The crystal ball of beliefs

If your life isn’t going as you had planned, it could be that your mental, emotional, and bodily map is limiting your world.

Beliefs are what we think about ourselves, others, and life.  If they are limiting, they place restrictions on our potential world, and therefore, in our results.  Beliefs translate into thoughts that are frequently charged with emotions, and that manifest through the body.

Each one of us comes to conclusions about the things that happen to us in life, and we emotionally absorb these outcomes.  We apply the negative and distort trauma to its most drastic point.  This deeply penetrates us, and soon converts into the mental programming that directs and guides our actions, and conditions the results.

A belief is a mental map that acts as a guideline for the decision making process.  We decree our future with them.  The smaller, more impoverished, hurt, limited or distorted our world map is, the more disfigured, complicated, and painful our space to unwind will be.  On the other hand, an open, enriched, healthy, and plentiful and lively map will provide us with greater adaptation to our environment, greater flexibility, and heightened understanding of both our interior and exterior world.

A belief is a feeling of certainty regarding the significance of certain things.  This affirmation then becomes the crystal ball through which we see life.  Everyone has their own system of beliefs, but we scarcely take the time to look at where they come from.  What are the sources of these beliefs?

The culture into which we are born transfers certain beliefs to us.  Family and our education sphere act as a beliefs transmission channel, as do the experiences we live throughout our lives, and our reactions to these experiences.  These are the pillars that sustain our beliefs.

Beliefs affect our perceptions about everything that surrounds us, and about ourselves.  Do we live in reality, or a mental production of it?  What we live and experience depends on own mental map’s representation, through which we designate meaning to the world.

Beliefs have enormous power over our actions.  As Henry Ford said, whether you believe that you can or can’t, you’re right.  We have beliefs that push us, or that limit us.  The important this is to identify them and know that they influence the way in which we relate to the world.  This impacts our happiness and success.

Beliefs are solidly installed in us, acting as the cement that fastens the bricks of our life.  This is so true that we frequently eliminate or avoid anything that doesn’t stack up to our beliefs.

What can we do?

You can change your beliefs.  We can transform these deeply engrained ideas that are so negative, limiting, and that pressure us for more positive, expansive, beneficial, productive, and advantageous ideas.  Our obstacle could be our lack of compromise in confronting them, in bringing them to consciousness, and taking responsibility for them.  It seems like there’s always some excuse to postpone this extremely essential task.  If we believe that we’re not capable of changing, our reality will be just that: we will not be able to change.

1.  Identify your limiting beliefs

We must make ourselves aware of these beliefs, localize them, and determine to what point we’ve been living our life like an android.  So many people walk through life on autopilot, without ever stopping to think about what is truly sabotaging their desires.  Reflect on those beliefs that have stopped your evolution in different areas of your life, and write them down on a piece of paper.

2. Challenge your beliefs

We have accepted and validated for such a long time ideas that restrict our potential and lock our creative strength in an invisible trunk.  This step is extremely revealing because it allows us to realize how many erroneous beliefs have taken control of our existence.

3. Change your limiting thoughts

Go back to your list of beliefs that don’t uphold your goals, curiosities, dreams, and aspirations, and think about what they’ve cost you, in emotional terms.  Write down your new beliefs, and feel the emotion of them already being integrated.  Read this list 5 times a day, and create a new vision of your life in your mind.  On your mind’s screen, clearly imagine how your life picks up with your new belief system.  This is the first step of the life awaiting you, if you are persistent with this objective.

Open your eyes to what’s around you, and take a good look at the examples and situations that support your new beliefs.  You will gain confidence and security in less time than you had imagined, and you’ll see how it is no longer difficult for you to fulfill actions that coincide with your life model.

We must move towards a new way of understanding the human being, based in our relationship with ourselves and with others.  We must work at emotional and instinctual reeducation, in integrating our thoughts, feelings, and actions to avoid thinking one thing, we feel something else, and do just the opposite.  We must remove the beliefs from our lives that reduce our confidence and crush our sense of security, that prevent our existence from expanding.  Feel life intensely, bring consciousness to your body, read the messages it gives you, and enter into the here and now.

Helena Lopez-Casares and Javier de la Sen, Principles at Higher Education for Bodily Intelligence

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