Sample: Deep Beliefs

Deep Beliefs

I think that one of the most vital things that our mind does is to try to make sense of what happens to us and to use this ‘sense’ to predict what will happen next.  Our mind takes the example of our experiences and comes to conclusions.  These conclusions, about ourselves and life, become our own personal beliefs.  In essence beliefs are thoughts.  They are put in place throughout our lives, but perhaps most actively when we are young.

We may not think these thoughts consciously for long periods, but they influence our thinking relatively continuously and particularly if some current event ‘reminds’ us about them.  In these situations our full belief seems to reactivate, as if it is recovered from store and switched on to become an active source of secondary thoughts, opinions, and associations that reflect the underlying belief.

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Fear of Fear

There is one particular stumbling block to changing our beliefs that I want to cover to complete this walk, and that is the role that fear plays in protecting our deepest and self-denying beliefs.

What are your most deeply-held undermining beliefs about yourself?  Do you hold yourself as weak, or unlovable, or selfish, or disgusting, or dangerous, or perhaps irredeemably damaged or even evil?  What do you notice about your feelings and general state of mind when you think those things?

It is likely, if you are reasonably honest about yourself, that you will have one or more beliefs that you want to keep very much to yourself, that you want to keep as secret.  Beliefs that you would not share willingly with others.  Beliefs that you find so distasteful that you will not even want to admit them to yourself.

Through talking with many people it seems to me that many of us live with some deep beliefs that we want to keep secret, and we have a fear that others will discover our secret and that we will then be exposed and rejected or at the very least humiliated.

We may even have on-going anxiety that others already see this dark side of ourselves and are judging us because of it.  This is a classic self-esteem issue where we experience our self-belief primarily as a fear.  Often our beliefs about our self will show up in our thinking as fears, along with predictions that we will be exposed to those around us for what we fear we really are.

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Personal Power Tip: Be prepared to keep at it when you work to change a deeply-held belief.  Though insight can occur in an instant, rooting out and changing a life-long belief will normally take persistence.