The Ego/small self, revealed
The Kindergarten Teacher Movie: A study of ego and tragedy
As a teacher of spiritual concepts, I am often asked to define the ego. “The ego is the part of us that ultimately, is very afraid. It is the part of us that is selfish - greedy, mean, vindictive, prideful, sneaky,” I’ll answer. “Why? Because the ego is afraid to lose, to be rejected or abandoned, to lose wealth or status. In order not to feel afraid, the ego wants to feel special, important, and powerful.” And people will nod, and seem to understand. But it’s so tricky to really recognize how sneaky the ego is at wanting to feel SPECIAL. What’s wrong with being special, we might say? How bad could that be? Especially to those of us who were ignored or shut down as children, the need to feel SEEN and ACKNOWLEDGED can be quite powerful. But there is a difference between being SEEN, and needing to be SPECIAL/BETTER THAN/MORE IMPORTANT than others. The need to be a special/chosen one can turn quite pathological and lead us down a very dark path, as may who have followed cults have discovered. I recently watched the movie ‘The Kindergarten Teacher’ and was struck by how aptly this movie portrays the dangers of either NEEDING TO BE SPECIAL or in replacement of that, NEEDING TO BE ASSOCIATED WITH SOMEONE SPECIAL. The need to feel special can seem innocently validating and harmless, even can be misinterpreted a self-love! So then, what are the true dangers of letting our ego take over our actions with the ego’s endless desire to feel special or important? Do we understand the true tragedy that can befall our life when the ego runs the show?
Enter the movie that I recently watched, The Kindergarten Teacher (warning - this does contain some spoiler alerts, and I strongly encourage you to watch the movie if this topic interests you). It was hauntingly well-portrayed by Maggie Gyllenhall as a liberal Kindergarten teacher who is quietly disappointed with her life, her family, and society in general. Why? Well, it seems, they all suffer the crime of being intolerably mediocre. She has two teenage children that ‘barely read’ and seem more interested in dating and joining the military than in intellectual pursuits, much to her dismay. Meanwhile, she starts taking a poetry class, and to her further dismay realizes that she is decidedly mediocre at poetry as well. So, what does the ego do what it realizes that maybe cannot be amazing what it considers to be important in life? When life, or your spouse, or your children do not meet your high expectations, when you or they are not world-class geniuses or artistic prodigies (or, for the spiritual community, world-class powerful healers or divine gurus)?
The ego projects those desires into another person. In her Kindergarten class, the teacher Lisa discovers that one of her students can write amazing poetry far beyond his age and maturity. It’s almost as if he channels them: he starts pacing, the poems seem to come from ‘somewhere’ beyond him, and often include references to God or death in ways that a 5 year old would normally never discuss. The Kindergarten teacher, amazed, starts writing down every poem she hears the boy utter, and each one is more brilliant than the last.
What I love is that the movie makes it unclear whether he is a little mentally imbalanced, with maybe some schizophrenic tendencies? Or is he truly is a divine channel, or a poetic genius? I like that ambiguity: who is this boy and where does his talent come from? It is never answered in the movie and up to us to decide. All we know is that he has a mother who - it is unclear - is either living in a different city, or dead, and a father and nanny who has no interest in his boy’s poetry talent.
And here is where the story gets interesting, and disturbing. The teacher, seeing the specialness of this boy and his talent, starts crossing numerous boundaries as she tries to ‘develop’ his talent. But in her mind, these boundaries are ok to cross because he is ‘special.’ He needs a ‘special mentor’ to guide him (in her mind, of course, it has to be her, given the lackluster interest from his father or nanny). I won’t list all the small and large ways she crosses boundaries in this movie, but they are many and they are disturbing. And that’s the point: her ego becomes so distorted, so blinded by the talent and by his SPECIALNESS, that she can’t let it go. She wants to own it, control it, become enmeshed with it. Before she knows it, she can justify almost any disturbing action because of this SPECIALNESS. He becomes everything she wishes she could be, or her children could have been: someone special, talented, unique, gifted. Her ego cannot resist someone this SPECIAL, and it becomes her downfall.
The biggest tragedy in the movie is that her ego destroy’s her AND the boy’s raw talent. Her ego’s need to OWN this talent, to claim it as a discovery of hers, to mentor him, to be his stand-in mother, end up backfiring horribly. At one point, she passes off his poems as hers in her poetry class, and gets new (and also inappropriate) admiration from her handsome poetry teacher. It seems that his ego also cannot resist the allure of someone with ‘special’ talent, and it seems to give his ego permission to cross inappropriate boundaries with her as well. Of course, her ego actually loves this attention from him because it allows her to feel special as well - to be admired for a talent she doesn’t actually posses. And so, she has a brief affair with him, even though she is married. The ego’s need to feel admired, and special, is endless.
There is a heartbreaking scene at the end of the movie where the boy, the innocent victim in all this manipulation, wants to recite a poem. His teacher is now forcibly out of his life, having crossed far too many boundaries, and he is by himself in a cop car. “I have a poem,” he says, but there is no one to write it down and he falls into silence. There is no one to hear his poem or to care, and his poem goes unsaid, unheard, unmanifested into reality. Everything that the teacher was afraid of - that his genius would go unrecognized and unsupported - came true: not in spite of her, but because of her.
It’s a tragic story in so many ways, not least of which that in some ways the teacher was right: our world does not support the poets, the artists, the dreamers. It supports the business owners, the engineers, the lawyers. Young divine channels with gifts like him DO get lost in our society, to the detriment of all. So how could this movie have played out differently? What would have happened if her ego had been dissolved?
An egoless teacher could have nurtured this boy’s talent in a way that didn’t benefit her personally at all. Maybe she could have gathered his poems over the course of the kindergarten year and helped him publish some, if that’s what he and his father wanted. Does the boy even want to be published? Does he want the fame or the pressure at that young age of being labeled a ‘genius?’ Maybe better to treat him like a flower still blooming: water the talent, write it down, let him decide when to bloom. Maybe he just needed to grow in the garden awhile longer before he was ready for all of society to admire the scent and beauty of his lovely poems. But the ego does not want to nurture, it wants to OWN. She wanted to pluck that flower and keep it in a glass jar, to parade him for her benefit, so she could feel special by association. Yes, even if she wasn’t quite special enough…well, at least she was part of something, and associated with someone, who WAS special. And when that happens, we aren’t in a place to nurture in a selfless, egoless way. We attach, we need, we try to control. And ultimately, in this story she will lose her job and possibly her marriage and her family over her actions - simply because her ego needed to feel SPECIAL.
Be very careful of this in the spiritual/healing world. Do you attach to a certain teacher or mentor simply because they are well-known and you want to feel part of something special? Many cult leaders and false gurus make their students believe they are a part of something totally special that other people aren’t ready for because they aren’t awake/enlightened/advanced enough. Oh, how the ego loves that! The false guru/teacher may also play on the ego by telling the students that they are so special to be ‘chosen’ by this teacher. Huge red flag! It’s one of the sneakiest tricks, and many, many students have fallen prey to this tactic because they need to feel special runs so deep.
A true spiritual teacher will guide you to remember that we are ALL loved, we are all unique sparks of light, regardless of our level of talent, fame, or recognition by the larger world. A person who quietly but lovingly tends a home garden is just as important as a indie filmmaker who reaches millions of viewers.
I believe we are all unique, lovable, divine sparks of source. After doing healing work for over 10 years, I can confidently say that we are all equally ‘special’ and fascinating and complicated and flawed and wonderful and tragic and miraculous. You don’t need to prove yourself to anyone, including yourself. Some of us do have rare, raw talent. Some of us refine talent through discipline and dedication over a period of years or decades. Some of our talents or unique gifts are unappreciated, like a fine sense of comedic timing, or giving really good hugs. And if you do have a larger calling in this world, the universe will give you many opportunities to bring that to fruition, so you don’t need to force it into being! But regardless, we all have SOMETHING unique we bring to this world: our own, wondrous, awe-inspiring, loving bright soul. And that is enough. It is enough.
What if we lived in a world where talent, or beauty, or invention, or insight was nurtured and celebrated without needing to claim it, control it, or monetize it? What if we are not in competition with anyone else - including our own made-up versions of who we wished we could be? What if we can look at everyone we love, even those that are ‘not living up to their potential,’ not with disappointment but with gratitude and compassion and support?
If you catch your ego needing to feel special, ask yourself: why? What am I afraid of? Am I afraid of not being loved? BECAUSE YOU ARE, BY SOURCE, ALWAYS. Are you afraid of being irrelevant, boring, worthless? Only the ego thinks we could ever be those things, because the soul knows: we are all precious beyond words. And we are all endlessly lovable and fallible, we are all geniuses and tragedies in the making, dancing in and out of time, eternally moving back towards wholeness and light, in one way or another. And what saves us is Grace: not our ego. Just the grace of the Divine light is all we need…
Allow this Divine love, this Divine Grace into your hearts as you dissolve your ego away, one more layer, right now. The ego’s needs are like buckets with holes at the bottom: you can try to fill them all you want with money, fame, power, control, or trying to ‘earn’ love by being special, but it will never fill. It cannot. Only divine GRACE can plug those holes. Only divine LOVE can fill that bucket. Fill your spirit with this divine love, now. Throw away that old bucket full of holes and a open your heart….open your heart….feel the divine love fill your heart so completely, you need nothing else.
And THIS is how we change the world, one heart at a time.
With love,
Kelly Kay