The Story of Self-Mastery

The stories you tell yourself that include blame, shame, guilt, and victimization have to self-validate. The ego has to be able to prove the pain to you via past or present experience. It can't hold onto something it can't prove by showing you a present experience or a memory. That's why these stories become cycles in our lives that are hard to get out of. The ego is using experience to prove itself right. It actually ends up becoming a form of self-sabotage. Here's how it goes.

When you find yourself telling that story of blame, the ego validates the story by continually reminding you of what the other person did. That keeps you stuck in it because you can't change what the other person did. So as long as you buy into the ego's logic that you can't stop blaming the other person until you can change what they did, you stay stuck in the blame.

When you tell the story of shaming yourself, you create a constant feedback loop. The shame causes you to not start anything or not even bother to try. Every time you fail to get started, the ego uses that as validation for the shame. That's self-sabotage buried in a story of shame.

The story of guilt causes you to be afraid of doing something wrong when it's internalized. Once again, you don't even start because of the fear of failure or mistakes. Much like with the shame, it creates a constant feedback loop because you're telling the story of feeling guilty for not doing what the guilt stopped you from doing to begin with. It's still self-sabotage but the underlying wound looks slightly different than it does with shame.

Victimization is the story of not having control. If we think we don't have any control over anything then we can tell ourselves a story about how it's not our responsibility. We don't have to do anything about that because we don't have control over it. This might cause you to not bother trying or it can result in carelessness because if the outcome isn't under your control then it doesn't matter what you do.

If we're talking about victimization in the sense of something happening to us that wasn't in our control, it results in a similar feedback loop because the ego makes us believe that the only way out of it is to have control over the experience. That feeling of powerlessness creates self-sabotage as well when we just stop trying to do anything about anything.

The trick with all 4 of these is to break the feedback loop. That's not always easy because it brings up the fear of what if. Suddenly we have an unknown outcome in front of us and we're afraid that our experience is going to validate the story we're telling. Even though it's likely that we haven't tried anything new in a very long time and we don't really have any proof of the story, the ego still validates it by projecting fear into an unknown future. It just assumes the outcome will be bad and it will spin your perception of the outcome to make it bad if it needs to in order to validate the story again.

Let's be clear. The ego is not malicious. There is no malicious intent in what the ego is doing. The ego is identified with the pain in these stories. That means that it wants to hold onto that pain because that's who the ego thinks it is. The ego thinks it is the pain. So when you try to go heal the pain, the ego thinks you're trying to get rid of it. That's not true, but that's how the ego perceives it. It doesn't tell you that story though because if you understood that you wouldn't believe all the other stories it tells you.

The ego is entirely focused on self-preservation and that's not a bad thing when you're actually in danger or have experienced major trauma. Those self-preservation mechanisms are very helpful and necessary. When we're talking about day-to-day experience, they are over-kill. It's extreme. We don't need all that to deal with the guy that cut us off in traffic, but that's what we do anyway.

The stories of blame, shame, guilt, and victimization are a form of self-preservation. By identifying with pain the ego has a reason to stick around. Let's face it, we learn early on that pain is part of the experience. We're going to have a hard time avoiding pain while we're in our human forms. So if we can't avoid the pain, then we might as well wear it because that's going to help us survive the experience of being human.

What I try to offer is the idea that you have some control over that. You don't have to wear the pain. The ego can and should be managed. Much like the mind, which when left to it's own devices is a funhouse ride like no other, learning to control what the ego and the mind offer us is an important skill that we aren't taught. Learning to gain control over it actually causes fear. People think they are going to become self-absorbed because that level of control requires them to focus on themselves to do it.

One of the very common objections that I get is that replacing one story with another doesn't solve anything. The mind made up an unhealthy story of blame, shame, guilt, or victimization, and then we just replace that with another less painful story. That's the ego telling you there is no point in getting control over the mind because there is nothing outside of the story of the mind. That's a lie.

When you let go of the stories of blame, shame, guilt, and victimization by leaving the experience alone and only taking responsibility for the self, it means you aren't trying to understand the experience. It happened. Why do I feel the way I feel? Why am I thinking those thoughts about what happened? The minute you blame your feelings on the experience you have a problem. The experience didn't make you feel anything, you unconsciously chose a feeling based on whatever old wound was triggered by the experience. Now that you're aware of the feeling you can gain control over that. You don't have to tell stories about it.

What we're trying to do is not project anything outward at all. My feelings and thoughts are my own regardless of what happens. We want to get a place where we're not blaming our experience for our internal weather. "But wait, doesn't that mean I have to dissociate from my experience?" No. We're not going for dissociation. We're working on gaining control over the weather within ourselves.

When we have an experience, our human form is going to react to that experience. We don't squish that. We allow that to take place and we recognize it as a human response that is not us. We are not that response. We are spirits in physical forms, which means that when the physical form reacts we can separate from that. We can watch that reaction happen without doing anything about it or hanging onto it in any way.

Once the reaction is complete, we let it go. We toss the crazy the mind made up. We let go of the emotions so that we don't hang onto them. We don't keep reliving the experience and because we're not hanging onto pain we don't need coping mechanisms and survival skills. The experience remains self-contained. It stays limited to the experience and the reaction that follows. It doesn't overflow. There is no continuation. There is no identification. We just leave it where it is. We don't have to take it with us.

We've still allowed our human to have the moment, cry it out, yell and scream, be mad, or whatever it wants to do. We haven't stopped that. We've just learned how to contain it so that our future is not affected by our present pain. We're not making choices based on pain anymore. We're not carrying pain with us. Experience just gets dropped once the human is done reacting to it.

Past experience needs to be contained as well. We can stop reliving it. We don't have to keep healing it. The trick to past experience is to find the old coping mechanisms and survival skills you have in place because you did pick it up and take it with you. The way you allow yourself to finally drop it is to stop living from it. That's why you learn to understand your behavior and where it came from. That's what will facilitate being able to drop the old experience.  

The problem most people have when they don't have a strategy for managing their current experience, is they just keep adding pain to the pile. It's really hard to clear out the old crap when you're still piling new stuff on top of it. The idea is if you can learn to contain current experience and not add it to the pile, then you'll be able to make quicker work of the old experience because there won't be anything getting in your way.

Each story you tell about your experience adds a new thing to the pile. Each of those stories of blame, shame, guilt, and victimization add more to the pile. They make it harder to unwind the experiences and understand what's going on. We're not able to gain a sense of control because we're still telling stories that perpetuate the feeling of being out of control. Control comes through containing experience and not identifying with the human reaction that follows. This is how we manage our internal experience.

It is possible. It takes some work, especially to uncover those old behaviors and patterns, but you can do it. Keep going.

Love to all.

Della