Your beliefs become your thoughts
Your thoughts become your words
Your words become your actions
Your actions become your habits
Your habits become your character
Your character becomes your destiny. – M. GANDHI
What are your beliefs?
Beliefs are curious things. We make them up then they form the bedrock of how we live our lives. There are positive beliefs that support us and contribute to feelings of happiness and health. There are limiting/negative beliefs that don’t support us. Instead, theycontribute to feelings of unhappiness and dis-ease. Paradoxically they aren’t necessarily true!
For example, human beings once believed that the world was flat. Ships venturing past the horizon would eventually fall off into an abyss. We know that this is not true. It was a cosmology that Christopher Columbus overcame before he set sail and discovered the Americas.
Another example comes from Buddhism. There is a famous story of a group of blind men who touch an elephant to learn what it is like. Each one feels a different part, but only one part. They then compare notes and learn that they are in complete disagreement. They fight about what the elephant is. Each is convinced that they are right about his interpretation. They are all right and all are wrong because they only have a limited perspective.
The story highlights that our beliefs hold only one perspective and don’t necessarily hold the full truth of reality.
Where do beliefs come from?
What we believe shows up as a mirror in our life and mostly unconsciously. Our beliefs and values fuel how we experience and interpret life. Do you believe that you live in a random cosmos where nothing makes sense or do you believe that you live in an ordered universe where everything makes sense? Each perspective will colour the spin that you put on life’s events.
According to Wikipedia, a “belief” is the state of mind in which a person things something to be the case, with or without empirical evidence to prove that something is the case with factual certainty.
Our beliefs come from what we heard from our culture, parents, friends, television, music, books, politics. More importantly, the assumptions we make and misunderstandings also have an impact. Misunderstandings is key to understanding this. So many times painful experiences lead us to create an interpretation of the event; then this interpretation becomes a negative belief. As children, we respond to life from the right side of the brain. It is the limbic system that governs our relationships and survival mechanisms. We often make a conclusion about ourselves like I am not loveable, I am not safe, God is a cruel god, I can’t trust anyone.
Once we have a belief, any information from the outside world is filtered through the belief so that we strengthen our original belief and reject any information that may contradict it. This is how they become our internal programming. We carry them with us throughout our lives. Most of the time we do not question them.
Beliefs are hard to find
Paradoxically, our core beliefs are hard to find. They exist in the background of our psyche hidden from our conscious mind. Yet they are so powerful. Studies have shown that 95% of all our behaviours and actions are unconscious and influenced by these hidden beliefs. The personal unconscious is the storage house of all our complexes, that is, those emotional and painful split off parts of our personality that were created when we were children.
The iceberg is a wonderful image to show that what we see in ourselves and others is only the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface of what we say and what we do is a world view about life and the nature of the universe.
What are limiting beliefs?
The Buddha taught that the root of our suffering can be found in our thoughts about our reality. This is not about suffering that comes from real loss, grief or other authentic pain; this is inevitable. Buddha spoke about the dukkha suffering that arises from our beliefs about what is happening or what is not happening in the moment. Limiting beliefs are rooted in the past and in fear. These are the places in where we are stuck. They constrict our experience of life and disconnect us from fully living in the moment.
Real but not necessarily true
Thoughts and beliefs are navigational maps that are not necessarily true. Some serve us by supporting feelings of connection and meaning. Others cause feelings of separation, self-aversion and/or blame of ourselves and others. We can free ourselves from harmful beliefs by investigating them with a dedicated, mindful and courageous presence. We need to understand how do our beliefs lead to an interpretation of life events? When we do this, we can look at life’s events with some objectivity of what is so without overlaying an interpretation. It is then that we are empowered to change our beliefs based on what life asks of us NOW and that which will give us meaning.
Tara Brach – Buddhist spiritual teacher and psychologist – speaks of a process of inquiry in her book True Refuge. It starts with connecting to the emotional suffering that we experience. Are we fearful? Are we angry? Are we depressed? And then we need to ask ourselves is there a story that we tell ourselves about this suffering.
Then we ask ourselves the following questions:
What are the beliefs associated with this feeling?
Are they true?
What is it like to live life with these beliefs?
What would life be like without these beliefs?
Reflection:
The way to put this into action is to take a life experience. I had the occasion to do this recently. A friend needed to reschedule a get together. My reaction was anger that I knew well in myself. It would have been so easy to go through my day being grumpy that I had been “rescheduled”. When I actually looked at what was really going on, it was really clear that my old programming had kicked in. My reaction was connected to my abandonment story. When I checked in with my friend, I found out that what was going on for them didn’t have anything to do with my interpretation. I learned that it is so important to get a reality check to measure our experience versus the outer circumstances.
If you would like to discuss this more, I have started a thread on my facebook page
Christina Becker
April 2017