Are You Willing to Lose Yourself to Gain Inner Mastery?

For many years, I have been on what I call the journey toward inner mastery of the self.

It’s a path that feels both ancient and intimate, as if I’ve been called not merely to “improve” or “achieve,” but to become—to align the fragmented pieces of my nature into one fluid, unfolding current.

As I’ve walked this path, I’ve come to see mastery not as a static peak to conquer, but as a dance, a conversation between my will and the world, between intention and surrender.

The I Ching’s Hexagram 1, Qian or Heaven, has been a profound guide to me on this journey. It speaks of pure, creative energy—the primal force that gives birth to all things. Qian is the dragon soaring through the sky, fierce, tireless, and full of potential.

It calls us to tap into our innate power, to recognize the wellspring of creative force within, and yet, crucially, to channel it with care. Qian doesn’t teach blind pushing; it teaches aligned movement, perseverance, and awareness of timing.

Willing To Do The Deep Work?

In practical life, this is where deep practice comes in—a tool that has been my compass toward mastery. Robert Greene, in his book Mastery, emphasizes this path of deep practice as the only authentic route to profound skill and self-command.

He writes of the “apprenticeship phase,” where the ego must quiet down, where repetition, struggle, and intentional focus burn away distraction and entitlement. It’s a humbling phase—a gritty, sometimes painful confrontation with limits. But it’s here, in the disciplined engagement with life, that the seeds of mastery are planted.

For me, this has meant sitting with discomfort, studying my patterns, and returning again and again to what matters, whether in my creative work, relationships, or spiritual practice. Deep practice is not glamorous. It’s the hours spent honing a craft when no one is watching, the countless failures that refine instinct, the solitude that shapes intuition. It is the slow accretion of wisdom through embodied experience.

And then, something shifts.

There comes a moment—sometimes gradual, sometimes sudden—when effort softens into effortlessness. The Taoist principle of wu wei comes alive: the art of non-forcing, the exquisite unfolding of action without strain.

Here, the boundaries between self and world thin, and what was once clumsy becomes fluid, what was once forced becomes natural. It is the musician lost in the music, the Substack writer or book author disappearing into a constellation of words, the lover merging with the beloved.

This is the paradox of mastery: once you have climbed the mountain of discipline, you must throw away the map and fly. Greene speaks to this in Mastery, describing how true masters appear relaxed, improvisational, even playful. They’ve internalized the rules so fully that they can now dance with them, break them, and invent anew. At this stage, control gives way to communion; we cease trying to dominate life and instead join its flowing current.

Can You Allow Life To Simply Unfold?

Surrendering into what is known as wu wei, a state of effortless action, is not passive. It requires trust— a willingness to yield to the intelligence of life, to loosen the grip of the ego that so desperately wants credit and control. It demands we relinquish the need to be the architect of every outcome and instead become a vessel, a channel through which the Tao moves.

In my own journey, I’ve tasted this surrender in fleeting moments: a conversation that blossoms without agenda, a piece of writing that seems to birth itself, a meditative stillness where doing dissolves into being. These moments remind me that mastery is less about conquering myself and more about coming home to myself—allowing the vast sky of Qian to move through me, as me.

To pursue mastery of the self, then, is not to tighten the reins but to prepare the vessel, to practice deeply so that when the winds of Heaven rise, you can lift your sails and let go. It is to trust that life, in its mysterious unfolding, knows the way better than you do.

Perhaps the most radical mastery of all is to disappear into the flow, to become no one, and in doing so, to become everything.

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Diamond Michael Scott

aka The Chocolate Taoist