Atman with the Brahman. In this union, you can tap into the source of creation and reclaim your agency as the creator of your reality.
You came here to create, not to consume and be distracted by outside noise that is designed to pull you away from your innate powers of creation and weaken your connection with this energy.
They say you will not notice a yogi in a crowd because they are so subtle, but you will notice a yogi in a crisis, because they are so subtle.
The Real Practice of Yoga
That is the real practice of Yoga. Not how far you can bend, what you wear, or what your practice looks like from the outside. It is who you become when everything you thought you were is stripped away.
Yoga did not teach me how to escape suffering. It taught me who I am underneath it. It taught me how to surrender without giving up, how to let go without losing myself, and how to find my way back to my own power when my physical body had almost none left.
That night, I thought I was preparing to die. Instead, a part of me did die. The part that believed I was only this body, this mind, this identity, this life as I knew it.
And that is ego death.
Not the end of you.
The beginning of remembering who you really are.
This is the Yoga I teach, and the foundation of everything I share through Yogi Maha Method 200-Hour Yoga Alliance Certified Teacher Training.
May you be healthy. May you be happy. May you be at peace.
The light within me honors the light within you.
Namaste, my friend.
Are You Aware of Who You Really Are?
I am a yogi living among Hollywood stars in Los Angeles, a city built on image, where how you look from the outside is valued far more than how you feel on the inside. Every night I meditate, and ask the universe to send my way the people who will benefit from my teachings the most, and to help me be a conduit for them to hear exactly what they need to …
