Ego under lockdown
Lockdown has made most of us confront our egos.
While all our experiences with coronavirus hasn’t been the same, one thing that life repeatedly has made us do is shed our egos.
For me it has been a wild journey of mental breakthroughs. From gaining a deeper understanding of my conditioning and understanding my relationship with my parents.
While I am always grateful for everything that life has bestowed upon me, and will continue to be grateful, I came to terms with my anxiety. It is the kind of anxiety which we all have: uncertainty about future.
There must have been activities we did in the past in the outside world, with which we identified ourselves with. Now that we can’t perform those activities and satisfy our egos, our egos hunt for new indoor activities to satisfy our itself with. I came to terms with my and the million things I do to simply pander to it.
To understand, accept and perform what is important, joyful and to discard what is harmful, unnecessary is the main lesson from my pandemic experience.
While I practiced the KonMari method on all my belongings and surrounded myself with items that only bring me joy, I also came to terms with my psyche. I applied the KonMari method in 2019, I am happy with the progress I have made with it.
I also read books during the pandemic that dealt with the case of ego. I value and cherish all the books that have come to me during this pandemic, some of the ones I would like to mention are: The five love languages, You can heal your life, and the Untethered Soul.
Untethered Soul is the book that I can write about in length. I re-heard the audiobook twice in the span of one month. That’s a first for me, as I have never gone back to any books, irrespective of how much I loved them.
I would recommend this book to every single soul out there. It is life changing, transforming and also you gain far more from it than you can even imagine.
Also, my ego has nowhere to go, it can no longer assert itself through endless productivity photos, or through places I take it. Yet, the battle of overcoming ego is perennial. One can never overcome it completely without being 100% aware of it. This is my biggest lesson learnt during the pandemic.
To collate the lessons I learnt so far would be:
- I berate myself a lot. Not in a nice way. There’s endless chatter in my mind that constantly weighs me down, or over-values me against others. It is like my mind is wondering how am I competing against others. What a pointless exercise.
- While I am overcoming self-hate, I also observe that my mind identifies itself with every activity I do, and wishes to take pride in results as a personal victory. Now, this could be normal, but it feels like a bondage. It is a bondage. For example: I get into a proper routine, my mind identifies self as successful because of the routine and immediately wishes to broadcast it to the world. The it understands the pointlessness of recognition from the outside world, immediately drops the routine. And I force it back. This resistance is nothing but the ego wanting its share of food in terms of validation. Once it knows the validation isn’t enough, it crawls back to old ways and complacency.
While I am sure there are many other lessons to be learnt and valued, this time of coronavirus has taught me a lot more about myself than any other time has ever. I am forever grateful for this experience.
Thank you Universe! My heart is filled deep gratitude!
