The Self Mastery Journey: Uncovering You
A self mastery personal transformation isn’t something that happens overnight. It’s necessary to learn new skills and to change how you look at your old patterns to make a deep and lasting shift. This is not a journey for the faint-hearted, since it will have you face and shift the foundation you’ve built your identity on. So is it worth it?
More than worth it.
The rewards are freedom, inspiration, self-realization, joy, and peace, to mention a few. And well-practiced skills that you now can apply to keep navigating the world, and your unconscious. While practicing to make changes, you’ve gained skills that make you the master of self, and the artist of your own life.
This first episode is my attempt to give you a good overview of the Self Mastery process. Because if you know where you’re at and what’s ahead, you have a much better chance of understanding what you might need to move forward.
Listen to it here:
Here’s the summary of what I’m (un)covering in the first episode of the Uncover YOU podcast.
The overview of identities along the Self Mastery journey
In the Self Mastery journey, you’re often showing up in a victim identity, and the suffering you’re experiencing has made you motivated enough to start making changes.
As you start learning skills to step out of the victim role, you’ll become the hunter of your old beliefs and then move into the dreamer and the artist.
The Self Mastery Stages
Let’s look more closely at each one of these stages in.
Victim
Where your unconscious is pulling the strings, directing your decisions and reactions. Your dream is dreaming you.
You are for example:
- Feeling the hurt of your past experiences and re-living them in the present and projecting them onto the future.
- Unconsciously living by the protection mechanisms trying to avoid feeling painful emotions.
- Living with shame and guilt for things you’ve done, or how you’re feeling and behaving.
- Your attention is unconsciously being pulled along by the program of your mind and things and people around you.
Hunter
Where you’ve turned the tables and are hunting the unconscious system of beliefs and agreements, that are driving your thoughts and emotions. And where you’re dissolving the layers on top of the experience of your core self.
Learning and practicing skills in:
- Understanding how the mind works
- Stalking: inventorying, journaling your thoughts and emotional reactions
- Being with and releasing emotions
- Directing your attention consciously
- Un-identifying with the programs of the mind
Dreamer
Where you start experiencing yourself outside of the old programs, and outside the old identity with the mind.
Expanding your awareness outside of the previous known realms of your mind and exploring:
- Connecting with unconscious parts
- Embodying and living your knowledge rather than speaking it
- Feeling vs thinking
- Sensing consciousness inside and outside of you
- Connecting with your heart-center
- Activating your intent and what you want
- Loving all of you
- Being. Also when doing and thinking
Artist
Where you’re using your re-gained personal power to consciously create the dream you want.
At this stage you are:
- Consciously transmitting more than unconsciously receiving.
- You understand the power of words, energy, and your attention and use them well.
- Connected with your intuition and your deeper wantings to navigate where to go next, instead of run by the ego-mind.
- Loving the experience of YOU, with both dark and light
You don’t move through these identities with clean transitions though. It’s not like when you upgrade your avatar in a video game and suddenly you are new and shiny. No, it’s more like you gradually shift your identity and start blending your victim outlook with a new flavor of the hunter perspective. Drop by drop, with each practice, you’re changing from one identity to the other.
When you start learning the Dreamer skills you’re adding new skills that will take apart more of the victim identity and help with your hunting skills.
And when you start practicing creating from the Artist perspective, you’ll most likely come across new beliefs that have been hiding. Some of these shifts go faster and some are slower.
Another way of putting this is that different areas of your life can be in different identities at the same time.
After a year or two with the self mastery work, you might approach your career from the artist identity, while your morning meditation is where you go practice your dreaming skills. You’re currently hunting some beliefs around money that you got to see, while that one relationship that you’ve been struggling with is still moving out of the victim state.
Why start with learning about the mind?
Within self mastery, why do we start with learning about the mind and our unconscious patterns? Isn’t it better to focus only on what we want (the fun and enjoyable things) than to dig around in the basement?
There are a lot of self-improvement practices out there that will tell you not to focus on the “bad” stuff. Or even scare you from going there with statements like “you get what you focus on”.
A practice like that might bring you small shifts but they will come to a stop. Why?
- It’s not about becoming someone else. You don’t need to LEARN self-love or feeling alive. That often ends up in adding layers to your program. All you’re longing for already exists there at the core of yourself, and you’ll start experiencing it when you remove the layers of unconscious programming.
- Your unconscious is what is mainly running your thoughts and emotions. If you avoid looking there you’re missing the engine in the machinery. Not until you fully accept and embrace your unconscious (bad, dirty, evil…) parts can they be brought into the daylight and be allowed to change.
- Life/consciousness itself does not differentiate between good or bad. So when we decide to look away from half of the creation, we’re agreeing with the mind of its labeling of the world. And alas, you’re still in the old program of your mind.
- You won’t recognize the difference between your mind’s concepts about the world and a deeper direct experience of yourself and the world, if you haven’t gotten to know the mind. It’s guaranteed that your mind will keep morphing and learn new ways of hooking your attention, including showing up as very spiritual, grateful and loving. If you can’t tell the difference, you’ll most likely settle with this new, “upgraded” version of your mind and never know that there is more.
Where you might get stuck
I want to tell you about some of the places where people often get stuck and what you need to move past that roadblock. They’re part of the journey, so you don’t need to try and avoid them, because they will actually have you develop new skills! But it can be good to know what they might be if you happen to be in one right now… And what to go look for to move out of it.
1. Trying to figure it all out and think your way out of the old patterns.
Thinking that if you only would UNDERSTAND what is going on and see how it’s all connected that it would change. You’ll never be able to think yourself all the way out of unconscious patterns with your cognition.
What you need:
Learn to connect with and release emotions.
Practice feeling.
Learn to tell the difference between direct experience and an idea of the mind.
2. Only applying the hunting skills to some of the parts of the mind, while still identifying with others.
Example: Seeing the initial thought or emotion, and not seeing the reaction to that thought. Seeing the inner judge as separate but still being annoyed, hurt, or pissed about what he is saying.
You’re probably saying things like:
“My mind keeps doing that… I haven’t changed a bit yet…”
“I hate what my inner judge is saying about me”
What you need:
Be blown away by the realization of to what extent we are run by our mind program, and keep asking yourself “what perspective am I in?”.
3. Becoming identified as the hunter and thinking it’s the end of the line, and not realizing it’s a new character in the mind.
Which is very needed at a certain point, but can keep you stuck in the head. Analyzing and scrutinizing everything your mind does. The mind does A LOT of things, if you were to put your attention on it constantly you’d be trapped forever trying to figure it out.
What you need:
Time to start practicing dreaming and moving into your body, and start directing your attention onto the observer itself; the one beyond the mind.
3 tips from my own self mastery journey
- Learn how your mind works, by recruiting a hunter/warrior character – and how to get out of it later.
- Move your knowledge out of your head and into your body. Living it, feeling it, embodying it.
- Learn to love, not just accept, all your parts. Especially the dark ones we’ve learned to be ashamed of.
Join me live for the next session!
I'm recording the episodes for the Uncover YOU podcast live in our community each Tuesday and you're welcome to join me and bring your questions.
1. Create an account in the Self Mastery Community (if you don't already have one)
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