The Path to Self-Mastery
Rethinking Control and Perception
Self-mastery was where I started this crazy journey. The idea came through intuitively as a way to heal myself. It’s the process I used to heal. Self-mastery is mastering yourself in the experience without changing, manipulating, or controlling the experience in any way.
What does that mean?
There are 3 aspects to mastering ourselves in the experience. They are thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Behavior is intentionally last because we need to be able to manage our thoughts and feelings before we can change our behavior. It’s really difficult to change your behavior when your thoughts and feelings are still out of control.
Thoughts and feelings go together. Feelings come in on the back of thoughts, whether the thoughts are conscious or unconscious. Even in a crisis, there are many unconscious thoughts and mental processes happening that ultimately create the feelings you have. Our goal isn’t to change what happens in a crisis. Our goal is to change how you react on Tuesday when somebody says something you don’t like.
Thoughts are all about perception and judgment. The experience itself is neutral. It has no inherent meaning of its own. The only thing that creates meaning is you - how you perceive what’s happening is what gives the experience meaning.
How you perceive what’s happening is a choice. It is not pre-determined, given, or automatic. Just because X happens doesn’t mean Y is the automatic reaction. The idea that the reaction is somehow a given or automatic, means you haven’t questioned your own judgment of the experience yet. You’re still reacting blindly. Ask yourself these questions:
Why do I feel so strongly about that experience?
What is my judgment of that experience?
Does my perception of the experience include blame, shame, guilt, or victimization? If yes, drop those stories. They are not true nor are they apart of the experience. They are part of your perception of the experience.
What did the experience trigger within me that made me react that way? Heal the trigger.
Why do I believe that this is the only way to see this experience? Try to see the experience differently and heal the triggers that are created by attempting to do that.
What would happen if I changed how I think or feel about the experience?
The goal is to free yourself from the rules and ideas that you have around how you think things are supposed to be. You do that so that you can begin to change your reaction to these experiences. As long as you’re locked into all of these rules and ideas, you won’t be able to change your judgment of the experience, how you feel about the experience, nor will you be able to change your behavior.
The experience does not work based on the human rules of how people think things are supposed to be.
The experience is neutral and happens anyway. People get divorced disregarding the human rule that says marriages are supposed to last a life time. Not to be morbid, but children die before their parents disregarding the human rule that says children are supposed to outlive their parents. People kill each other, disregarding the human rule that says we shouldn’t do that. People steal disregarding the human rule that says we’re not supposed to do that. Every single day, the human rules of how things are supposed to be, are broken. Every single day we fight with each other to try to create absolute rules of human conduct. Every single day we lose that fight.
Your judgment of those experiences as things that should not be happening does not change the fact that they happen nor does it change the outcome of those experiences. The truth is that if you left your judgment of those experiences behind, nothing outside of you would change. The experiences would still occur and end the same way. The only thing that would change is how you feel and think about what’s happening around you. You would feel better and life would continue on the same as it has. You are not obligated to make the experience matter, nor are you obligated to change or control the experience in any way.
Your job is to manage your thinking or your perception of the experience in such a way that any pain you feel from those thoughts and feelings is released naturally. The experience doesn’t cause pain. The pain is created by your thoughts and judgments of the experience. Your reaction or response to the experience is separate from the experience itself. They are two entirely separate processes. You may see them as cause and effect, but recognize that cause and effect are still separate processes that happen independently of each other.
Human beings have the ability to think thoughts that are not based on any external cause, and then have feelings about those thoughts. You can’t blame the external for how you feel and think because you have the ability to create it independently without any external input at all. You’re literally reacting emotionally to your own thoughts and blaming the experience for it.
If you don’t like how you feel, change how you think!
Once you see the experience differently and you’re no longer unconsciously emotionally reacting to it, then you can change your behavior.
You will be doing this after the fact for a long while. It takes time to learn how to manage yourself in the experience in real time. I did it after the fact for a long time. I still do it after the fact sometimes.
Experience happens in patterns. We have a lot of the same types of experiences. We’re always short of money at the end of every month. Our relationships always end the same way. Certain things always happen. Recognize those patterns because that’s easy to pick up and deal with. It’s obvious. It’s right there. You see it all the time. That bit of pattern recognition is an easy place to start healing from.
Instead of waiting for the pattern to repeat itself, spend some time figuring out your own thoughts, feelings, and behavior about the experience.
Change your thinking so that your judgment of the experience changes, which will ultimately change how you feel about the experience.
Figure out what a better response is based on your new judgment.
The next time the experience shows up, which it will, respond in the new way and then watch what happens.
Based on that new outcome, figure out if you need to change anything within yourself or if the outcome is simply out of your control.
If the problem doesn’t have a solution, you can’t fix the problem. At that point self-mastery is about making sure you’re not spending time worrying about things you can’t do anything about. Problems get put in the corner and ignored until you have a solution for them.
A big part of self-mastery is understanding what’s under your control and what’s not. You can have all the rules you want, but if the experience happens anyway, then it’s not under your control. Your rules don’t matter. They become a reason to be upset but they don’t solve anything. Let go of the rules.
Your idea of how it should be is not true.
None of this means that you can’t care about what’s happening around you. What we’re going for is compassion. Compassion is not painful. Compassion allows you to recognize what’s happening, be sensitive to it, but still leave it there and not try to control or do anything about it. Compassion happens from the sidelines.
Your only response to things that are out of your control should be compassion.
Other people, including your own friends and family, are not under your control. They get to do what they are going to do and you get to make a choice to change, limit, or end the relationship. That is your only point of control when it comes to other people, no matter who they are to you.
Self-mastery is full self-responsibility. We don’t try to control experiences externally. We control ourselves within the experience and that means leaving everybody else to their own devices, while making our own choices.
Self-mastery requires us to take a rather hands-off approach to life. It requires us to sit back, explore our own internal self more, while spending less time focusing on the outside world. Recognizing the inherent neutrality of the external experience actually frees you to do that. It frees you to question the human rules while making conscious choices for yourself that aren’t based on how you think things are supposed to be.
What is one belief or “rule” you’ve held about life that you’ve started to question? Let me know in the comments!
I’ll be continuing this conversation in my podcast this week. I invite you to subscribe, follow along, and share with your friends if you think this would be helpful to them.
Love to all.
Della
