What is Mastery?
On Sunday I had very low energy and headache. That day even sitting up with support was exhausting. Caffeine withdrawal? We started drinking espresso coffee instead of other forms of brewing, and less time in contact with the water means less caffeine in the resulting coffee. It tastes so good! Probably not the only reason for the tiredness.
Monday the headache was gone, and the energy was starting to come back. Monday was still tiring, and I had to muster enough energy to clean bee hives and put packages of new bees in the hives. Let’s just say, there were VERY frequent breaks to get that done!
This lack of energy left me in the position of not having the energy to do forms and other physical aspects of Kung Fu, so I found myself thinking about Mastery. The quote from Stewart Emory talks about how to achieve it, our attitude, and observing and removing things from our environment that hold us back from achieving it but doesn’t really cover what it is other than “technical excellence in a chosen field and a commitment to that excellence”. Maybe that is all there is to what Mastery is.
Anyway, I hope you will be patient with me as I share a little bit of my Mastery “rabbit hole” with you.
Internet dictionaries said that Mastery meant that a person had comprehensive knowledge or skill in a subject or accomplishment; control or superiority over someone or something. Look up Master and it was, having or showing very great skill or proficiency; acquisition of complete knowledge or skill in an accomplishment, technique, or art; to gain control of; overcome.
“Overcome” resonated with me, in light of what was happening these last few days. How to work on mastery in Kung Fu no matter what life throws your way? I heard a quote (wish I could find it again), many years ago, about how it was easier to achieve enlightenment/mastery if you could seclude yourself away from the world, but the real achievement was to obtain enlightenment/mastery while still living in the world, with all its demands on our time and attention, such as family and work.
Many of the world’s religions have quotes about Mastery. Many of them are about self-mastery and mastery of knowledge. It was interesting doing a search through the texts of various religions and philosophies such as Hindu, Zoroastrian, Bhuddist, Judaism, Jainism, Christian, Islam, Baha’i, Tao, Confucian, and others. I wish I had more time to read them in detail. Each have their own way of expressing it, but it’s there.
“Faiths are like languages. There are many of them, and they are not reducible to one another. In order to express myself at all, I must acquire a mastery of my own language. If I have no language, I will still have feelings but I will be utterly inarticulate in communicating them”
~ George Townshend
The quotes about mastery, transformation, interconnectness, and perspective were very interesting to me. Roy Steiner talked about personal mastery as “It rests on the eternal truth that lasting change starts from within. This is the core of the transformation paradigm: that personal transformation precedes social transformation, that trust in a society is built upon truthfulness and trustworthiness of its individual members. Personal mastery calls for integration of reason and intuition (i.e. science and religion), compassion, commitment to truth, and a personal sense of interconnectedness. This inner transformation paradigm has seen a renewed attention by contemporary management and personal development gurus (e.g. Covey, Dyer, Chopra) and has created a "thought revolution" in management and leadership in the post-modern organization of the western world.”
Steiner also talks about “Systems thinking” and that “a whole [system] is not the sum of its parts (reductionism) but the product of their interactions. It is not seeing the forest alone but seeing the forest together with the trees. Systems thinking also teaches that the world is dynamic and interconnected and that cause and effect are not close in time and space.”
What is mastery? From the perspective of my own experience, learning, sources, it is doing something to the best of your ability… and then pushing past it. It is hard work, it is Kung Fu, it is pushing what you think your boundaries are, it is being fully present, it is paying attention, it is a perspective, it is meditation, it is learning to be comfortable with being uncomfortable (as opposed to staying in your personal comfort zone) … It is a lot of things! Thus, I haven't found a way to express it accurately and succinctly in words yet.
“[In] the study and mastery of any field to keep in mind that a fundamental characteristic of any discipline is that it provides a particular perspective on reality—it does not describe reality itself.”
~ Paul Lample
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