Your Beliefs are Unbelievable

Life doesn’t control you. What you believe about it, does. – Alan Cohen

Have you ever noticed how babies are fully engaged in whatever is happening around them? They’re like this fluid energy that is connected and interrelating with everything. They are experiencing life. This is what it means to be in your heart, fully engaged with how you feel, in oneness with all that is. They haven’t learnt to separate themselves from their experience by viewing life through the lens of a self-made belief structure.

Experiences happen and pass through their awareness. They have sensations, pictures, sounds and reactions. But they come and go all by themselves. As adults we allow this to a certain extent, for example when we let go of each breath. However, working with many people in my clinic, I’ve noticed that even breathing tends, consciously or unconsciously, to be controlled. It is often very shallow and not adequate to support optimal functioning of the body. People use their breath to hold onto their repressed feelings. There is hardly a day that goes by where I’m not encouraging people to breathe more fully. Young children don’t have to work at breathing, they naturally let it flow.

From the age of two things start to change. Your parents and everyone else convince you that you are your body. At first you talk about it in the third person because you know they are referring to the body that you, the indwelling entity, inhabit. So for instance when I was that age and wanted my toy, I would say “Where’s Jenny’s toy?”

Then very soon after it changed from “Jenny’s toy” to “my toy” and I defended it with my life. I forgot that Jenny was just the vehicle, the personality, that I was expressing from. I never challenged that belief and forgot that it was a learned behaviour until later on in life when I activated the process of self-enquiry. I assumed that the beliefs I adopted were true, and created my own self-imposed conditions and limitations, boxing myself into a corner.

I forgot that I had a body, but I was not my body. That I had a personality, but I was not my personality. I had begun the journey of collecting beliefs and thus creating my own artificial reality : I’m happy, I’m sad, I can’t sing, I’m boring.
I thought I was a great artist until I was nine years old and a teacher at school told me I was nowhere as good as my older brother. I made an on-the-spot decision that I couldn’t paint. Much later on in life when I realised it was just a belief, I picked up a paintbrush and was surprised to discover that I had the potential to be a great artist.

As you mature, you live more and more in these beliefs and less and less with your direct experience. The more beliefs you layer in, the more dissociated you become from being able to feel and connect with your heart. This is why most people find that as they get older, life is less fun and they have lost their ability to feel love and joy. At this point people tend to look outside of themselves for more and more sensory stimulation so they can feel something. Anything. This will be the person who loves things like good drama or horror movies, alcohol and drugs, even coffee.

It is the reasoning mind, the aspect that thinks, that is constantly drawing conclusions and constructing beliefs around the way you perceive life. This creates a reality model from which you operate. More often than not those beliefs place limitations on reality. Ultimately you need to move beyond the limitation of beliefs and reality models and transcend all beliefs. Beliefs will cause you to constantly judge and this will taint your entire experience of life.

Whenever you are in your head running a commentary on life, you leave the “now” moment and remove yourself from experiencing life. This is the place where the beliefs kick in: that means I’m good, that means I’m bad, that means I’m smart, that means I’m stupid.

For example, your model of reality may have a belief installed which you believe to be accurate, which says “all men are bastards.” You will automatically draw men into your life that treat you poorly to support your beliefs.

I worked with someone recently who had problems with never having enough money and we were able to uncover a belief that he had that people with money are not nice people.

When you are running your life through your belief-system you are living in your imagination. Your belief could very well have been created from a one-time experience and leave you living out the rest of your life expecting this to happen again. This is the mechanism behind worry -- where you project yourself into the future and decide that the worst will happen every time. The universe will give you what you ask for.

You might find that you have beliefs about everything. But those beliefs are always about what was or what might be. They are memories that you assume you are. You don’t need beliefs to relate to the “now” moment. The “now” is always taking care of itself. Beliefs come up after the fact. Even if you try to have a belief about what’s here, now, you can’t. You are having a belief about what just was. There’s a delay. The “now” is whole. It’s complete, perfect and it’s all there really is. The stuff that goes on in your head is memory or anticipation.

When you drive around in your car all day, at the end of the day you don’t say, “I must be a car.” We have been viewing life through our belief frameworks for so long we actually think we are them.

Although there are certain limits within creation, for example how fast you can swim, how high you can reach without a ladder, a limiting belief is something you create in your mind. It’s not necessarily true. It is belief that you project onto reality to prevent you from achieving self-mastery. For example, you might believe that it’s a good thing to be working on your personal growth process. This is just a belief. It’s simply a choice to believe that someone who is consciously embracing personal growth is better than someone who’s not. The belief is a judgment that you are making that is not true. There is no right and wrong, that’s judgment, and just another self-imposed condition you’ve placed on yourself.

I’ve had clients come and tell me that they are screwed up because their parents neglected them, and clients come and tell me that they are screwed up because their parents did too much for them. For every belief you have concocted, there will be someone out there who breaks your rules.

Beliefs aren’t the truth; they are just mental-plane constructs that block you from actualising the truth, and place limitations on your potential. In order to be in the “now” and fully experience life you will need to discard all reality models that you have created from your beliefs and embrace truth.

Language is another layer that takes you away from experiencing life. We act as if language is real but it isn’t. It just labels or represents what’s there. People live their lives as if when they said “water,” the very word would quench their thirst.

You need to reach a level of maturity, where you let go of the need to hoard positive and negative beliefs about yourself that cut you off from the presence of awareness that you are.

When you get there you may well have some interesting realisations, for instance, that this thing called “time” is just in the mind, that you aren’t your body, mind or personality. That the physical body you have been identifying with, isn’t who you are or thought you were but is just a belief. You may start to open to the possibility that your physical body is just a vehicle so that you can express yourself on planet earth. You may start to see that the possibilities are endless.

There isn’t actually a problem with what you are. It’s all the stuff that you think that you are, that you aren’t, that causes the problems and stops you from tapping into the unlimited potential and possibilities life has to offer. Don’t get stuck in any limiting beliefs, rather allow yourself to be present with what is present in this moment, which is always here, always now, and enjoy the magic and wonder that life can be.