Self-Mastery

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience." 

                             —Eleanor Roosevelt

What does it take for self-mastery?  Life provides opportunities for self-discoveries through errors made. Insights move into moments of enlightenment. Miles Davis says, "Do not fear mistakes. There aren't any. Only lessons."  

If we pay attention to our choices, we can make different mistakes and learn new skills. Life can be compared to a pencil with a point and an eraser. We're meant to use the eraser but not to let it erase so far down we forget to use the point.

It takes a lifetime to learn about ourselves as we commit experience.  We use and discard mental patterns and habits. Often we intercept choices before they turn into misfortunes. We learn to solve problems.

To evolve with self-mastery, we need to let go of what does not serve us and write about it.

Fear Less

Fear is a universal experience. Even the smallest insect feels it. We wade in the tidal pools and put our finger near the soft, open bodies of sea anemones and they close up. Everything spontaneously does that. It’s not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown. 

It is part of being alive, something we all share. We react against the possibility of loneliness, of death, of not having anything to hold on to. Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth. 

If we commit ourselves to staying right where we are, then our experience becomes very vivid. 

Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape. 

- Pema Chödrön

When Pema Chödrön writes about becoming intimate with our fears, she recommends using fear as a tool rather than as a problem to solve. She advises us to dismantle our familiar ways of behavior and says we must accomplish, “a complete undoing of old ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and thinking.”

Bravery is not the absence of fear but the intimacy with fear.

We need to step forward a little further with courage. Pema Chödrön encourages that our deepest strength arises by befriending ourselves which is the only mechanism for befriending life in its completeness.

Susan Jeffers believes, "Apart from obvious connections, it is possible the cause of our fear lies elsewhere. But does it really matter from where self-doubts come?  It is often impossible to figure out the actual causes of negative patterns. Even if we did know, the knowing doesn't necessarily change them. If something is troubling you, simply start from where you are and take the action necessary to change it."

Duke professor Dan Ariely suggests 'reframing your experience.' He says, "You might not be able to change what you have to do but you can change how you see it."

Find a fear and approach it. Then write to it with all the senses.

Use laughter to tickle fear into submission.

Develop a metaphor to return to when faced with the fear.

Write until your mood changes to Fear Less.

If you find your socks don't match 

Stand in a flowerbed

If your shoes don't fit 

Give them to the fish in the pond

If your horse needs shoes

Let him use his wings

If the sun never shines again

Hold fireflies in your hands to keep warm

If you are afraid of the dark

Remember the night rainbow

If there is no happy ending 

make one out of cookie dough 

- Cooper Edens

 

Leaving the Rhine

Music courted the Rhine river. English poet, Lord Bryon felt the power of the songs; warlike, tender, sad, and passionate. 

After experiences there, Byron penned his goodbyes.


Adieu to thee, fair Rhine.
How long delighted
The stranger would linger his way
Thine is.a scene alike where souls united
Or lonely contemplation thus might stray
And could the ceaseless vultures cease to prey
On self condemning bosoms, it were here
where nature, nor too somber nor too gay
wild but not rude, awful yet not austere
Is to the mellow Earth as Autumn to the year.

Adieu to thee again, a vain adieu
There can be no farewell to scene like thine
The mind is colored by thy every hue

The wild rocks shaped as they had turrets been
In mockery of men's art and there withal
A race of faces happy as the scene
Whose fertile bounties here extend to all
Still spring over thy banks
through empires hear them fall.