Holistic-Personal-Development.com

Effortless mastery in holistic personal development means to become that principle which you are developing in yourself. It means much more than having an understanding of love–it means to become love. It means to go beyond understanding poise and to actually become poise. It’s one thing to understand the importance of living in the present moment; it’s another to actually do it as consistently as effortlessly as you breathe.

How do we go from having spirituality in our head to actually becoming spiritual?

We might think we have all the answers to all of life’s problems, but when life spins out of control in a crisis, even the most knowledgeable of people sometimes find their wisdom deserting them.

The ego comes back, stress returns, old grudges reassert themselves. What can we do?

The first thing we need to establish in our mental makeup is patience. It takes time for seeds to sprout and grow. And it takes taime to develop effortless mastery. You cannot learn a holistic principle one day and expect it to be part of you the next day. It takes time for you to assimilate it. It also takes time for the old ways of being to drop away. A habit that has been engrained into your consciousness every day for 20 years isn’t going to just disappear overnight. Effortless mastery takes effort to acquire. But how sweet it is once you attain it.

When I was getting back into my music a few years back after a long absence, I picked up a book called Effortless Mastery, by pianist Kenny Werner. He stresses in his book the importance of practicing something over and over again until it becomes part of you. In the middle of a jazz solo, you don’t want to stop and think about how to play a pattern over a chord progression. You want it to unfold naturally, spontaneously.

It’s the same with life. You don’t have time to stop and think about how to respond in a situation. You just respond in the most natural way. That is effortless mastery — natural and second nature. So the key is how to take something that you are learning and translate it into your modus operandi. It takes commitment and determination. And as Kenny Werner can testify, a lot of practice. If you get to the state of effortless mastery, you have become a master. You have become it. Forgiveness personified, or patience personified, or poise personified. When you become it by tuning your vibration to the desired frequency, it becomes effortless and natural as a bird singing with the morning sunrise.

I recently heard a talk by Robert Dreyfuss about his journey to India in 1965 to meet Meher Baba. Baba asked him if he had read the book, God Speaks, a book he wrote dealing with the sojourn of the soul progressing through evolution and reincarnation and all the levels of higher consciousness, culminating in self-realization. Robert said he was reading it. Meher Baba said to “read it over and over until it flows through your veins.” That is the principle of effortless mastery. It’s one thing to read a book. It’s another to really absorb it.

Robert Fritz wrote in his book, The Path Of Least Resistance, that “once a structure exists, energy moves through that structure by the path of least resistance. In other words, energy moves where it is easiest to go.” If the easiest thing to do is to react in a fury of anger, that’s what happens.

An example would be I call a friend on the phone and he calls me irresponsible because I didn’t vote in the presidential election. Maybe the call would go like this:

Me: Hi Bob. How are you doing? It’s been awhile.
Bob: Not too good. Did you see the election results?
Me: No, I haven’t checked the news today.
Bob: What? You haven’t checked the news? Are you that irresponsible? Don’t you care what happens to the world?
Me: Sure I care. I just didn’t check the news this morning. I was writing an article.
Bob: You did vote didn’t you?
Me: No, I didn’t vote. I was…
Bob: What? You didn’t vote. People are going to die because of this election and you are going to have blood on your hands. You’re a real apathetic son of a bitch.

This could escalate into a real ugly scene real fast. What should I do? What is my path of least resistance here? Do I apologize, argue, say thanks for the feedback, or call him a name and hang up. Do I express myself with poise, indignation, amusement, compassion, or humor?

If I have been working on the principle of being open minded and looking with interest at other people’s viewpoints, I might be able to say, “Wow Bob. I never thought of it that way. You must be feeling a lot of pain. Anything I can do to help? That would be effortless mastery of poise.

But if my path of least resistance is reaction, I would say: “You’re the son of a bitch!” Click! That is how most people would react but what good does that do me? With my poise in shambles, my good mood would be ruined, and my day would probably go down hill from there. No creativity; no peace; no joy. My day would devolve into a waste of time and energy. It would be the opposite of effortless mastery. It would be pain and struggle.

As the Buddha said, “Hatred never ends hatred. Only love ends hatred.” When someone puts negative energy into the world, we have the choice of adding more negative energy, or counteracting it with higher positive energy. The higher will strengthen us. The lower will weaken us. The higher takes us to our goal; the lower takes us away from it. The higher eventually takes us to effortless mastery.