"If your reality is distorted by the experiences, beliefs and agreements that are unique to you, you project that out into the world. Very often what is happening in your life - right now- is a perfect reflection of what you believe. Almost everyone in your inner circle is in your movie reading off your script."- Ray Dodd The concept of changing your beliefs as the first step to experiencing more of your life has a clich-ish ring to it. It makes sense. Hundreds of books have been written about it and thousands of workshops are currently running (including my own) that use this as a major part of their workshop. But what does it truly mean to change your beliefs? Is it as simple as deciding to change your beliefs? What if you dont know that what you are looking out of is your belief system? What if its just a belief that you need to change your beliefs? What if the only thing holding you back from doing what you truly love to do is your belief in needing to overcome your beliefs before you can do what you love? However, if you truly believe that changing your belief systems can make you get more out of life, then we have certain issues to examine before we can get there. First of all, we need to know what beliefs are. A lot us may think that beliefs are actually things that are inside us. However, if we truly look at it we will see that beliefs are who we are rather than just the things that we believe in. What we believe in is an idea that is symptom of our beliefs. This is an important distinction to make because nowadays in different workshops I have seen seminar leaders say, Examine your beliefs. Write out a sentence or two about what is holding you back. What negative beliefs are holding you back? In doing that, they are actually making the people write out the symptom rather than the belief. A belief is who you are. Your beliefs system is what you are looking out of at the world around you. These beliefs that seminar leaders make you write out is actually a symptom rather than the actual belief itself. We all know what normally happens when we attack the symptom rather than the source itself, it normally doesnt get solved and something else develops in its place. The relief is temporary and will return or get worse in the long run. So how do you actually change your belief system if its not through writing out sentences about what you believe about yourself? The only way to do this is to start to become more aware of our reactions to the different situations in life. Which situations should we look at? Any situation that provokes some form of extreme emotional reaction is a situation to look into. Why is it that we are reacting that way? What have we believed about the situation that has made us act this way? This is extremely important to look at. It all begins with awareness into life and into our reactions to the situation. Whenever you feel that you are helpless, start looking at what you can do about it rather than continuing to proclaim your helplessness. You need to realize that your emotional reactions are occurring in result to what you have believed about the situation. There is also another fact that you must realize: Every time that you react to an internal idea, you reinforce that idea. Your reaction actually reinforces the truth of that idea inside your head. You need to study yourself whenever you react. I know that this may be hard to do, but no one said that it was going to be easy. Realize what you are reacting to. That is your belief system. How are you looking at the world? What you are seeing is your own personal reality and not the objective world outside. Realize that your reactions are actually nothing more than your projection of you believe about the world so start there. The next time you need to examine your beliefs, you dont need to write down sentences and then create ways to change those beliefs. All that you have to do is examine yourself and your reactions in your daily life to see what you really believe and what is stopping you. Then simply see that there are other alternatives to living a more expressive and fuller life. As I said, its not going to be easy, but its going to be worth the effort since youll be gaining back your true freedom to live life fully! |
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