ABSTRACT
Self-mastery is all about awareness, and it begins with self-awareness. By adulthood the socialization process regarding emotion is so engrained that some of us scarcely realize that the peoples have any emotions at all, and the vast majority are blind to one emotion or the other. The thinking center would light up, and the emotional center would calm down. In that moment awareness and skill are one. The act of noticing with the thinking mind is the skill that calms the emotional mind. Feeling the stress, the person who has chosen to do something different will also go into reptilian brain alert and be tempted to stop and go back to the way things were (a flight reaction). There is a powerful urge to stick with the known and to slip back into the safety of behaviors the person have done before.
