December 8, 2021
The Power of Self-Mastery:
Changing Your Life Through Discovery, Exploration, and Transformation
Brandie Allen
Aviva (2021)
ISBN: 978-1636181523
New Book Teaches How to Become Experts at Making Positive Personal Changes
Brandie Allen’s The Power of Self-Mastery: Changing Your Life Through Discovery, Exploration, and Transformation is for anyone who wants to make positive changes. She offers processes for people to break their bad habits or get out of their ruts, no matter their circumstances, so they can make positive decisions to enhance their lives. Brandie shares her own powerful story of how she went through her own “dark night of the soul” and made the changes she needed, and she shares practical steps for how others can do the same.
The journey to self-mastery, to taking back control of your life and improving it, begins with learning to recognize where we are and what we might be doing to impede our progress, as well as what or who else might be standing in our way. Brandie encourages us to realize the process will not be easy, and shows us how to embrace the discomfort while avoiding pitfalls to make the journey smoother.
One major factor that may be holding us back is that we have created personas for ourselves that we have come to believe reflect our true identity. We do this in many ways, taking on labels like wife, mom, good son, boss, or perhaps more negative identities such as idiot, loser, incompetent, etc. Unfortunately, we are often telling ourselves a story about ourselves that does not always reflect who we are. Usually, it is one we have taken on because we have let other people determine who we should be, or we have used it to protect/hide our true personality from the world. Brandie, inspired by Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song,” urges us to emancipate ourselves from the mental slavery we have inflicted on ourselves or allowed society to inflict on us. She reminds us that only we are capable of freeing our minds.
The persona Brandie took on was victim. It’s easy to see why she adopted it. The dark night of the soul came for her when a series of difficult events hit her: “For me, the dark night came when, within a brief period, I filed for divorce, my children and I moved out, my grandfather died, my dog died, my estranged father died, and I totaled my SUV.” However, this experience ultimately caused her to shift her focus and reject the victim persona. She describes what happened as: “The difference was my focus shifted from feeling victimized and like there was no end to the nightmare to a much stronger and determined outlook. No one was coming to save me. This was something I had to take control of and change for myself. Period. I realized it was my journey and mine alone. As Maya Angelou said, ‘I’ve got my own back.’”
Brandie discusses how a dark night of the soul experience is a positive thing because it forces us to question everything we thought we knew, from what is important in our life to our relationships with others and our role in our family. That questioning can lead to some stunning and empowering realizations. It might also lead to setting boundaries with people and causing some turmoil, but ultimately, a healing of our past. As Brandie describes, a dark night of the soul can ultimately be a “divine rollercoaster.”
One significant way to heal that Brandie explores is the power of letting go of old patterns, including the need for validation and concern over what others think of you. Letting go is like peeling away all the protective layers to get at the heart of who we truly are and what we truly need. It may sound scary, but that is because we do not have the whole picture. However, since we can’t predict the future, we can never have the whole picture, so Brandie encourages us to “trust the Universe, and take inspired action during times of change.” Then the waiting for how things will turn out becomes easier.
Throughout the book, Brandie shares numerous personal stories of how she created positive changes in her life. Some of them are very surprising but powerful, such as when she was hypnotized and recalled a traumatic event from her childhood she was too young even to remember. Recalling the event and then working through how it was still subconsciously affecting her life allowed her to heal from it and make powerful changes. Perhaps the most touching story for me was one she told about her relationship with her father. She came to realize the role she played in distancing herself from her father, and then when he died, she was stunned by the number of people who came to his funeral and the kind things they said about him. This made her realize how she had missed out on getting to know her father—a difficult lesson to learn, but one that taught her to be more open and forgiving and also take responsibility for her own role in relationships. As Mother Teresa said, “If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”
The Power of Self-Mastery has many more powerful realizations and lessons for all of us. Change is possible when we are willing to let go of the past and embrace the change before us. It is a scary process, but it is empowering. When we embrace change, we change ourselves, we master ourselves, and we become empowered.
For more information about Brandie Allen and The Power of Self-Mastery, visit www.ThePowerofSelfMastery.com.
— Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD and award-winning author of Narrow Lives and The Best Place
