5 hindrances to self mastery

When we start a new journey, in which we set up certain goals there are certain obstacles of that journey that will be new experiences. Those new experiences will challenge us in ways we may not be familiar with, but to truly get to the end of the journey we will have to go through those obstacles. Which will have plenty for us to learn, the trick is to understand that these hurdles will evoke certain emotions and will lead to us feeling confused and lost at times. Which is all part of the game/journey those mistakes and failures we make become our true lessons, This is the part of a concept known as “failing forward”.

Therefore with every lesson learnt we become a step closer to our true goal, there might be circumstances that will distract us from our journey. Those are understood in certain stages but for this piece we focus on 5 hindrances to self mastery.

Sensual Desire

The way I like to see sensual desire is through timing because, the process of timing things makes it easier to know when it is the right time for certain pleasures and when it is the right time for focus and determination. In an essence we should not divert from our mental practices for too long, as this leads to us going down the rabbit hole and losing track of our focus. The desire to be stimulated to forget certain problems or just escape our environment for a second because, facing those problems is too much to handle. The idea of diverting from our goals for a long period of time will affect our progress and eventually our pleasures will become our main priority. A form of addiction taking too much time from our actual work. We start to spend time on things that don’t bring us value. From our work ethic and using that time to sooth our desires. Just like any other addiction. Goals eventually seem impossible, diluting passion into something of a task, so we spend time on our pleasures instead. Some may say the key is to allocate very little time to our pleasures until, after completing all our tasks for the day/week/month/year, by using our pleasures as a reward system to our passions instead.

Ill will/Aversion

The process of moving forward in life without healing better understood as a process of bottling up our emotions, it may seem like a good idea until one day when we’ve reached our limit and we unleash all those emotions on the wrong person, resulting in situations where we find ourselves hurting someone else or ourselves. The idea of avoiding your problems is that it is nothing but a temporary fix and does not particularly resolve the issue. Only way to resolve an issue like that is to address it head on as; anger, fear and insecurities are part of the game of life and need to be dealt with compassion and understanding, in order to heal.

Dullness/Heaviness

This part is largely common and experienced by most. The feeling one gets of self doubt and just really being unable to see any positive outcome happening in our life. We usually experience a deep state of negative thought, when we’ve hit our level of self awareness of not feeling well mentally. Leading to an attempt of interpreting and processing our depression. We create our own suffering and it truly is difficult to get out this state in life and takes a lot out of us, to be able to overcome this state. Usually the trick is to truly treat this situation just like “quick sand”. The more we try fight the situation the faster we sink, so the best option is usually to approach this situation calmly and allow ourselves to feel what we are feeling and start processing ways to overcome this. Understanding what we are feeling and why we are feeling this way, where it stems from, leads to the key of how and what is the best way to move past that state. Mainly who can be around us to help.

Restlessness

We all hate the process of working for something, but love the finish product. We envision ourselves being successful but hate the fact that we not there yet and feel like we are not really going to make it so we quit or start to find ways to distract ourselves from completing the tasks at hand. Challenges will always be part of the journey. The idea that a person is impatient stems from comparing ourselves from other peoples accomplishments, feeling like time is no longer on our side. The desire to want to be great but not feel any suffering. Comparing dilutes a clear vision to what we must do to succeed. Finding ways to boost our inspiration from surrounding ourselves with like minded people and also finding things to do to help keep, us inspired and focused.

Sceptical Doubt

This part of any journey is quite interesting, this is the point where we feel like we are not ready to be in a certain position, so we use all our fears to delay the process of growth. The fear of failure, sacrifices we might need to make in order to reach a certain position becomes too big of an ask, for various reasons we tell ourselves it is not worth it, usually because it takes us out of our comfort zone.

The idea is to build a certain sense of resilience, where we trust our intuition in order to get us through a level of uncertainty we might be feeling / experiencing. This is usually when the vision to the end of our goal seems very unclear and we feel like its too overwhelming for us to even attempt to go on.