The unexamined life is not worth living. ~Socrates

Setting the foundation for examining my life fundamentally changed me and how I perceive my experience. In a word, neutrality transformed the way I engage with the world. It’s not apathy—though that sometimes occurs. It’s not indifference—though that can also happen. Neutrality is the ability to look at an experience without the immediate need to judge it or categorize it into one of the many pre-defined piles we’ve created.

Neutrality can be uncomfortable because, at its core, it asks us not to judge. Our instincts drive us to quickly label things as good or bad, right or wrong, because judgment serves as a form of self-protection. By categorizing an experience as "bad," we activate our defenses, giving us the illusion that we’re guarding ourselves from potential harm. But this immediate judgment distorts our perception of the experience. That’s where neutrality comes in.

Neutrality offers us space between the experience and our reaction. When we pause before judging, clarity begins to emerge. Without the need to defend ourselves or change the experience, we can gain authentic insights from it.

Experience itself is inherently neutral. We assign meaning based on whether we perceive it as "good" or "bad." But this duality is a projection of our own judgments. By labeling something as good or bad, we lose sight of the insights the experience is trying to offer us. We overlook the opportunity to learn about ourselves.

Once we recognize this, we can begin to ask meaningful questions:

• What am I meant to learn from this experience?
• What pain is this triggering within me? (This is something you can heal.)
• Can I see the experience without the stories of blame, shame, guilt, or victimization?

It’s okay to ask these questions even after the experience has passed. By regularly reflecting after each experience, you’ll notice patterns in your behavior. These insights will allow you to consciously choose a new response. Through this self-awareness, you'll be able to change your behavior in real-time.

However, to ask these questions effectively, we must first see the experience neutrally. If we try to answer them while clinging to stories of blame, shame, guilt, or victimization, our answers will be clouded by those emotions. The experience remains distorted.

We need to drop the story. The experience is simply what happened. We don’t need to understand it from someone else’s perspective or justify others’ actions. What matters is how we understand ourselves within the experience. This means letting go of the stories that justify the pain we feel. We don’t need justification.

Blame, shame, guilt, and victimization are stories that help us justify our feelings. When we blame someone for how we feel, we are justifying our emotions, but that justification isn’t true. It’s hard to grasp, but our feelings aren’t caused by others. Our unconscious mind has already interpreted the situation before we even consciously process it. This triggers emotion without giving us the chance to question it. That initial rush to judgment arises from a desire for self-protection, and it starts the story of justification—making it harder for us to take full responsibility for our feelings.

Self-mastery teaches us how to manage ourselves within an experience. It gives us the ability to accept full responsibility for our thoughts, feelings, and actions, removing the need to justify them. The experience itself doesn’t justify anything—it simply is. And in that space, we can fully accept ourselves and our responses.

Justification is a crutch that prevents us from embracing neutrality. Neutrality allows us to stand firm in the experience without the need to change or justify it. By focusing on our internal thoughts and feelings, we take ownership of our responses and stop unconsciously reacting.

In questioning these ideas, I realized that justification is self-defense in disguise. We are taught to defend ourselves from everything, but to embrace neutrality, I had to drop my shield and stop defending myself. This led me to a crucial question: What am I afraid of?

It’s hard to be neutral toward things we fear. The question becomes even more powerful when we consider this: Was there truly something to protect myself from, or was I overreacting out of fear? The answer was clear: I was overreacting. There was nothing to fear except my own fear of "what if?"

"What if?" stems from a need for control—the belief that if I don’t react, I’m inviting more pain. This is the logic behind self-defense: If I don’t stop this now, it will only get worse. But what if reacting doesn’t stop the problem? More often than not, the experience happens again anyway.

So where does our sense of control come from? It lies in our power to choose. That’s where true control resides. I trust myself to handle whatever comes next. If the experience repeats, I’ll need to make a decision about the relationship—perhaps limit or even end it. Instead of avoiding this by picking a fight, I allow whatever needs to happen to unfold.

We can't be neutral toward something we feel the need to control. When we use self-mastery to search for trouble—wondering if we need to pick a fight or justify our feelings—it pulls us into a rabbit hole, creating unnecessary pain. These are the stories we need to let go of. Self-mastery requires us to focus on our internal thoughts and feelings, not on external experiences or the outside world. It doesn’t matter why something happened—it simply did. We have to accept that and trust ourselves to handle what comes next.

This is the power of neutrality: the experience no longer matters—not because we don’t care about it, but because we prioritize ourselves by first addressing our own feelings. From there, we can question how to engage with the experience without the need for control or self-defense. This shift changes how we see the experience, offering a more neutral perspective. It allows us to respond in a much more rational and logical way, removing the immediate emotional reaction and opening the door to a conscious response. This is the power of neutrality.

Love to all.

Della