Day 297/366 days Towards Self-Mastery.
As you reach for self-mastery you're reaching for inner calm. All that inner work and reflection is about resolving old issues, reassessing expectations and beliefs and adjusting your life so that you get off the emotional roller coaster, and achieve a nice steady and comfortable ride going forward.
Apart from the really important work of resolving passed traumas, there are some practical things you can attend to right away.
When it comes to paying the bills, it's never been easier to set up an automatic payment and pay bills on a regular schedule to take all the pain out of meeting the monthly accounts.
Back before internet banking, or internet at all, it was customary to sit down each month and write out a pile of cheques to send off by snail mail to each service provider. Each stroke of the pen across the cheque to render it "not negotiable" should it go astray in the mail, was a painful reminder that money was coming in one hand and going out the other just as quickly.
When internet banking became a thing I was an early adopter. It was truly life transforming to go online and set up automatic payments for all my monthlies. Not only did it save me hours of work each month, it took all the emotional pain away as well.
Before long I learned to make that job even more rewarding and uplifting. Yes, paying bills now for me is uplifting. Here's my secret.
Auto-payment was a great revelation of the internet age, I pay all my bills by auto-payment, fortnightly. AND I pay a little extra on each fortnight, so that as times goes by, I get ahead of my bills.
Now when I receive my bills by email, my accounts are in credit. This work exceptionally well for the power bill because I use more power in winter than summer, and by the time winter comes around, I'm several hundred dollars in credit. I can use heating to my hearts content and to my greater comfort knowing it's already paid for.
Rates are paid in advance. Telecoms, insurances, subscriptions when I can.
There's no need to put yourself through the torture of paying bills each month wondering if you will have enough funds to go around. Do a budget, work out your outgoings, get everything on auto-pay and let the technology work for you. What's left is what you have to support your table and your entertainment, and hopefully a little savings as well.
Self-mastery is about getting your house in order. Finding all the times that disharmony disturbs your equilibrium and ferreting out the solutions. Money matters disturb most of us. Getting to the bottom of your money consciousness might take a while and a good deal of understanding your ancestral emotional and attitudinal inheritances. In the meantime take practical steps to minimise the pain of earning dollars and paying dollars for services rendered.
366 days Towards Self-Mastery
When I considered my New Year's intentions for 2020 I had just one: To allow my heart to love what it loved...and let it lead me. (If not now, then when?)
I've spent months working on integrating my life. To live life more fully with my home life, my interests, my work, my responsibilities, all coming together, all connected. I want to give each the attention that they desire and need, and still have time and energy for the others. That means living and working from the heart.
As I was clearing out my bookshelf over the Christmas break I discovered Simple Abundance. I set it aside to explore it on New Year's Day as I lazed through another delicious day of nothingness. Sarah, the author, says this book is about living in grace. Living in grace I realised, is about Self-Mastery.
My thirst for understanding the human condition has driven me all my life, and hand-in-hand with self-mastery it has been a life-long goal. And seeing as I love to write, that living in grace is about self-mastery, and I love a bit of a challenge, then if I am truly going to let my heart lead, I really don't have any other choice. So scary as it feels, I'm starting out on a daily mission of leaning into the suggestions of this daybook and making a daily post to keep me accountable. If not now, then when?
I'm Josie. You can find out a little more about me here.
Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy: by Sarah Ban Breathnach.
This book is written for the Australian and NZ market because it refers to seasonal changes. It's available on Amazon here if you'd like to follow along.