Who's Holding You Back? | S1E9

Who’s really holding you back? 

In this episode of Souljourner Truth, Kimberley explores the role of the ego — that fearful, protective part of ourselves that often keeps us small while convincing us it’s keeping us safe. 

Through stories from work, relationships, and spirituality, this episode examines how the ego reacts to threat, resists vulnerability, and quietly shapes the way we move through the world. 

So maybe the thing holding us back isn’t our boss, our partner, our parents, or the algorithm...maybe it’s actually our own ego. Walk with me.

Souljourner Truth, hosted by Kimberley.

Walk with me.

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"Something Inspired" | written and performed by Kimberley David | recorded and mixed @ The Snug West Studio, Las Vegas, all instruments and backing vocals by Paul Umbach - paulumbachmusic.com

© 2026 Souljourner Truth. All rights reserved.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to Soul Journer Truth, where we'll find our way home together. I'm Kimberly, and just like you, I want more joy, more peace, more prosperity, and more love in my life. Every episode, we'll examine a soul-stirring question, we'll walk it out with practical, easy-to-manage steps, and then we'll bring it home by integrating and embodying what we've just learned. If you're ready to come home to the best version of yourself, then walk with me. Who's keeping me from achieving my dreams? Who's stopping me from living my best life? Is it your boss who insists you get to work by 8 and not 805? Your spouse who can never seem to see the dirty dishes in the sink? Your parents who were too busy raising themselves to actually raise you? Your hyper competitive best friend, the Instagram algorithm, your high school coach who never believed in you. Who else can we point the finger at? Who else can we blame? Well, maybe it's you, Boo. And I kind of know it's you because it's me too. Or more specifically, it's our ego, that fearful, protective part of ourselves that believes that staying small is safer than living into the greatness we are truly meant to be. So what is the ego? It's not bad, it's essentially just a protective mechanism in the brain developed to help us navigate the world, avoid pain and danger, and preserve our sense of self physically, emotionally, and psychologically. Thousands of years ago, that protective mechanism may have helped us survive very real physical danger. But most of us aren't being chased by lions and tigers and bears anymore. Yet, our nervous system still reacts to emotional and physical risk as though our very lives are on the line, because it simply cannot distinguish between the different types of threat. So the problem is not that the ego exists, but rather it's that most of us are unconsciously letting our ego run unchecked, and therefore it becomes the decision maker for our entire lives. I see this all the time in my own life. Let's take work as an example. Sometimes I'll get an email from certain colleagues asking me to explain or clarify something, and immediately I feel my body react, my jaw tightens, I feel heat in my stomach, my chest, my face, and suddenly my mind is off to the races. Why are they questioning me? What are they digging for? Why can't they just take my word for it? What are they trying to trap me with? And then I find myself writing some aggro email back, and the circle just keeps going and going and going and going. And that's the thing about ego. It mistakes questioning for rejection, clarification for criticism, and that type of emotional exposure as a threat. So then my ego is ready to fight, to do battle, to throw down, all because my identity as a competent professional suddenly felt threatened. These people are trying to expose me. But if I'm being truly honest, my colleagues usually aren't doing anything more to me than I do to them or to someone else. I ask questions, I push, I challenge. Not because I'm doubting someone's intelligence or competency, but because I genuinely want to understand. So if I know that about myself, why can't I extend the same grace to my colleagues at work? Why is my ego always so ready to create drama when there really isn't any? And you know, the ego shows up powerfully in our relationships too. Yeah. Romantic, familial, platonic, all of them. For most of my life, one of the hallmarks of what I thought was a good romantic relationship was this feeling like, oh my God, this relationship is so amazing because I can truly be myself. But what I eventually realized was that I wasn't being myself at all in those relationships. So what I should have said was, oh my god, this relationship is so amazing because I can truly be who I pretend to be. And that's different. I didn't fully understand that difference until my current romantic relationship. Because being your real self isn't just about being able to burp and fart in front of somebody. Being your real self means being able to show up warts and all. It means being able to express your deepest fears, insecurities, hypocrisies, the places where you're still wounded, the places where you're reactive, the places where the person you aspire to be and the person you actually are don't fully line up yet. These days there isn't actually that much difference between the face I present publicly and the face I see when I'm alone in my mirror. But that's just because I'm in the conscious process of becoming, no longer pretending, becoming the person I truly want to be. But there are still little discrepancies here and there, like I like to think of myself as kind, compassionate, and loving. And then my partner gets to see all the moments where I'm impatient, unforgiving, unkind, or just being a complete jackass. But the amazing thing is, I don't have to hide those parts of myself anymore. I don't have to hide them from myself or from him. I don't have to maintain the mask because now I finally understand the ego's role in all of this. My ego wants to protect me from rejection, from hurt, from exposure. It also wants to preserve the carefully constructed identity, personality structure that I built to keep myself emotionally safe. But true relationship requires something deeper. It requires the willingness to lay the mask down, to allow yourself to be fully seen, like fully seen, like the four-year-old version of you. Because it's only then that we experience true merger, true union with another. Not merger or union between the masks, but between the souls underneath. And the ego does not like that because true merger, true union threatens the ego's need to remain defended, separate, curated, and in control of how it's perceived. The ego wants to keep the mask, but real connection requires that we drop it. And honestly, I see ego all over my past spiritual life as well. Long before I consciously stepped on a spiritual path in 2013, I was unconsciously circling one. And prior to that, I was deeply skeptical. In fact, I probably would have called myself atheist in my younger years. Once I started becoming spiritually curious, I still spent years circling my current spiritual home, the Agape International Spiritual Center. I spent years circling it before I ever walked through the door. Years. Like five of them. Something in me was drawn to it, but something in me was resisting in a very big way. During that five-year period when I was circling, I had multiple people invite me to services at Agape. I learned about the main Reverend, Reverend Michael Bernard Beckwith. I learned about him through the movie and the book, The Secret, which deeply resonated with me. I dated someone who was very active in the congregation who kept inviting me to go with him, like all the time. I had mentors and teachers in my life who would speak about agape. But yet I couldn't get myself to walk through the doors for years. Looking back now, I can see that resistance for what it really was: ego. Because a commitment to spirituality asks that we expand beyond the limited identities we've constructed. Beyond the mask, beyond the defenses, beyond the carefully curated Instagram perfect story of who we think we are. And the ego does not like that. The ego wants certainty, familiarity, control. It wants to stay inside the known version of self. But spiritual growth asks us to surrender, to soften, to become willing to see that maybe we are more than the small, defended identity we've been clinging to our entire lives. And honestly, I think that's why so many of us circle spiritual transformation long before we finally step in and step up. And more still, why so many of us are so terribly uncomfortable with the very idea of spirituality at all? Because somewhere deep down, the ego understands that spirituality flips the script. The ego is no longer the ultimate authority, and for many of us, that is terrifying. So, how do we begin working through this? First, we have to recognize when the ego has taken the wheel. Usually your body's telling you tight jaw, tight chest, flushed face, knotted stomach, racing thoughts, that overwhelming fight, flight, freeze, or fawn feeling that we all know oh so well. But honestly, even though our brains are screaming at us, do something, run away, shut down, just give them what they want. This is exactly the moment to pause because when the ego feels threatened, the nervous system shifts into overdrive fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. And those responses are rarely going to net us what we truly desire. So we need to figure out how to do something to break the pattern. We need to get off that train. One of the fastest ways is just to interrupt the nervous system response by slowing down the breath. And one easy way to do this is by activating the vagus nerve with a simple slow breathing exercise like this. Inhale for four, hold for four, exhale for six. Let's try it together. Inhale, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four. Exhale, two, three, four, five, six. Great. So just so you know, the exact counting doesn't really matter all that much. The key is simply this. You inhale for a certain period of time, you hold the breath for that same period of time, and then you exhale for a longer period of time. Because when we slow down the breath in this way and activate the vagus nerve, we signal safety to our nervous system. And when that nervous system begins to settle, the ego no longer has such a tight grip on the moment. And then we can respond to whatever's coming at us in a way that is much more aligned with our soul's true desire. So, over the next week or two, let's practice this. Let's practice slowing down the breath with the four, four, six breathing exercise, or whatever counting feels right for you. And just watch what happens when we breathe in this way in the moments we feel threatened and triggered. Watch what happens in our relationships at work, in traffic, in conflict, in all the times we feel defensive, reactive, shut down, or afraid. Notice how when we stop allowing the ego to control our lives, we stop being able to find other people to blame for what's holding us back, for what's keeping us small. Because maybe, just maybe, it was our ego all along. And in the next episode, we're going to take this one step further, and it's a big step. Because if the ego is the thing that's been keeping us small, what happens when we finally stop letting it run the show? What happens when we truly connect with our soul's desire and learn to manifest the life of our dreams? What becomes possible then? So be sure to tune in next episode where we will begin exploring these concepts, including a simple formula for manifesting your best life ever, that I've been calling the Math of Manifestation. So until then, may your soul's journey be joy-filled and abundantly blessed. May your light shine so brightly that it illuminates the path for you and for every being you meet along the way. I release this prayer, knowing that it is already done. And so it is. Amen. Namaste. Thank you so much for walking with me today. And remember, the practice is just practice. So no judgment, only grace. If something cracked you wide open in this episode, or if the universe smacked you with a big old question you just can't answer, I would love to hear about it. Hit me up anytime at traveler at souljournertruth.com. And remember, traveler is one L, not two. Until we walk again, see you next week.