Ready for real change? My 10 Steps to Self Mastery lists some of the most powerfully transformative things you can do to bring about lasting happiness and fulfilment in your life.
I’ve been studying psychology and spirituality all my adult life and on this page I’m going to list the 10 Steps to Self Mastery that have personally helped me – and the many clients I’ve worked with over the years.
These are practises, techniques, and ‘ways of being’ that will help you master your emotional brain, awaken your soul, and connect up to a bigger reality.
- 1. Learn all you can about hypnosis and the REM state
- 2. Calm the nervous system with deep breathing
- 3. Assess your emotional needs
- 4. Separate yourself from the problem and reclaim your true identity
- 5. Develop your Observing Self – be in the world but not of it
- 5. Develop your strengths and resources
- 6. Resolve trauma and negative memory patterns
- 7. Learn to use your imagination and attention mechanism better
- 8. Make sure you get sufficient, high quality sleep
- 9. Unleash your creativity and lose yourself in something you love
- 10. Look after the mind-body connection
- Bonus step to self mastery: connect up to something beyond yourself
- Self Mastery – summary and next steps
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10 Steps to Self-Mastery: How to master the one life you’ve got
1. Learn all you can about hypnosis and the REM state
I became intrigued with the idea of self-mastery in my early twenties having stumbled upon a book called ‘The Master Key‘ in a charity/thrift shop. It cost me 25p but I felt the wisdom contained within its pages was priceless. It was one of the first books that prompted me to study psychology before I went on to train in hypnosis.
Hypnosis happens naturally; we all go into trances of varying degrees every day but much of it is ‘negative hypnosis’, such as worry or anxiety. How often do you find yourself caught up in the same old mental loops? That’s a trance state.
Hypnotherapy purposefully uses hypnosis to access the REM state – nature’s optimal programming state. The REM state is your ‘reality generator’ where you can change memory patterns, break free from old conditioning (including trauma), and mentally rehearse new skills.
Make sure you’ve got your free copy of my ebook where I speak more about hypnosis and the REM state and how it helped me change a 10-year problem in only two sessions.
Then check out this free hypnosis course
2. Calm the nervous system with deep breathing
The second thing to gain mastery of is your survival brain. If you suffer from anger, anxiety, panic attacks, or stress I’d encourage you to learn how to do 7/11 breathing (or what I call Zen Breathing). It’s changed the lives of hundreds of people I’ve worked with over the years.
Just a few minutes a day can help you regulate your nervous system and feel generally calmer and more in control. Zen Breathing relaxes your body and mind at the same time and will lower your stress levels if you practise it regularly.
Once you have mastered it – and it’s fairly easy to do – you can calm down quickly in any situation. After all, you don’t want your survival brain bossing you around when it’s not needed.
3. Assess your emotional needs
Doing an ‘audit’ on your emotional needs can help you identify the stress points in your life.
We are all born with emotional needs and if these go unmet our stress levels rise, leaving us more vulnerable to anxiety, depression, anger, addiction and the like.
We’re talking about things like: the need to feel safe and secure, the need to feel in control of our lives, the need to connect to others, the need for attention, and the need for meaning, to name but a few.
As Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell point out in their ground-breaking book, The Human Givens, when emotional needs are met in healthy ways you cannot suffer from mental illness.
RELATED CONTENT: How to meet your emotional needs – with a FREE assessment questionnaire
4. Separate yourself from the problem and reclaim your true identity
Always remember that whatever problems you face in your life they do not define you: you are not the problem – the problem is the problem.
High emotional arousal makes us stupid (and act in stupid ways) because it hijacks the more evolved part of the brain – the neocortex – resulting in our survival brain running the show. We then over-identify with our problems and emotions.
We say, “I’m just an angry person,” or, “I’ve never been any good at relationships,” or, “I’ve been depressed all my life.”
Therapist and author, Stephen Wolinsky in his brilliant book Trances People Live, refers to these as ‘trance identities’. They are not who you really are but have become so habitual you assume it is who you are.
Anger, anxiety, and depression are all trance states – states of locked attention – and they say nothing about who you truly are as a human being.
So ask yourself, “When the problem isn’t occurring, how different do I feel and behave then? Who am I when this problem isn’t happening? What is my true identity? Who is the real me?”
Look for exceptions. Remember, the problem doesn’t exist 100% of the time.
5. Develop your Observing Self – be in the world but not of it
One of the ways to separate yourself from the problem is by developing another resource – the Observing Self.
The thing is that most of us are tossed hither and thither by the machinations of our minds, caught in a spider’s web of our own making. If we’re going to evolve as a species I think this is a key step toward self-mastery as it enables us to come out of negative trance states.
Indeed, it was 20th century mystic and philosopher, G.I. Gurdjieff, who said that humanity is sleep-walking; we wander blindfolded, from one trance state to another.
It’s not until you can step back that you can see the bigger picture. This is what the Observing Self is all about. It is about ‘waking up’ and in so doing expanding your own consciousness.
One of the ways to develop the Observing Self is through the AWARE technique. This technique calms both body and mind and helps you step back from emotional arousal and see the bigger picture from the position of the witness. You’re then able to observe your thoughts, feelings, emotions, and sensations without getting attached to them or drawn into the story they might tell.
Download the AWARE technique straight to your phone so you can escape your own negative trances
5. Develop your strengths and resources
Along with the Observing Self, nature has been generous in providing us with a whole host of other resources – and the potential to develop more.
Previous successes – however small – can serve as a resource. Mastering how to relax can be a resource, as can developing better communication skills or managing anger. Having a network of supportive friends is a resource; people who are there for you through thick and thin.
Check out this infographic from the Human Givens Institute that describes 8 innate resources
However, sometimes these resources can be damaged (through trauma or misuse of drugs, for example), undeveloped, or misused.
Trauma puts the survival brain in charge, blocking access to new learnings, keeping us trapped in negative memories and flashbacks. Luckily there is a way to break free from this…
6. Resolve trauma and negative memory patterns
A vital step toward self-mastery is to free yourself from any traumatic memories. This is because unresolved trauma will keep you on red-alert. You sleep with one eye open. Your stress levels, fuelled by cortisol and adrenaline, are always higher than they really need to be.
I’ve treated hundreds of people over the years with a specialised technique that de-traumatises the brain, helping you finally break free from those memories that have been haunting you all this time. All negative memories can be ‘re-coded’ in the brain so that the past is finally laid to rest. And this is why this step is vital for self mastery.
Trauma resolution, combined with Inner Child healing, is a powerful way to let go of the past.
When you free yourself from such memories you literally release spare brain capacity. Your mind-body system feels re-booted as new neural pathways are laid down in your brain.
Are you a therapist? Learn how to free your clients from negative memories fast
7. Learn to use your imagination and attention mechanism better
Once free of negative memories, it’s far easier to use your imagination more resourcefully. Indeed, the imagination is one of your most powerful and helpful allies – if used correctly!
But misusing it can lead to all manner of problems…
We now know that the main cause of depression is worry, which is a misuse of the imagination. It wasn’t designed to repeatedly mull over negative scenarios.
So, instead of ruminating on all the woes in your life and all those ‘what ifs’, learn to focus your imagination and attention differently.
Getting yourself calm then tapping into your imaginative capacity to rehearse things going well, forms the bedrock of hypnotherapy. This is where new blueprints get laid down.
One of the rules of the mind states that the brain will try to bring about whatever you focus on the most. So, be mindful of where you are directing your attention and how you are using your imagination.
8. Make sure you get sufficient, high quality sleep
Sleep is both a physical and a psychological need. We need slow wave sleep to repair and regenerate the cells of the body and we need REM sleep to process unresolved stressors from the day before.
RELATED CONTENT: How to sleep better – starting tonight!
Most of us need about 7 to 8 hours of sleep each night to function at our best but this needs to include the right proportion of REM and non-REM sleep.
Too much REM sleep will result in you feeling tired come the morning, even if you’ve slept all night. This is because excessive dreaming – which occurs in REM – is tiring for the brain, leaving you exhausted and de-motivated.
See what my therapy tutor, Joe Griffin, says about why we evolved to dream and why it’s important to get the right amount of REM and non-REM sleep…
9. Unleash your creativity and lose yourself in something you love
We all have creative abilities whether that’s drawing, painting, playing a musical instrument, flower arranging, needlework, graphic design, writing stories, poems or songs, doing the gardening, re-arranging the furniture, or whatever.
What creative things did you enjoy when you were younger?
When we lose ourselves in such things we get into ‘flow states‘; the guitar plays itself, the picture emerges onto the canvas as if by magic, a poem or story is birthed through your fingertips and onto the page.
Being out in nature is another way of losing yourself. By ‘losing yourself’, I’m not just referring to distracting yourself but connecting up to something bigger than yourself. This is why ‘forest bathing‘ is proving to be good for alleviating depression and so many other mental health conditions.
By becoming absorbed in something you enjoy, you open your mind to the ‘wonder state’ young children experience. And this can lead to mystical states of consciousness, such as I experienced when pushing my baby son in his pram.
RELATED CONTENT: Read about my experience of unity consciousness
10. Look after the mind-body connection
And finally, step 10…
When striving for self-mastery it’s all too easy to focus on mental stuff and overlook the physical aspects of yourself: the need for a good diet and exercise.
Twenty odd years ago, suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder I got better simply by taking St. John’s Wort and walking to work instead of taking the car. The natural remedy and the daily exercise lifted my mood and energy levels in no time.
Simple steps such as increasing your levels of vitamin D and omega 3 have been proven to boost mood and immunity (1).
And on my ‘Van-Life’ website (2) I talk about the many brain boosting foods that help stave off brain degeneration.
Making sure your diet is rich in vitamins and nutrients and that you’re getting the right amount of physical activity (along with practising all the steps above) gives you a real chance of achieving self-mastery on all levels – body, mind and soul.
Nurture your physical health with hypnosis – begin your Body Balanced Journey
Bonus step to self mastery: connect up to something beyond yourself
Whether it’s through the practice of meditation or prayer or the development of a certain ‘attitude toward life’, having a connection to something beyond yourself seems to make us healthier (and live longer) (3).
When you get your basic needs met you have more free capacity to connect up with a larger organising idea, be it based in science, nature, religion or philosophy.
Nurturing this relationship with something bigger than yourself seems to have a positive affect on your sense of wellbeing, both physical and mental. So it pays to find a means of ‘stretching’ yourself in some way, to be more ‘other’ oriented (or ‘Other’ – capital ‘O’).
RELATED CONTENT: Read my take on Centering Prayer and nonduality
Self Mastery – summary and next steps
I believe that if we’re going to evolve (or even survive) as a species it’s vital we apply as many of these self-mastery steps as we can. Otherwise we’re stuck in the same old trances that have been running the show for decades (or more like millennia).
All of the above steps can be seen as skills to develop or ‘practises to live your life by’. I include all of them when working with clients. Change happens more easily when working holistically.
Make sure you check out my self-help articles covering topics such as: depression, addiction, mysticism, and more.
And if you have any questions or would like to find out more about how I could help you achieve self-mastery consider booking a Free Discovery Session with me or check out my hypnosis FAQ page.
Notes:
(1) See the research into the effects of omega 3 and vitamin D
(2) In my spare time I love nothing better than to get out in my campervan and reconnect to nature. Read about my adventures at ‘motorhome hobos‘
(3) Research at Harvard found that religious people lived far longer than atheists Tyler VanderWeele: Do Religious People Live Longer? | INITIATIVE ON HEALTH, SPIRITUALITY, AND RELIGION