Self-Mastery

If I said that was easy, I'd be lying. It's not easy and it requires healing to make it possible.

We are taught from a very young age to manage the experience and not ourselves. Human beings are naturally externally focused and often that means we forget to manage ourselves in the experience. But what does that mean? How do I manage myself in the experience?

I start by recognizing where my point of control is. I understand, primarily, that I only have control over myself. I cannot control other people, circumstances, and situations. I can control me by managing my thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in such a way that I don't create additional pain for myself or others in the experience. That means I have to be self-aware enough to see when I'm prone to mindlessly reacting so that I can change that to respond consciously.

From the outside looking in, there are two major hurdles to doing this effectively. The first is in the fight for control or the fear of losing control. The second is in the desire to defend ourselves from the people and things we think are bad. We spend much of our lives looking over our shoulders, defending ourselves, trying to keep control as a means of defending ourselves, while doing everything we can to keep things the same. 

At the base of all this is the idea that known pain is better than unknown pain. We understand the pain we are currently in and we've learned to live with it. The mind is, in fact, comfortable with it because it is known. It is the present experience. The mind does not know what will happen in the future if things change. The mind doesn't know what it hasn't experienced yet. Therefore, the mind says the potential for unknown pain is far worse than what I'm experiencing right now. If we left the mind to do what it wants to do, we would live in the movie Groundhog Day, essentially living the same day every day for 80 years because that level of knowing is what keeps the mind comfortable.

At some level, we force ourselves through certain changes. There is an infinite amount of change in the experience of growing from an infant into an adult. We force ourselves through those changes. The body does it naturally, the mind doesn't always go along willingly though. How many of us are afraid of becoming adults? How many of us are afraid of growing old? How many of us are afraid of dying? These are all transition points. There is no end and there is no beginning. We simply transition from spirit to human form (human birth) and back to spirit again (human death).  The human form is meant to be temporary. The ego or personality that came with your human form is a costume of sorts. It is temporary much like your body. 

These built-in physical changes that naturally occur in your body are difficult for your mind to manage.  It draws fear from these experiences because they haven't happened yet. The mind is afraid of anything unknown, including the natural changes and transitions that a normal human body goes through over the course of its life. That's why the movie Groundhog Day is so appealing, because even aging is not relevant when you live the same day every day and nothing ever changes.

Most of us realize that life would be rather boring without some change and some variety. It is crazy-making, even for the main character in the movie to keep living the identical day over and over again. Being able to live that predictably for that long would be dull - but society makes this way of being the goal in many respects. Keep those appliances and dishes your entire life. Stay married to the same person your entire life. Keep the same job from the minute you graduate school. Live in your childhood home your entire life.  Keep the same friends your entire life. Eat the same meal on the same day of the week every day for life. Clean the house the same way on the same day for life. Go to church in the same church, sit in the same seat, every Sunday at the same time for life. You can probably think of other places in life where monotony is encouraged and even celebrated.

Why does that happen? The fear of change. Not doing those things is seen as bad or wrong because of the fear of change. If we're afraid of it then it must be bad, right? That's generally how it is perceived. Is that a true story though? The fear of change is so strong that we're wiling to stay miserable to avoid change. Not just that, but we're willing to make change the problem. We make it the scapegoat. It's the change that's the problem not the marriage, not the meals, not the friends, not the routine, not the job - the change.  If you have to change it then you did it wrong. There is something wrong with you. Once again, that's not a true story. It's fear doing the talking and ultimately what we end up doing is defending the fear.

We hold ourselves back. We stay in the crappy relationship. We hang onto the job we don't like. We keep those dysfunctional friendships. Why? Because we tout the longevity of those relationships as a means of avoiding the fear of change. We make it better to stay in a miserable 40 year marriage than it is to find a way to make yourself happy, with or without the marriage. That's fear of change - the willingness to stay miserable at all costs.

When we learn to manage ourselves in the experience, we don't give into the fear. We understand that the fear is going to be there until we make the change. Think about standing on the side of a cold pool. If you're a swimmer, you'll know that fear well. You'll stand on the pool deck all day to avoid jumping into that water. When does the fear go away? When you jump in. The thought that has to come to you is that you might as well go get dressed if you're not going to get in the pool. What does that thought make you do? Override the fear and jump in. Why? Because you didn't come to the pool to stand on the side for a couple hours and then go get dressed again without ever going swimming. That experience is the metaphor for life. It's how life works. How bad do you want it? That's really what it comes down to. Do you want it enough that you're willing to override the fear?

Fear is an emotion. The mind tells the story of the fear - it validates the emotion by creating excuses, problems, and reasons not to change things. Our behavior reflects the story and the emotion. We get stuck in this little loop in lots of different ways over the course of our lives. The way out of this loop is to recognize the emotion, stop the mind from validating it and making up excuses, and then consciously choosing a different behavior that reflects what you want to do, not what your mind and emotions tell you to do. 

Managing ourselves in the experience means practicing self-awareness. What am I feeling? What am I thinking about what I'm feeling? What is the corresponding behavior? From that awareness, we question whether any of that is true. We understand that we are separate from the experience. We can't blame the experience for how we feel - that's full self-responsibility. My job is to manage my thinking around those emotions so that I don't make them stronger and I don't create any new pain. From there, I can question what a conscious behavior might look like and then do that instead.

The reality is you'll do all that after the experience is already over. Why? Because you'll need to sit with yourself to figure out the connection between your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. They stem from past pain that you've held onto. They stem from old wounds, beliefs, previous experiences, and things other people told you that you've never thought about or questioned. To heal and change all these things, you'll have to understand it all. You'll have to dig deep to gain the clarity and understanding you're looking for. It takes time to do that work. Once you've come to some understanding, the next time a similar experience shows up you'll handle it differently. Slowly, over a long period of time, you will ultimately change how you show up in the world. It's just going to take time and a commitment to understanding yourself within the experience. This process is how we work toward that understanding.

What I share with you here is what I've learned to do for myself over the course of the last 10 years. I sat in the fear. I understood my reactions to things. I understood where my feelings came from. I understood how my thoughts were validating those emotions. I understood my wonky perspective. For a long time after I would have an experience, I would sit with myself to understand why I reacted the way I did and what a better, more conscious response might look like. Every time, I was given the opportunity to try again. When needed, I also held my own feet to the fire by apologizing for my own crappy behavior, even if the other person never apologized for theirs. 

Self-mastery is a commitment to a way of being in the world that makes you take full responsibility for yourself with no projection of blame, shame, guilt, or victimization onto anything or anyone outside of you. Self-mastery gives you the understanding that you are responsible every thought and feeling you have. You are responsible for your own actions as a result of those thoughts and feelings. Those thoughts and feelings are not part of the experience. They are separate from it.  Learning that changes how you see your own thoughts and feelings, it changes what you do with them, how you act on them, and how you relate to them. They no longer stop you from living your life, being who you are, and creating the life you want.

What you will find below are a whole bunch of articles about thoughts, feelings, behavior, perspective, and other things related to spiritual self-mastery. Read through the articles that are relevant for you. Come back when you run into something new that you want to figure out for yourself. I hope you find reading these articles as helpful as I find writing them to be for me.

Love to all.

Della

Responding vs. Reacting