beliefs

The importance of dealing with your beliefs
By Hitesh Verma

Now, if you're like most people who understand the powerful Law of Attraction that was all talked about recently on Television with respect to the movie - The Secret, know that it's entirely up to us to create the future in the way we want.

In fact, the concept is so stupidly simple that most tend to pass it saying, " Nah, it doesn't seem like it'll work ..." And that's where this article comes in.

You see, the Law of Attraction says, "Like attracts like". We're sort of magnets attracting unto us what ever we put out - most importantly whatever we think about. Our Universe is an inclusion based Universe that says "yes" to every though that we put out. It doesn't distinguish if we want it or not, it just fulfills whatever we're thinking about.

And, if we have a belief that's counter to what we're thinking, we're offering a mixed signal to the Universe, saying, " Bring me that. OK, forget about it, because I don't think that I'll get that".

We human beings have been so conditioned by our surroundings to think & behave in a certain way. We have so many beliefs that we've formed all around us that get us more of what we believe. Most of us have grown up not believing there was enough & that there was always going to be a shortage. Which ones of the following disempowering beliefs do you think you face?

- I'm not deserving enough. "You know, even John who is always at work doesn’t make that much money. How can I even dream of making that much?"

- If I'm rich, I will not fit in my social circle. My friends will see me as an outsider. They'll say, "Look at Jane! She's a big show off with her new sports car."

- You have to be really smart to be rich & well, mine is a different case. "You need at least a college degree to be successful & make money. I know about Bill Gates, but who else. You know that's one case"

- I always have to work hard for making my ends meet & that’s what I'll be doing all my life. "Isn't that what most of the world do? They work all day & then frugally run their households & raise great children"

Do you get the idea? If on one hand, you're asking the Universe for a million dollars & your inner beliefs are saying otherwise, then what do you think you'll get?

There are a few methods of dealing with your belief system. In the next article, I'll get into more details of exactly how to approach the beliefs & how to change them.

Be patient. You didn't get all these beliefs in a day, so changing will take time. And here's the best part, when you do change them then the manifestations will begin to flow in easily. More of the things that you want will come your way faster than ever.

The Magical Beliefs of Childhood
By James P. Krehbiel

As children, we think we have the magical powers to change all that is wrong with our world. We need to believe that we can control problems in order to survive emotionally; i.e., we may have parents who aren't emotionally healthy. They may lack the capacity to be nurturing, supportive & affirming.

In such cases, we perform to please, trying every means to get our parents to act like functional adults. When our efforts fail in getting what we need from our parents, we turn our feeling inward & believe that somehow we're the one's who are defective, not our parents.

That way we can minimize the pain that results from dealing with them. Many people turn to self-blame as a way of coping & hold the image that our parents will someday change & become the loving people that we always wanted. As we transition to adulthood, many of us mantain this psyhic image, believing that people ought to behave the way we want them to repond.

Many of us keep striving, pursuing, performing & fixing in order to fulfill the fantasy of what we want from others. By taking responsibility for our parent's failures, we let them off the hook & minimize the pain regarding how they treated us.

As young children, we need the comfort of feeling safe. We tend to gravitate toward that which is familiar & comfortable even when it's dysfunctional. We maintain behavior patterns established by our parents. The safety of our support system makes us feel secure in the midst of an insecure world.

Those who experience appropriate parental support & comfort feel grounded. However, as we transition to adulthood, we continue to look for external validation to make us feel secure, while we live in the midst of insecurity.

Eventually, the notion of trying to stay secure breaks down as we're faced with ambiguous & challenging problems. Allan Watts, author & philosopher, alludes to this paradox. the more we try to grab onto security, the more we actually feel out of control.

"Grabbing for security is like trying to hold water in our hands." Paradically, it's ony when we accept & embrace insecurity, that we actually become more grounded.

Believe In Yourself Believe In Your Dreams
By Donna Webster

Are you living the life of your dreams? Or are you like most women going thru the day to day motions, day after day?

Surprisingly many women aren't living the life of their dreams. And it’s certainly not because they have no dreams or goals. Many women have low self esteem & have never had anyone to build the confidence in them that they needed as a child.

Without someone on your side cheering you on & telling you to believe in yourself, it’s very easy to get discouraged & not pursue your dreams.

We all have dreams & goals & although we may be grown up now, those dreams & goals still hold a place in our hearts. You feel them now & then tugging at your heart strings trying to get your attention, but you’re not sure what to do?

The good news is that it’s never too late to live the life you have always dreamed of. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have your own personal cheer leader.

You already have everything you need to become whatever you want in life. If you believe in yourself, anything is possible. You have amazing gifts & talents & it’s you job to discover them & share them with the world.

With a little faith, hope & courage, you can live the life you have always dreamed of. Believe in yourself & the rest will follow. Take that first step today, your destination is waiting for you.

The Belief Trap
By Jane Prince-Smith LISW

What to do if you're certain things will never change & it all seems impossible...

Do it anyway.

The thing about change is that it always happens. We don’t always realize it, because we’re often too busy living inside our heads & believing in various distortions of reality. But the basic principle of life is change.

Everything ages. People grow old. Cars rust. Living things die. Seeds lie dormant, then sprout, bloom & die back. Weather changes constantly. Seasons change. Sick people get healthy; healthy people become ill. People are sad. Then sadness passes & gives way to joy.

So, to say that nothing will ever change isn't true. If people say this & they’re not psychotic, what’s going on?

What’s going on is the process of belief. Belief is that which feels true. Notice the accent is on the word “feels.” What we believe isn't necessarily true, but it feels that way, so we accept it.

This is why people act in ways which are contradictory to their best interest. Smart people do dumb things. Kind people do mean things. Good people do bad things. Some people fly planes into buildings. It is because of their beliefs.

So we can see that beliefs, although very possibly not true, are very powerful. Some schools of therapy are built on the premise of changing one’s beliefs. When this can be done, it's an extraordinarily powerful technique.

But sometimes, our beliefs get the better of us. The most insidious belief most people ever have is a belief in their own unhappiness or misfortune. They reason, “Things will never get better. They never have; why would things change now?” “I'm unlucky.” “I’ve always been poor, so odds are I always will be.” “No one would ever love me.”

We can argue with the beliefs, but it may be a waste of time. They're very strong. So, the only way to combat them is to BEHAVE in a manner opposite to your beliefs.

What does
this mean, exactly?

For starters, it means play-acting. Play-acting is the practice of behaviors that are the opposite of what you think.

i.e., a young girl believes she's ugly. As a result, she always walks with a shuffling kind of gait, slouched posture, head down. (She’s trying to be invisible). The more she does this, the more her belief in her ugliness grows.

One day, she starts to walk differently. She holds her head up, makes eye contact & smiles slightly at people, picks up her feet & plants them with purpose. She still believes she's ugly of course; she’s only doing this on a dare.

After a week people are starting to greet her warmly in the halls. After 2 weeks kids are chatting with her at the start of classes. Eventually, she's plunged into a crisis:

...if she’s really that ugly, how come people are so nice to her?

This is the first crack in the belief. There are many to come. Sooner or later, the belief will be replaced with REALITY.

We see beliefs come crashing down all the time. The child who believes he can't ride without his training wheels; the individual who believes she can't meet a particular challenge, the people who believe others of a certain race or creed are awful, until they work with or live next door to some of those folks & have a good experience.

So believing that your life will always be awful because it always has been is just that: a belief.

You have no more certainty that your life won’t change than you have that you'll even be alive tomorrow. In any case, it doesn’t matter what you believe; only what you do.

If you practice living as though good fortune is around the corner, sooner or later it will be. The odds are with you. If you practice carrying yourself as a person of beauty & importance, you'll become so & most importantly, others will see you as such.

If you plan your life to include abundance, it will, eventually. Your choices will be different, your behaviors will be different & when opportunity comes, your eyes will be open.

And the universe itself responds differently. Whether or not you believe in such things, it's been shown repeatedly that optimists are luckier than pessimists.

So, it’s a 3 step process:

1. Act the opposite of what you believe.
2. Watch it come true.
3. Change your belief.

This method works. It feels funny at first, but who cares? You felt lousy to begin with; what’s a little more weirdness? The point is, TRY IT. You have nothing to lose, except maybe feeling a little silly; but trust me, no one will notice.

What is Your Belief, You Think
By Marc de Bruin

The world you experience around you is the world YOU experience around you. It’s not my world & neither is it your mother’s or father’s world (although to a certain degree it is, but more about that a little later).

You have your very own way of seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting & smelling this earthly experience, which makes your viewpoint unique. Have you ever wondered why that's so? Well, keep on reading.

There's this theory that our senses are bombarded with about 2 million bits of information every second. If you'd be aware of all 2 million bits, you’d go bonkers completely. No doubt whatsoever.

That’s why our nervous system has this incredible ability to “block out” huge amounts of info & to only let in about 134 bits (that's 0.000067%) per second to process.

What underpins this ability to discard most of the sensory information & only be aware of a tiny bit of it are our internal filters, which distort, delete & generalize the sensory input to bite-sized pieces?

A couple of very important ones of these filters are the values, beliefs & memories you hold. For the purpose of this article I’d like to talk a bit more about “beliefs” as a filtration tool.

We all hold beliefs & that’s a good thing, considering we don’t want to go mad because of this massive assault of sensory input. But what are “beliefs”, really? Well, they're the spectacles thru which you view the world & give it a certain “color.” Your beliefs make your world your own, unique world.

We hold beliefs

about nearly everything:

ourselves
other people
work
play
hobbies
the world
concepts
health
emotions, etc.

Here are a few examples of beliefs, that make things more clear:

I'm a brilliant / awful person
My wife / husband loves me (not)
The world is a terrible / gorgeous place to live in
Nature is beautiful / horrible & scary
The earth is round (yes, that's a belief, not as much a fact. As little as 600 years ago, people believed the earth was flat! Who knows, in another 600 years from now, people might believe the earth is just a disc with pictures moving from left to right on it & life on earth is merely a “circular illusion”………)
Black cars are more beautiful than red cars (that’s a truth for me, but hey, even that's a belief!)
When people look angry at me, I get scared / even angrier
Driving a car is very dangerous
The more I meditate, the closer I get to enlightenment
I don't like being shouted at!
I'm (not) good (enough)
Working is what people are born to do
Money only comes to me thru hard work Etc., etc.

Our beliefs are the mental maps we use to navigate the territory we call “our life”. We develop(ed) our beliefs over time, starting from the day we were born, out of our experiences in life. At birth, we don’t really believe anything. But soon after that we start to develop our first beliefs about life.

It all starts with a vague representation of something we experience. We haven’t got a clue where to fit that experience yet, but with time more & more clarity comes & “knowledge” arises.

That knowledge gets backed up by even more experience & solidifies. Now the knowledge becomes a “knowing,” something that you consider “true” in your life’s experience.

You've started to believe in what once was merely a thought, a possibility in the realm of options. If more validating & affirming experiences are stacked on each other, the belief develops even further, into a conviction.

From that point on, you've built a fortress around your belief & it might seem that no-one is able to prove your belief wrong anymore.

Are you still with me??

I’ll give you a real-life example out of my mother’s life. She got quite disappointed in people in her early life already. She experienced the German suppression in WW II, had a not-so-nice stepmother & quite a tough upbringing.

All these (& more) experiences developed the belief in her that “people aren't innately friendly, can't be trusted straight away & need to be regarded with caution at all times, otherwise they’ll disappoint you”.

Now that's / was quite a destructive belief, but nevertheless a true one in my mum’s life. When my parents divorced (another disappointment) & most of the family on my father’s side - sort of - dumped her like a hot brick, that belief got reinforced heavily.

It was true for her, wasn’t it? Later on, a few more not-so-nice encounters with the human race turned her belief into a conviction & she died (too young, in my opinion) convinced that “we” (yes, us humans) are not-so-nice beings to begin with, apart from a few special gems.

And mind you, my mother was quite spiritually evolved in many ways & taught me great wisdoms. This “parasite” belief, however, had fully invaded her thoughts & made her life experience, well, not-so-nice, to say the least.

I'm quite convinced I didn't take that specific belief on board, luckily enough. My experiences with the human race are very positive!

The above example goes to show that you can believe anything (how idiotic the idea might seem to other people), as long as you hold an initial representation & find evidence in your experiences that validate & confirm that representation.

Slowly this “idea” turns into a truth, something that's true for you in your world. The belief my mother held (or at least my translation of it) was quite a negative one, but of course we hold very positive beliefs as well!

They make your life interesting & enjoyable & allow you to soar high above mediocrity!

You’ll probably agree with me (I assume you got the picture) that the sum total of your beliefs makes up your global representation of “the world”. Some beliefs you share with others, other beliefs are purely yours.

A fact is, that many of the beliefs you hold in your life right now are derivatives of beliefs your mother & father held in their lives. Our parents leave an enormous mark on us, because they've been with us from the day one & are our prime teachers for the first bunch of years of our lives.

And so there's a lot of truth in the biblical wisdom the “the sins of the father are visited upon the son”, where “sins”, in my spiritual perspective, are the limiting beliefs our parents held.

In my coaching practise I work a lot with beliefs. I teach my clients how to find out what their beliefs are in the first place, how to grow & reinforce the beliefs that are supporting them in their lives & how to undo & break down the limiting, non-effective beliefs.

The simple truth (no, not a belief) is that if we're able to create beliefs (& we are), then we're also able to un-create & re-create beliefs. It's just a matter of finding a new (desirable) representation in reality & searching for evidence that confirms & validates that new representation.

Moreover, there are simple but very powerful tools that I use to break down an old, limiting, not honoring belief, so the client & I are able to work at both ends of the issue. A tad of effort & persistence on the client’s side to establish the new, honoring & effective belief means his/her world will change. It can't do anything else but that. Change your beliefs, change your world & enjoy it more. Simple & very powerful!

Marc de Bruin
LandMarc Coaching & Health Solutions

Master your beliefs, Master Your Emotions
By Steve Davis

Joe makes a comment & you suddenly feel a rush of energy. Your face flushes & your knuckles whiten as you begin squeezing the edge of the table for dear life. Some part of you knows that this feeling isn't proportionate to Joe’s comment or intention, but something was triggered in you nonetheless & you’re ready to bite his head off.

To be effective as a friend, spouse, significant other, coworker, manager, leader, or whatever role you’re playing at the moment, learning to manage your feelings is a critical step toward living a happy, successful & fulfilled life. And let me just say this up front, managing your feelings doesn't mean that you stuff them down & repress them. It means that you become aware of what's going on inside of you, own your feelings as your own, heed the message that they have for you & act responsibly.

What are emotions & what is emotional mastery? Emotions are often described as energy in motion. They become problems only when we judge them as wrong, bad, or inappropriate. When we let our emotions run us, we miss the message that they carry. When we stuff them down for fear of what they might cause us to do, they simply lie in wait to emerge with a vengeance later on. Emotional mastery is the ability to process our emotions so that we receive their message & use their energy for appropriate action.

Our emotions are very much a reflection of our beliefs about life events. For example, if you believe that you are your work & you suddenly lose your job, you're likely to feel an incredible amount of fear, as you perceive your very survival to be at stake. If you repress this fear, possibly because you view it as a weakness, you’ll probably experience anger or rage & at some point, you'll likely lash out at whoever’s available.

If on the other hand, you're a person who views your job simply as one aspect of your life & you know that your inherent value lies in your unique skills & qualities, then your feelings & response to losing your job will probably be a whole lot different. You may just view this loss as an opportunity to explore a whole new path for yourself.

The bottom line here is this: how you feel in any situation corresponds exactly with what you believe about yourself & the situation. Master your beliefs & you’ll master your emotions.

Knowing that you can change how you feel simply by changing how you think about each experience is a powerful concept. So if you feel upset about something, ask yourself, “How can I reinterpret this event in a such a way that I can feel good or at least OK about it?”

If you have a bill you can’t pay, instead of getting mad or sad about it, decide that this is an opportunity to redesign your financial life. Ask for help, develop a plan & use your energy to get moving on it.

continued below the windows....

childhood beliefs come from our parents' thinking

How you think about your emotions adds even another layer. We often give ourselves a double whammy when we get upset about feeling upset. Here are some positive ways to interpret the purpose of our basic emotions set down by Peter McWilliams in his book, "Do It."

Fear is the energy to do your best in a new situation.
Guilt is the energy for personal change - it's anger directed toward ourselves & anger is the energy for change.
Unworthiness keeps us on track - just as we can have anything we want, we can't have everything we want. So too, we're worthy of anything we want, but we may not be worthy of everything we want.
Hurt feelings are a reminder of how much we care.

So how can you use this information in your life? I suggest that you examine any beliefs you hold around emotions & the situations that trigger them. Begin to cultivate present moment awareness as your emotions arise. Just notice them & look at them, not as good or bad, but simply with curiosity & with the question, what's this energy for & how do I choose to use it?

Practice. Begin the practice of observing emotions when they arise & identify any judgments you might have about them. Focus instead on listening to the message they hold for you. Then, if you should be so bold, act on this message by expressing the emotion in a positive fashion.

Change your Beliefs & Change your Life
By Leslie Gail

So, we all have beliefs about work, life & ourselves that we brought with us from our earlier years. Thru our experiences as well as what people told us, we now look at & embrace life in a certain manner.

Maybe your parents told you you weren't smart enough. Maybe growing up in a large family you didn't feel your opinion mattered.

These beliefs are limiting in that they're still holding you back from moving forward in your life. On the flip side, maybe your parents made you feel smart & that you could accomplish anything you set your mind to. Or you saw a strong work ethic that's now instilled in you today.

These beliefs are enabling in that they enable you to be your best. The problem arises when you allow past limiting beliefs to guide your present & future decisions.

These negative beliefs stay with you & you remain stuck in the past. You do however have the choice to create new supportive beliefs, leaving the past where it belongs, in the past.

Acknowledge that what you were taught you had no control over, but you DO have control over your mind & belief system today.

Action Steps For The Week:

1. List past beliefs

What did you grow up believing about work, relationships & yourself?