Living with balance and harmony takes practice. It requires self-mastery of your thoughts, emotions, habits, and behaviors. When you learn to utilize self-mastery and trust it, you will uncover a powerful navigational tool for your life.
Self-mastery is a process. Take a moment to touch your forehead with your hand. It’s easy and automatic. However, babies are unable to do this simple action. It’s a process to learn how to control the movements of your hands and understand the spatial relationship between your forehead and your body. You had to learn to match that image with the visual image of an adult’s body, and likely mimic your mother’s/father’s actions. This was huge for your baby-self, and is a step forward in the ongoing process of learning motor skills.
As with all significant learning experiences, they are seldom measured in a straight line, but in stages. They are brief spurts of progress separated by periods where you rested, stayed the same, or even seemed to be getting nowhere. Through gradual non-hurried instruction and practice, your baby-self made something difficult - easy and stress free. This is what a mastery journey looks like. We learn and grow in steps.
Then distractions enter. We can be influenced by promises of immediate gratification, instant success, and fast temporary relief. Our fears or wanting to be liked by others can lead us from the natural ways we learn and grow. We want the quick effortless gratification, along with the status and success those promises offered. These distractions prevent us from developing our individual skills and heightens our stress. They undermine our health, career, relationships, and entire life direction. They can even remove us from our God-given natural rhythm! The good news is the path of mastery, which we successfully experienced as our baby-self, is waiting for us to step back on it and stay on it!
A mastery journey can begin whenever YOU DECIDE to learn a new skill, embody a new way of thinking or being, or invest your energy into something important to you. With this path, accept that the learning process is usually incremental and occurs in stages.
Doesn’t the goal of having a new life-long skill or having a long-lasting relationship sound more enticing than quick gratification? Life skills like a baby learning to walk, learning a second language, or even honing a creative outlet aren’t mastered overnight. They take focus and practice - and your growth may not be visible at first. Don’t let any of that discourage you from embracing a path you are called towards.
This same self-mastery is a powerful tool for navigating your entire life. The more you invite it in, the more your focus moves to the process itself. You can learn so much about yourself through your mastery journey. Don’t be surprised if the journey matters, just as much as the final destination.
Need help beginning your self-mastery journey?
1. Be open minded. Listen to a new viewpoint. You could learn something important and relevant in surprising places.
2. Explore your negative traits and emotions. Own them. Start to replace them as they occur with something positive. Become a master of your thoughts and emotions.
3. Select a personal development goal for yourself. Practice it – it will soon be part of you. Then focus on another. Example: Every time you realize you are not being kind, shift it in the moment. After six months you will have become this trait effortlessly.
4. Decide to learn something new, and do it. It stretches your consciousness!
5. Become an independent, rational, and discerning thinker. Put your emotions and outside influence aside. You will be surprised how things will look different to you.
In addition to personal mastery, there is a collective mastery that may seem like it’s slow to take place. Just as mastery is an ongoing, gradual learning process for each of us as individuals, it works the same way for the collective whole. It will take time for all to move into an enlightened way of thinking and living on earth. For the harmony of mastery to really stick and become the fabric of each of us and our world, lets allow the time for the important ‘evolution of learning’ to take place.
As we learn and navigate choices about which old beliefs to throw out and what new ones to incorporate – we move towards a new vision and understanding. As we actively practice kindness and patience we can more easily replace prior intolerance or pride. Let’s slow down and actively practice what we each want to become. This how we, collectively and individually, master a life of harmony and balance.
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