Influences
Egos Anonymous did not begin from nothing. It grew out of traditions and teachers who have spent their lives on the same questions: what the self is, why we grip so tightly, and what becomes possible when we let go. We are grateful to them.
Alcoholics Anonymous. Founded in 1935 by Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, AA began with a simple discovery: one person who was suffering could help another in a way no expert could. From that came the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, which Egos Anonymous adapts. AA’s own literature names “selfishness—self-centeredness” as “the root of our troubles,” and describes the alcoholic as “an extreme example of self-will run riot.” Egos Anonymous takes that insight and asks what recovery might look like for anyone whose life has been run by self-will, with or without a substance. We are deeply grateful to AA and to the many fellowships that have adapted its Steps before us.
Richard Rohr. A Franciscan priest and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation, Rohr has spent decades showing how the Twelve Steps express the heart of the spiritual life. In Breathing Under Water, he suggests that all of us are addicted, if not to substances, then to our own way of thinking, our need to be right, and our need to be in control. He teaches that grace comes before our effort, that everything belongs, including our failures, and that falling apart is often how we fall upward into a deeper life. His influence runs through this program’s understanding of self-will as a universal human addiction, its trust that grace is already present, and its conviction that what feels like collapse may be an opening.
Ram Dass. Born Richard Alpert, the Harvard psychologist became one of the West’s most beloved spiritual teachers after meeting his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, in India. He taught that who we are is loving awareness, and that the ego is not an enemy but a familiar character we can learn to watch with compassion and even humor. After a stroke left him unable to speak fluently, he called it fierce grace, and he went on teaching that suffering, too, can bring us closer to what is real. His influence runs through this program’s practice of the witness, its gentleness toward self-will, its understanding of service as an expression of love, and its conviction that we are all just walking each other home.
Rumi. The thirteenth-century Muslim mystic and Sufi poet understood longing not as a problem to be solved but as the pull of the Beloved, a call home. His poetry treats love as the path itself, and the dissolving of the self as a homecoming rather than a loss. That vision runs beneath this program’s language of Love, its welcome to those who arrive through longing rather than exhaustion, and its trust that what we are reaching for has been reaching for us all along.
Internal Family Systems. Developed by Richard Schwartz, IFS views the protective parts of ourselves with curiosity and compassion, as parts that took on difficult jobs for good reasons. It also teaches that beneath all our parts is the Self: calm, curious, compassionate, and never damaged. Egos Anonymous draws on these principles rather than the full IFS model. They shape how this program understands the ego, as a protector to be understood rather than an enemy to be defeated, and its trust that something in us remains whole and intact.
Trauma-informed therapy. The working guides draw on trauma-informed principles: asking what happened rather than what is wrong with us, understanding our patterns as adaptations rather than defects, honoring the body, and moving at the pace of what is ready to be seen. In that spirit, you choose what to explore, when, and with whom, and your safety always comes first.
Brené Brown. A research professor who has spent decades studying shame, vulnerability, and courage, Brown draws a clear line between guilt and shame: guilt says I did something wrong, while shame says I am wrong. She has shown that shame grows in secrecy, silence, and judgment, and loses its power when it is met with empathy. Her work shapes this program’s approach to shame in Step Four, its trust in Step Five that what is spoken and received begins to change, and its understanding of courage as the willingness to be seen.
Ramana Maharshi. At sixteen, the South Indian sage had a spontaneous awakening in which he realized that the awareness noticing his body was not the body, and could not die. He spent the rest of his life at the sacred mountain Arunachala, teaching mostly through silence. His central practice was self-inquiry, asking “Who am I?” and tracing the sense of “I” back to its source until the ego, which he called the I-thought, loosens and pure awareness remains. He taught surrender as an equal path to the same freedom. His approach, looking directly at the ego rather than fighting it, shapes this program’s practice of noticing self-will, its questions about the one who wears all our costumes, and its understanding of awareness as one way of recognizing the True Self.
Pema Chödrön. The American-born Tibetan Buddhist nun teaches that when the ground falls out from under us, the invitation is not to escape but to stay. Her teachings on groundlessness, on the hope and fear that keep us from the present moment, and on maitri, unconditional friendliness toward ourselves, shape how this program meets darkness, doubt, and the restless mind. Her influence lives in the program’s gentleness: its invitation to look at our patterns with curiosity rather than judgment, and to stay with what is difficult without rushing to fix it.
Meister Eckhart. A German Dominican preacher of the fourteenth century, Eckhart taught that the spiritual life is less about acquiring virtue or knowledge than about letting go. His word for this was Gelassenheit: releasement, or letting be. He spoke of a ground at the depth of the soul where the soul and God are not separate, and wrote that “the eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me.” His teaching that God is not found by adding but by releasing runs beneath this program’s language of relaxing our grip, its frequent return to the ground beneath our defenses, and its trust that what we are seeking was never absent.
Thomas Merton. A Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, Merton gave contemporary contemplatives the language of the true self and the false self. He wrote that each of us is “shadowed by an illusory person,” a false self built from what we think we must be. For Merton, the true self lies hidden in God, present within everything we construct. His love of silence, and his deep exchanges with Buddhist teachers including D.T. Suzuki, Thich Nhat Hanh, and the Dalai Lama, model the conversation between traditions this program hopes to continue. His influence lives in the program’s understanding of the ego as a constructed identity, its trust in silence, and its sense that what we are within our defenses was never ours to build.
Howard Thurman. A mystic, theologian, and pastor, Thurman taught that within each of us is something that waits and listens for “the sound of the genuine,” a truth beneath everything we perform. He believed that inner life and outer life belong together: what we find in silence is meant to be lived among others. His vision shapes this program’s description of the True Self as something genuine that waits to be heard, its practice in Step Eleven of listening for that voice in silence, and its conviction in Step Twelve that inner freedom finds its meaning among others.
Egos Anonymous draws on particular insights from these teachers and traditions, not on their teachings as a whole. Each has its own depth, history, and understanding of the questions we explore. We are grateful for what they have offered, without claiming to fully represent them or to reconcile their differences.
Egos Anonymous is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, any of these teachers, their organizations, or Alcoholics Anonymous.
