I had expected this hotel room to be a quiet hermitage where I could study and dabble in art, but instead it has turned into a combination psychological workshop / isolation tank. With my personality, being stuck in a small bland hotel room is ego-breaking. Each week, as a coping mechanism, I’m forced to dig deeper and deeper into myself, but not in self-pitying, navel-gazing “introspection.” I come home every weekend an increasingly different person. And, for all its ups and downs, this person is happier, freer, and stranger than the person who left.
Lately my thing has been confronting my anxieties and fears. After being forced into some uncomfortable situations lately I found – shock! – that neither I nor my world came to some terrible, frost-giants-eating-Thor kind of end. I realized that anxiety and (some types of) fear are where the ego touches the world uncomfortably because the ego hasn’t processed the environment completely for whatever reason. So now instead of running away from those situations I’ve started embracing them and transgressing every anxious inner boundary. I feel somehow more complete by resolving these issues, as if the anxieties were locked doors keeping parts of myself hidden away. I’ve heard of some esoteric techniques that take this process much further, even into temporary ego annihilation, but that’s way beyond anything I’m doing here. It’s also a surprising amount of warped fun, but I’m still not going to jump out of an airplane.
I think the slow process will eventually get you to temp ego killing whether you intend it or not. Self awareness tends to do that and be cumulative. Don’t knock jumping out of airplanes – it is seriously peaceful and I can understand why people get addicted to it :)