The Mastery of Self: A Toltec Guide to Personal Freedom (Toltec Mastery Series)

Without awareness, your domestication and attachments will corner you into taking actions that conform to the belief systems they have built. This is not free will, as you have given up your personal freedom in order to maintain ideas that were planted in you long ago. When trapped in the cycle of the automatic, you are by definition acting without

As a Master of Self who wants to maintain control of his or her will and have unconditional love for all in the Dream of the Planet, you can stay balanced much more easily if you find out why this person has the unique ability to provoke a reaction in you. Think about it. Of all the people in the entire world, this person can push your buttons mayb

often wonder what the world would look like today if some of our modern religions taught that self-knowledge, rather than blind adherence to external guidance and dogma, was the paramount goal of the spiritual path.

The next time you are in a situation and you begin to feel angry, defensive, guilty, sad, or anything similar arising, the first step is to spot the emotion. Admit it exists, and accept that these feelings are inside you. Just identifying, admitting, and accepting the feelings often has a calming effect and begins the process of releasing them.

Self-domestication is the act of accepting ourselves on the condition that we live up to the ideals we have adopted from others in the Dream of the Planet, without ever considering if those ideals are what we truly want.

That's why we say in the Toltec tradition that if you are waiting to be loved and accepted in the future, then you are not loving and accepting yourself in the present.

As a Master of Self, the way out is to remind yourself that you are perfect in this moment and you don't need to do or achieve anything in order to be complete. It's absolutely fine to want to accomplish things in the Dream of the Planet, to see what your strengths are and see what you are able to do; but as a Master of Self your priority is to lov

In addition to forgiving those who harmed you, you also need to forgive yourself. That's because many people, when they look deeply at past experiences of domestication, find that they are angry with themselves for either staying in a situation or not doing more to break free. If this applies to you, remember to forgive yourself for that too. You w

It's noteworthy that the first four letters of the word scarcity are also the first four letters of the word scare, because fear is exactly what the idea of scarcity provokes. Fearing that there isn't enough of whatever they want, people view others in the Dream of the Planet as competitors for a limited number of resources, be that love, happiness