What is Self-Mastery?
Posted on Jun 25th, 2008
by 
Jeff
Jeff
Many people that have been working the spiritual path for awhile understand the basic concept that our beliefs create our reality.
What the Self-Mastery process does though is that it teaches someone step-by-step how to become a conscious creator of their reality.
As someone who started studying conscious creation with early books such as Norman Vincent Peale’s “The Power of Positive Thinking” and Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich” I was fascinated by the possibility of actually creating what I desired in life. I read and studied everything I could find on the topic over the past 18 years, including books such as “Creating Money” by Sanaya Roman, “Creative Visualization” by Shakti Gawain, “You Can Heal Your Life” by Louise Hay and the “Law of Attraction” series of books by Abraham/Hicks.
And with all of these books, the message was essentially the same. Affirm, visualize and it will happen. Yet, it happened with some things and not with others. When I couldn’t get the results I wanted, my mind would tell me that I didn’t have this power to create it...or that maybe I just wasn’t disciplined enough to stick with it long enough to create what I wanted.
When I found Self-Mastery, one concept I learned early on was that “nothing changes until it becomes what it is – Love.”
So what I have slowly learned is that in those areas where I have not been able to create what I desired, what I found was that I was unconsciously holding fear in those areas. I didn’t know I was holding fear. I thought I was consistently focusing on a positive outcome, but there was a part of me that was afraid that I wasn’t going to get what I wanted and that was completely hidden from my conscious mind.
I learned that most of my beliefs were formed when I was a small child...which meant that as a child, my mind didn’t discriminate from what I wanted to believe or what even made sense to believe. My mind looked out into the world I saw before me and either modeled what my parents did or decided based on what I saw how the world worked.
My mother and father were 18 and 20 years old respectively, so they really weren’t old enough to even know how the world worked. They were still figuring it out for themselves. They still had many of their own childhood models that they hadn’t tested out yet in the adult world and yet my mind was absorbing everything...whether it worked or not.
I learned that “psychologists estimate that over ninety percent of my beliefs are unconscious and that most of my unconscious beliefs were created as a result of thoughts that I was positively and negatively programmed to believe.”
So what that means is that I learned that a soda was a “Coke” or that an adhesive bandage was a “Band-aid” or that a tissue was a “Kleenex” by hearing that over and over. Conversely, I also learned that “making money is hard work,” “you have to do things you don’t like for money,” “you can’t trust people” and many other ideas that made my life more difficult than it had to be.
But I also learned things that my mind decided on its own and reinforced over and over like, “it’s not safe to express what I feel to my parents,” “I have to be perfect,” “if I don’t act a certain way, my parents don’t like me,” “I’m not good enough,” “I’m not safe with my parents”...which extended out to not really feeling safe with anyone unless I was alone.
I didn’t consciously choose these things, but the evidence for them was being reflected back to me in my daily life over and over and over and my mind’s job was to figure out what was going on and create ego defenses in order to protect me. Ego defenses are things like learning to minimize a situation, or to avoid people so as not to get hurt, or to repress painful feelings and emotions.
And again because I didn’t choose these reactions and because no one in my life had the emotional maturity or knowledge to teach me any differently, these reactions were reinforced enough until they simply became part of my personality...until they became who I thought I was.
The problem with believing that this is that I also believed that there wasn’t anything I could do about that. After growing up and living as an adult for 10 or 15 years, I had simply accepted that there were things I could change and things I could not...even though I felt trapped in a body and personality that I was not happy with.
I couldn’t understand why I kept having relationships that didn’t work out, why I couldn’t ever get out debt, why I couldn’t move beyond a certain point in my career, why I couldn’t have peaceful relationships with my family.
Now with my family, it’s not like I noticed that any of them were peaceful either, but I knew it had to be possible to create that.
With Self-Mastery, one concept I had to accept was that no matter how things appeared to me...was that everything was happening perfectly—none of what I was seeing show up in my life was a mistake. None of it was showing up by accident. None of it was someone else’s fault, none of it was my fault and yet none of it was unrelated to me.
While it was not my fault, in order to change any of it, I had to accept that if I wanted my life to change, then it was my responsibility to change it. I had to accept that my beliefs were creating my reality and I had to accept that I DID have the power to change it.
All of that took time. It didn’t happen in the first few weeks of my Self-Mastery sessions. It happened after I was able to finally see enough evidence of what was really happening in my life and what unconscious beliefs I had that were attracting these situations.
Once I learned to dis-create my unconscious negative beliefs, I learned how to replace it with a new belief. I discovered that “no two things can occupy the same space at the same time.”
This concept was crucial for me to learn because what I found was that until I accepted that if what I desired was not showing up in my life because I had an unconscious negative belief attracting those experiences, I couldn’t attract what I did want need and desire.
The only way to be able to create what I DID want was to surface and heal the belief that was already there and which was working perfectly. It was perfectly attracting experiences into my life to show me what I still needed to heal. Once I learned to understand that those people were not my enemies, that those experiences were not the bane of my existence, but were simply my greatest teachers, my life took a leap forward.
Because instead of being fearful about what was showing up in my life, now I could face what was happening and see it for what it really was...a lesson to be mastered.
I didn’t have to listen to my mind tell me that I needed to now just avoid this person. I could surface the belief that was causing me to have a problem with that person and heal the whole situation.
And once I replaced the belief with a positive, loving belief...I didn’t have to work to bring loving people into my life. They just showed up... because that’s what I was NOW attracting into my life.
Self-Mastery is not about becoming perfect. It does not mean that by the end of the course, you will be like Jesus or Buddha. That may happen in this lifetime for you and this course may help you along your path to do that, but that is not the intent of what this course is about.
This course is intended to help people find out in what areas of their lives they are holding onto unconscious negative beliefs and feelings. For it is the feelings attached to these negative beliefs that continue to attract the experiences into our lives again and again. Once I learned what pain I was holding onto and faced it, I could feel it and release it within minutes...instead of continuing to carry it around for the next 20 or 30 years as I had done already.
The Law of Attraction was working perfectly in my life and it continues to do so whether I am conscious of it or not. But since I am now conscious of it, I am working with the Law.
So instead of staying mired in the drama of my life; my disappointments, my fears and my pain...I am now using all of that as my mirror. It shows me what I need to heal, to surrender, who I need to forgive and I have learned how to do all of that.
Enlightenment is “the knowledge of how the Universe works.”
Empowerment is “the application of that knowledge.”
If you are Enlightened, but ready to be Empowered, check out my website at: www.learningtoflow.com.
Contact me and let’s talk about what you want to create in your life and what you want to stop unconsciously creating. Let’s create an action plan to change it so that your life works effortlessly for you.
Once you learn to consciously create your life, you will learn how to extend that to your family, your community and your world!
Namaste
Jeff
What the Self-Mastery process does though is that it teaches someone step-by-step how to become a conscious creator of their reality.
As someone who started studying conscious creation with early books such as Norman Vincent Peale’s “The Power of Positive Thinking” and Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich” I was fascinated by the possibility of actually creating what I desired in life. I read and studied everything I could find on the topic over the past 18 years, including books such as “Creating Money” by Sanaya Roman, “Creative Visualization” by Shakti Gawain, “You Can Heal Your Life” by Louise Hay and the “Law of Attraction” series of books by Abraham/Hicks.
And with all of these books, the message was essentially the same. Affirm, visualize and it will happen. Yet, it happened with some things and not with others. When I couldn’t get the results I wanted, my mind would tell me that I didn’t have this power to create it...or that maybe I just wasn’t disciplined enough to stick with it long enough to create what I wanted.
When I found Self-Mastery, one concept I learned early on was that “nothing changes until it becomes what it is – Love.”
So what I have slowly learned is that in those areas where I have not been able to create what I desired, what I found was that I was unconsciously holding fear in those areas. I didn’t know I was holding fear. I thought I was consistently focusing on a positive outcome, but there was a part of me that was afraid that I wasn’t going to get what I wanted and that was completely hidden from my conscious mind.
I learned that most of my beliefs were formed when I was a small child...which meant that as a child, my mind didn’t discriminate from what I wanted to believe or what even made sense to believe. My mind looked out into the world I saw before me and either modeled what my parents did or decided based on what I saw how the world worked.
My mother and father were 18 and 20 years old respectively, so they really weren’t old enough to even know how the world worked. They were still figuring it out for themselves. They still had many of their own childhood models that they hadn’t tested out yet in the adult world and yet my mind was absorbing everything...whether it worked or not.
I learned that “psychologists estimate that over ninety percent of my beliefs are unconscious and that most of my unconscious beliefs were created as a result of thoughts that I was positively and negatively programmed to believe.”
So what that means is that I learned that a soda was a “Coke” or that an adhesive bandage was a “Band-aid” or that a tissue was a “Kleenex” by hearing that over and over. Conversely, I also learned that “making money is hard work,” “you have to do things you don’t like for money,” “you can’t trust people” and many other ideas that made my life more difficult than it had to be.
But I also learned things that my mind decided on its own and reinforced over and over like, “it’s not safe to express what I feel to my parents,” “I have to be perfect,” “if I don’t act a certain way, my parents don’t like me,” “I’m not good enough,” “I’m not safe with my parents”...which extended out to not really feeling safe with anyone unless I was alone.
I didn’t consciously choose these things, but the evidence for them was being reflected back to me in my daily life over and over and over and my mind’s job was to figure out what was going on and create ego defenses in order to protect me. Ego defenses are things like learning to minimize a situation, or to avoid people so as not to get hurt, or to repress painful feelings and emotions.
And again because I didn’t choose these reactions and because no one in my life had the emotional maturity or knowledge to teach me any differently, these reactions were reinforced enough until they simply became part of my personality...until they became who I thought I was.
The problem with believing that this is that I also believed that there wasn’t anything I could do about that. After growing up and living as an adult for 10 or 15 years, I had simply accepted that there were things I could change and things I could not...even though I felt trapped in a body and personality that I was not happy with.
I couldn’t understand why I kept having relationships that didn’t work out, why I couldn’t ever get out debt, why I couldn’t move beyond a certain point in my career, why I couldn’t have peaceful relationships with my family.
Now with my family, it’s not like I noticed that any of them were peaceful either, but I knew it had to be possible to create that.
With Self-Mastery, one concept I had to accept was that no matter how things appeared to me...was that everything was happening perfectly—none of what I was seeing show up in my life was a mistake. None of it was showing up by accident. None of it was someone else’s fault, none of it was my fault and yet none of it was unrelated to me.
While it was not my fault, in order to change any of it, I had to accept that if I wanted my life to change, then it was my responsibility to change it. I had to accept that my beliefs were creating my reality and I had to accept that I DID have the power to change it.
All of that took time. It didn’t happen in the first few weeks of my Self-Mastery sessions. It happened after I was able to finally see enough evidence of what was really happening in my life and what unconscious beliefs I had that were attracting these situations.
Once I learned to dis-create my unconscious negative beliefs, I learned how to replace it with a new belief. I discovered that “no two things can occupy the same space at the same time.”
This concept was crucial for me to learn because what I found was that until I accepted that if what I desired was not showing up in my life because I had an unconscious negative belief attracting those experiences, I couldn’t attract what I did want need and desire.
The only way to be able to create what I DID want was to surface and heal the belief that was already there and which was working perfectly. It was perfectly attracting experiences into my life to show me what I still needed to heal. Once I learned to understand that those people were not my enemies, that those experiences were not the bane of my existence, but were simply my greatest teachers, my life took a leap forward.
Because instead of being fearful about what was showing up in my life, now I could face what was happening and see it for what it really was...a lesson to be mastered.
I didn’t have to listen to my mind tell me that I needed to now just avoid this person. I could surface the belief that was causing me to have a problem with that person and heal the whole situation.
And once I replaced the belief with a positive, loving belief...I didn’t have to work to bring loving people into my life. They just showed up... because that’s what I was NOW attracting into my life.
Self-Mastery is not about becoming perfect. It does not mean that by the end of the course, you will be like Jesus or Buddha. That may happen in this lifetime for you and this course may help you along your path to do that, but that is not the intent of what this course is about.
This course is intended to help people find out in what areas of their lives they are holding onto unconscious negative beliefs and feelings. For it is the feelings attached to these negative beliefs that continue to attract the experiences into our lives again and again. Once I learned what pain I was holding onto and faced it, I could feel it and release it within minutes...instead of continuing to carry it around for the next 20 or 30 years as I had done already.
The Law of Attraction was working perfectly in my life and it continues to do so whether I am conscious of it or not. But since I am now conscious of it, I am working with the Law.
So instead of staying mired in the drama of my life; my disappointments, my fears and my pain...I am now using all of that as my mirror. It shows me what I need to heal, to surrender, who I need to forgive and I have learned how to do all of that.
Enlightenment is “the knowledge of how the Universe works.”
Empowerment is “the application of that knowledge.”
If you are Enlightened, but ready to be Empowered, check out my website at: www.learningtoflow.com.
Contact me and let’s talk about what you want to create in your life and what you want to stop unconsciously creating. Let’s create an action plan to change it so that your life works effortlessly for you.
Once you learn to consciously create your life, you will learn how to extend that to your family, your community and your world!
Namaste
Jeff
Access: Public
beliefs
August 2008 