The Mastery of Life Blog

When you are full of fear, you become very ineffective. You lose your ability to see clearly and tend to make your situation worse. So how do you get rid of fear?

To answer this question, let’s look at the nature of fear. Fear is created by resisting a future event. For example, if I have a fear of losing someone, I am resisting the future event of possibly losing the person.

The more I resist losing the person, the bigger my fear. The bigger my fear, the more I feel threatened. The more I feel threatened, the more I hang on and push the person away. This is the nature of fear. Whatever you fear, you tend to create.

So how do you get rid of fear? To have any fear lose its power, you have to do the opposite of what gives it power. Instead of resisting the future event, be willing in your heart for the fear to come true — not in your actions, but in your heart.

In your actions, do everything you can to make sure your fear doesn’t come true, but in your heart, be willing. “I don’t want it to come true, but if it does, it does. I’ll deal with it.”

The moment you are genuinely willing for your fear to come true, it loses power. You restore your ability to see clearly and can see what needs to be done. Solutions and opportunity can then show up.

Make a list of all your fears and get to the place where you are willing for every one to come true. To learn how, read the section on how to let go.

Have you ever been verbally attacked by someone? It hurts and our natural reaction is to fight it, but this is the worst thing you can do.

Fighting what someone has to say doesn’t make the person’s upset go away. It gives it more power. The person gets more upset and blasts you even more. Then you get more upset and resist the other person even more. This quickly evolves into a cycle of conflict, where everyone gets hurt.

The key to avoiding this is simple. Listen. Instead of fighting what the person has to say, pull it out of the person. When you do this, the upset loses power.

To see how this works, find a time in your life when you were upset and communicated it. You got it off your chest. What happened to the upset when you did this? It lost its power and went away. The same thing happens when someone else communicates his or her upset. It loses power and goes away.

The next time someone is upset at you, encourage the person to say whatever he or she is upset about. You don’t have to like what the person is saying or agree with it. You don’t have to do anything. Just listen. Hear what the person has to say and hear it from that person’s perspective.

As you do this, you defuse the upset. When the upset is gone, you can have a conversation about what needs to be done. The ability to listen is one of the most important skills you can ever learn.

Every area of life that doesn’t work and every self-sabotaging behavior pattern can be traced to the automatic subconscious avoidance of a very specific hurt from the past.

This hurt is the childhood hurt of feeling worthless, not good enough, not worth loving, a failure, or some other form of feeling not okay. It’s not the truth that we are this way. It’s just an old hurt. But it’s a hurt that we will do anything to avoid feeling.

Any circumstance that triggers this hurt is perceived subconsciously as a threat to our survival. To avoid this threat, we fight, resist, hang on and withdraw. We operate in a state of fear, upset and tunnel vision. This in turn destroys love and sabotages our lives.

It also brings us more of the very hurt that we are avoiding. If someone is running from the hurt of failure, that person will create a life of failure. If someone is running from the hurt of feeling not worth loving, that person will sabotage relationships and forever push away love.

Every area of life that isn’t working and every self-sabotaging behavior pattern can be traced directly to this hurt. Finding and healing this hurt is one of the most important things you can ever do. Fortunately, the process for finding and healing this hurt is relatively easy. To learn the steps, click here.

Feeling hurt is not enough to release it. It’s how you feel it that determines whether the hurt comes or goes. Usually we feel our hurt at the effect. We feel like a victim of our circumstances. All the focus is on what happened.

When you are in this state, the circumstances have total power over you. You then feel your hurt in a way that prevents it from releasing. You can cry hours a day and still have plenty of hurt.

The key to releasing emotion and restoring your effectiveness is to separate the circumstances from the emotion. You do this by noticing their different locations. The circumstances are outside of you. The emotion is inside.

We think that the circumstances and the emotion are connected, but they are not. They may be connected in our mind, but they are not connected in reality. The moment you notice that the circumstances and the emotion are separate, the circumstances lose power. You still have the emotion, but now you are in the driver’s seat.

The next step is to dive into the hurt and cry it as hard as you can. Fell it deliberately and purposefully. Feel it because you want to. Reach in, grab it, and pull it out. If there aren’t any tears, fake the tears. Faking the tears coupled with an exaggeration of the emotion is just as powerful as the real tears.

Feel the hurt of what happened and the deeper childhood hurt of feeling worthless, not worth loving, not good enough, or whatever your deeper hurt is. Learn more

When you feel your hurt deliberately rather than at the effect, you allow the hurt to come and go quickly. You also feel on top of your circumstances. You release the negative emotion and can see what needs to be done. You literally get your power back.

If you do this and the hurt continues, you are avoiding the deeper hurt of feeling worthless, not good enough or some other form of feeling not okay. We’ll talk more about these core issues later.

When we get upset, we become full of negative emotion. Unfortunately, we don’t notice this emotion. All see are the circumstances, but the circumstances aren’t the problem. The circumstances are just triggering the emotion. It’s this negative emotion that gets us in trouble.

It destroys our inner peace and our ability to see clearly. It creates tunnel vision and forces us to act in a way that almost always makes our situation worse. This emotion is very destructive and our body naturally wants to be free of it.

The best way to see how our body releases negative emotion is to look at little children. When a child gets hurt, the child cries and cries. Then, after the child finishes crying, the hurt is all gone.

Little children are able to release emotion quickly because they do something that we don’t notice. They feel their hurt willingly. It’s the willingness to feel the emotion that allows it to come and go.

However, feeling emotion is not enough to release it. It’s how you feel it that determines whether the emotion stays or goes. If you feel the hurt unwillingly or as a victim of your circumstances, the hurt turns into pain and stays. If you take the same hurt and feel it deliberately and purposefully, because you choose to, the hurt comes and goes quickly.

So, the next time you get upset, find the underlying hurt. Then dive into it. Feel it deliberately and purposefully. Reach in, grab it, and pull it out. Feel the hurt of what happened and the deeper hurt of feeling worthless, not worth loving, or whatever your deeper hurt is. If there aren’t any real tears, fake the tears. Faking the tears, coupled with an exaggeration of the emotion is just as effective as the real tears.

The moment you release your negative emotion, your restore your inner peace. You see your situation clearly and can see what needs to be done. You become very effective.

So try it and see what happens. The ability to release negative emotion is one of the most important skills you can ever learn. Learn more about how to release negative emotion.

I was recently in a state of feeling discouraged. When I looked at what was going on internally, I noticed something interesting. I had lost hope in a situation that was important to me. When you feel that there is no hope in an area that is important to you, you can expect to feel discouraged. You may even feel depressed.

So here is the question. How do you create hope? When you have hope, you have an inner excitement. You feel on top of your circumstances. You are confident and very effective. When you have no hope, your circumstances have total power over you. Confidence and energy disappear. Negativity soars and opportunity gets pushed away.

To create hope, there are several steps you can take. The first step is to free yourself of the negative emotion that is being triggered by your circumstances. Find the hurt that you would have to feel if your fears came true and if your situation could never change. Then dive into this hurt.

Feel it willingly like a child. Feel it deliberately and purposefully. Let it the hurt come and let it go. The more you are willing to feel the hurt that is being triggered by your circumstances, the more your circumstances lose power and the more opportunity can show up. Learn more

The second step is to create a plan of action. Instead of fighting the way your situation is, surrender to the truth of the way it is. Then create a plan for what needs to be done based on the facts of the way your situation is. The moment you create a plan of action and start taking action steps, you get your power back. Life starts working and you generate hope.

The third step and perhaps the most important step is to get back in light. When you are in this state, you are free of the circumstances and present with who you are. You are happy, alive and free.

Learning how to live in the light is the key to being effective. When you are in the light, discouragement is impossible and hope is natural. We will talk more about this later. In the meantime, learn more about how to live in the light.

Our reality consists of feelings, emotions, thoughts and points of view. It exists only in our mind. In the reality of life, there are no feelings, emotion, thoughts or points of view. There is only the truth. What’s so is what’s so. Things just are and our feelings about it are totally irrelevant.

A good way to see this is to look at an upset. Find a time when you were upset. Didn’t something happen? Yes, something happened. That’s the truth. It happened.

Now notice how totally irrelevant your feelings were about it. No matter how upset you were, it still happened. There is the truth of what happened and there are our feelings about it. The two are never, never connected in reality. They are only connected in our mind.

We create our own reality and see life in a very particular way. We then act consistent with the way we see life and life responds accordingly. This in turn reinforces our reality. We think we are observing the truth of the way life is, but we’re not. We are observing our creation.

Unless you grow in your awareness, heal inside, and shift how you relate to life, your reality will remain the same and you will be forced to repeat the past. The moment you change your reality, you change what happens around you.

The purpose of our work is to create an awakening that changes the way you relate to life. The result is more love, more peace, and a much more enjoyable, productive life.

Whenever you have an argument, there are two people participating. Each person is pushing his or her point of view on the other, and no one is listening. Nothing is getting resolved and the cycle of conflict is escalating dramatically.

Disagreements are fine, but arguments are very destructive. You can say a harsh word in an argument that results in a divorce four years later. You can clean up what you said, but you can never take it back.

The next time you find yourself in an argument, stop and listen. Hear what the other person is saying and hear it from that person’s perspective. You don’t have to like what the person is saying and you don’t have to agree with it. All you have to do is listen.

Once the other person has his fully expressed his or her point of view, there will be an opening for you to express yours. Once each of you have said whatever you need to say, you can have a conversation about solutions.

The key to ending an argument is to listen. The key resolving disputes is to look for solutions that work for everyone. It is amazing how fast you can find solutions when you look for them.

One of Houston’s top cancer surgeons talked to me after one of our workshops. She told me that science is discovering a direct link between emotional issues and cancer. She then said that I had the key to healing these destructive inner issues. We met a few times after that and decided to do healing programs for cancer patients. Learn more

I have known that any area of life that isn’t working can be traced to an automatic, subconscious avoidance of a very specific hurt. I could see this clearly in the area of relationships and prosperity. It made sense that this would also apply in the area of health, but I haven’t placed much focus on this area of life. Now I started looking.

All the medical studies I found focused on the connection between cancer and resentment, unresolved issues from the past, upsets, and so on. All of these are the result of suppressed emotion. As I studied healing, it became very obvious that the one of the most important factors in healing is the willingness to feel your hurt. This allows negative emotion to come and go.

The willingness to feel your hurt is also the key to creating love and having a great life. It is one of the most important skills you can ever learn. In my research, I also learned a lot about faith, trusting, and spiritual healing. We will talk more about releasing emotion and the spiritual aspects of healing later.

Whenever you are in the presence of an aspect of your life that isn’t working, you lose some of your aliveness and peace of mind. Part of you closes down inside.

You may have a painful relationship or bills you can’t pay. You may have a messy house or job you can’t stand. These conditions of unworkability may be as minor as a squeaky chair or as destructive as a contested divorce, but every one of them pulls you out of the experience of love.

We also make handling these conditions a low priority. We would rather suffer than take the time to resolve them. As time goes on, these conditions accumulate. Life becomes less enjoyable and we don’t know why.

Now it’s time to find and remove these conditions of unworkability. It’s time to end the suffering and take charge of your life. It’s time to have your life be as great as it can be.

The first step is to find what these items are. Make a list of every single item in your life that isn’t working. Be as specific as possible. List the big items and the small ones. List the items that seem easy to handle and the ones that seem impossible.

After you complete your list, the next step is to start the process of handling each item. Once you handle an area of your life that hasn’t been working, you experience such a freedom and relief, you wonder why you waited so long to handle it. We don’t realize how much we suffer from these items until they are no longer there.

What would your life be like if you handled 20 % of the items on your list? What if you handled 50%? What if you handled every item? Your life would be incredible.

It is possible to have a life that is totally free of these conditions. This may take some work and it may take years to accomplish, but it can be done, and every step along the way will make your life a little better. To learn more about how to clean up your life, click here.