I’ve been practicing the Spiritual work on a pretty much daily basis since 2018,
Over the years of practice, I was looking for ways I can accelerate my progress and better make the changes I was looking to make.
In that process, I learned that there are some things that each of us can do,
which can really make the difference on how much progress we’re making, and on whether we get unstuck and get the changes we’re looking for or not.
I thought about sharing 3 of these things here:
1. Consistency:
Anything we want to get better at, takes consistent practice.
This especially goes for changing patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving we have been carrying throughout most of our lives.
Change isn’t easy, but it’s totally doable, and change takes practice.
Practice makes the master.
To get the most out of the Self Mastery work, you need to be consistently practicing it, in how much you can that feels doable.
5-10 minutes a day is better than doing 0, and like Tony Robbins says, if we don’t have 10 available minutes, we don’t have a life.
If we’re out of practice, and have trouble being consistent, what I often recommend to people is to start small with 5-10 minutes a day.
Because (And I’ve experienced it myself), the high expectation “perfectionist” part of our mind, can easily set us up for failure by telling us we “should” do an hour,
and we all know that this hour, in the best case after practicing for a day or two, turns into 0.
So what I found works best, is to start simple and small, with 5-10 minutes consistently a day, maybe more on the weekend, and then build up over time.
If we can build it up to an hour a day or so eventually, that can be really great and supportive for our happiness,
but it’s more effective to build it up slowly, and tp do how much we can and are willing to without stressing ourselves or placing big expectations.
Even 5-10 minutes a day starting out, can create miracles of wonderful changes happening.
2. Understanding What Resistance Is:
Did any of you reading the previous paragraph feel some resistance when I wrote about consistent practice?
Any tension, any shrinking, any contraction inside?
If so, then there is probably some part of your mind that is resisting being consistent with the practice, and therefore it’s great that we understand a little better about the process of resistance and what it actually is.
Perhaps the first thing to know about resistance, is that it’s not you actually doing it! It’s doing itself on its own.
The second thing to know is that resistance is completely normal.
It is something we are all going to run into somewhen in our process, probably often. I run into it all the time!
What resistance actually is, and why it’s here can be defined in many different ways.
One way to look at it, is that as you do this work, you’re going to run into certain limitations that you unconsciously placed on yourself doing your life, usually due to trauma, painful events or beliefs you took from your parents, society and the adults around you.
As you go inside, explore and seek to change the limiting beliefs and stories that are blocking you from being happy and living your best life, you are going to run into them.
Our beliefs don’t want to change. Our ego or the parts of our mind holding these beliefs want to stay the same, and they will actively seek to stop us from changing them.
Why?
Partly because these beliefs were created in the first place in order to protect us from emotional pain, and so going to change them means for these protective parts of our psyche that emotional pain can be on the way.
In cases of more severe trauma, holding on to these beliefs might’ve been crucial for our survival as children, and so changing them kicks an internal alarm in the nervous system that says changing them is dangerous.
Another significant reason resistance shows up, is because our ego (or parasite as Don Miguel Ruiz refers to it), is threatened by our desire to be free of it.
At the start of our journey, the ego has complete control over us.
Over time, we gradually free ourselves of that control, but during that process, the ego becomes absolutely terrified of our freedom, because, to the ego it means relinquishing control, and that’s something it’s very afraid of.
The ego is actually afraid of it’s own death and is afraid of change, it seeks to keep things the same.
So it will actively seek to sabotage us and stop us from changing and loosening its grip on us, in any way that it can (It’s a great practice partner!).
If you wondered why it’s hard for you to maintain your spiritual practice consistently, this might just be the reason, because your ego certainly DOESN’T want you to practice, because it’s a direct threat to it.
Therefore, it will create resistance.
Resistance can show up as procrastination, as an uneasy feeling in the body as you do the practices, as a sneaky thought telling you that you don’t need to practice because you “have it all together” or because there is “nothing to work on”
(sneakily distracting you from the many things you CAN work on, because we all have places on which we can grow).
It can show up as “forgetting” to do the practices, or as a story of not being able to practice because “there is no time” (yet, interestingly enough this story won’t show up when we watch T.V or spend time on our phone).
Once we understand what resistance is, why it shows up, and learn to track it’s mechanisms and dodge it’s many tricks, we learn to be consistent in our practice again, and do the work we need to change.
We do this because we understand that resistance is a good thing, and not a problem, it’s often a sign of progress, or a sign that we need to slow down because there is something we can learn.
It’s good to remember that the bigger the resistance, the bigger the freedom we will find on the other side of it.
3. Being Willing To Ask For Help:
This is a big one!
For many of us, our ego will hate asking for help, or not even think about the possibility, this is usually because of a few reasons such as:
Shame-based beliefs, beliefs that we should “figure things out on our own”, beliefs around trust as well as the general illusion of separation the ego thrives on and the misunderstanding of how hard this path can be sometimes and how much easier getting some help can make it.
Think about it for a moment – most of our emotional wounds happen in relationship, so it then makes complete sense that we can best heal in relationship, and this is what getting help means.
Getting help can look different for different people –
It can be asking for help from a friend or someone doing this work, making a post in the community, showing up for a workshop or course asking questions, or going all in into joining a power journey or doing 1:1 coaching\therapy with someone trained in a truly transformative approach. The kind where we don’t just talk all day rehashing our stories, but one where we actively work on changing our patterns to create change.
For me, getting help looked like starting 1:1 coaching with Gary back in 2019.
At the time I was doing the my mentor Gary’s Self Mastery work process for 2.5 years on my own, and I felt stuck, and coaching with Gary really helped me unlock what I was stuck on, and extremely accelerate my progress, and I’ve been working with him ever since.
When you think about it, it really makes sense as well.
Probably the fastest way to learn something is to learn directly from someone who already achieved what we’re seeking to create.
If I want to be great at Tennis, I will learn way faster by working directly with a great tennis teacher, than by trying to learn it on my own or through Youtube and books.
Why shouldn’t this be the case for our inner world too? In my experience, it is.
So don’t hesitate to ask for help! Your ego might not like it, but aren’t you here doing this work to learn how to be free of it?
And it may feel uncomfortable, but isn’t all growth like that? And aren’t you here doing this work to grow and leave behind past limitations?
It will take you a long long way.
Remember that getting help doesn’t mean that you stop being your own authority, it just means you allow yourself to get support with whatever YOU desire to get support with.
You’re in charge of making the choices, and you’re just receiving some help and support so you can make the changes you want better, and faster, and get unstuck in places where you are unsure where to go, or what to do.
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There are some more elements I’d love to share, but I think this is good for now.
I hope this is helpful🙏.
Which one of these 3 do you see as a growth point for you? As something you’d want to work more on?
Please share in the comments below or email me at “danielmoor@livingselfmastery.com”.
In LovingKindness, Daniel❤️.
