What is life mastery? Depends on what you want out of it.
The goal should not be “having no problems” but being able to meet challenges with the most resources.
Every area of life feeds into this in different ways.
Research and theory-building in terms of understanding each area (which supports the intellect’s theory building).
Nutrition: Animal fat, animal protein and organs, omega 3, limited/no grains, sugar, fructose or veggie oil.
Work out: sprinting, walking, moving heavy things around.
Social relationships: can pull you down, or make up for doing everything else wrong. How to figure that out? ”You just know”/learn to trust your gut and heart and not lie to yourself–which is partially learning but more removing pain (hypothesis).
The above is mostly “objective”–perhaps wrong or limited but ideally, one can research, define an outcome, work to achieve it. But most don’t. For the majority who don’t, this can be attributed to various social factors. But for those who do attempt this with diligent research and big plans, most fail. Why? While the social factors loom in the background, most immediately the cause that is changeable: emotional challenges. The above must be researched to go beyond “common sense”, but whatever one’s conclusions, most fail in putting them into practice. There’s the rub.
Solution: The issues are in the tissues.
Motion leads to emotion is the ground for thought. (Add in notes on motion and cognition and exception that proves rule of Hawkins.)
Motion is composed of structure and breath (as well as other things that are less influenceable, such as heart and chemicals/hormones/et al.).
Recovering flow in motion takes conscious practice to reduce deformations from chronically stressed, anti-flow modern lifestyles.
Joint mobility and moving the body through its degrees of freedom (yoga) are the primary means to do so.
The bigger emotional “issues”–from mood to character traits that inhibit one’s enjoyment of life–can be addressed through the conscious practice of creating the flow of breath, movement and structure throughout one’s day. Some issues are directly addressed, whereas others are “trained” for by creating the habit of responding to stress and negative emotions with “flow” (spontaneous, joyful, aware).
The details of fascia, heart rhythms, breathing patterns, hormones, movement patterns, etc. are interesting and perhaps necessary for motivation, but are unnecessary for the process to work.
The rub of this is in 1) one’s emotional pain blocks the process of creating a daily practice to expand one’s ability to flow through life, 2) one’s emotional pain limits the expression of this flow outside the practice in one’s day, and 3) one’s emotional pain can make it appear one is doing 1 and 2 but is doing them in a way that is avoiding certain issues/tissues. Most common is 1, most potent perhaps is a combination of 2 and 3: a certain situation (say a certain complaint from a loved one) triggers a whole ensemble of physical, emotional, social responses from you that are less than life affirming but also work to hide even that reaction. How does one bring awareness to those things? The meta-patterns? Journaling may be a help, though if one’s journaling about it then one’s there with the proper techniques and dedication, or at least dedication. I think one gets there through building a stronger foundation through a daily personal practice of widening and deepening one’s flow. Other techniques: counseling, journaling, etc. may all play a role but are ancillary to changing the body’s (e)motion.
So I suggest the key to life mastery is a daily personal practice focused on mobility: joint mobility and bodily flow. (Think tai chi plus yoga, see Scott Sonnon’s work.) Plenty of people who don’t do that as a conscious practice achieve far more than those who do it as a conscious practice.
I speculate that some do do it unconsciously and not as a separate practice. Others doing it would increase through contributions to the world. So I still say…speculatively…that it’s the key.
The details are interesting and necessary to talk about, but there’s the basics. …?
