The Shift from Ego to Essence
This article got me to thinking…
The emotional weight of the world is real. I read this piece in Slate about the emotional toll of ongoing political chaos and cultural divisiveness—and it captured something quietly devastating: American empathy is wearing out.
We’re tired of the headlines and the feeling that we’re supposed to care about everything all the time. And we can’t. Not from the level we’re used to.
We’re seeing not just political fatigue—it’s a deeper psychic condition: empathy burnout.
When Feeling Becomes Fatigue
Empathy burnout happens when we experience so much of others’ pain that our system shuts down. What was once an open-hearted response becomes a kind of emotional paralysis. This isn’t a personal flaw—it’s a natural result of trying to feel everything through the narrow channel of the ego.
The ego approaches empathy like a job: identify the pain, feel it, do something, repeat, and repeat until it collapses.
Research calls this compassion fatigue. It was first noticed in therapists, healthcare workers, and first responders. But now it’s become widespread. With social media, news cycles, and global crises on infinite loop, everyone is being asked to process more than a self can bear emotionally.
But here’s the thing: you are not meant to feel it all through the self. You’re meant to feel it through your being.
From Overwhelm to Overflow
The ego sees suffering and collapses under its imagined responsibility to fix, manage, or at least endure it. It measures itself against the magnitude of the world and always comes up small.
But essence doesn’t measure. Essence meets.
Essence doesn’t contract in the face of pain—it opens. It doesn’t empathize as a role—it is compassion itself.
When you touch the world from essence, there is no burnout because no one is burning. There is only presence—vast, quiet, intimately available.
You are not here to harden your heart. You are here to let it expand. Allow the world’s heartbreak to become the doorway to your vastness.
The Green Thread
In many spiritual traditions, green is the color of compassion. Not sentimentality. Not performative caring. But life’s deep commitment to itself.
In Sufism, the guide Khidr appears in moments of profound need, not to rescue but to awaken. His color is green because he is the presence of divine renewal. He doesn’t help—he is the help because his being is compassion.
In older pagan traditions, the Green Man is the face of the forest itself, of death giving way to new life. He’s not an emblem of comfort. He’s a reminder that everything belongs to the turning wheel of becoming.
Khidr and the Green Man speak to a form of compassion that doesn’t flinch. That includes decay. That regenerates. That doesn’t do anything, but allows everything.
This is the green of genuine empathy. It is not fragile, not finite, but rooted, alive, and endlessly becoming.
You are not the carrier—you are the sacred embrace.
It doesn’t mean you’re broken if you’re tired of caring. It means you’ve been caring from the surface—from the part of you that thinks it must manage or mend what hurts.
But compassion is not an act of repair. It is a presence that makes room for what is.
Compassion doesn’t come from personality, emotion, or moral effort. It comes from the soul’s essence—the deep, quiet ground of being that does not flinch or flee.
When compassion arises from this depth, it doesn’t remove the pain. It holds it, not to hold it in, but to hold it open. It is the ground that lets the light and life back in.
And in that open space, something begins to shift. The frozen energy around old wounds starts to thaw. The rigid beliefs that formed in suffering begin to loosen. The self no longer braces—it breathes. What was stuck begins to move again.
This is not healing through doing. This is rebirth through being.
The soul knows how to hold pain like the earth holds seeds—not to protect them, but to let them break open.
You are not here to be strong enough to fix the world. You are here to become soft enough to contain it until what is buried in sorrow can blossom again.
Let essence do the holding.
Let love do the work.
Let the green rise.
John Harper is a Diamond Approach® teacher, Enneagram guide, and human development student whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. He is the author of The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life and Good Vibrations: Primordial Sounds of Existence, available on Amazon.