Your beliefs drive your life

"In order to believe in something you must first agree with it."
(Quoted from 8,789 Words of Wisdom by Barbara Ann Kipfer)

This quote stirred up a memory for me. A good part of my Master-level NLP education focused on beliefs and values. Your beliefs drive everything! Beliefs and values determine how we spend your time, energy, money, the quality of our relationships and everything else in our lives. We all have two levels of beliefs: our conscious beliefs and our deeper, underlying unconscious ones. The conscious beliefs are obvious to you; it's the unconscious ones that show up in all of those troubled areas in your life. And what's weird is that you may think you believe in one thing (prosperity is a good example), but really - based on the results you're getting in your life - you really, at a deeper unconscious level, believe something else (money is evil).

So here's the deal. In order to change what's happening in your life - whether it's struggling with relationships, hating your job, or being financially challenged - you have to discover your deep values and beliefs and create new ones that will get the results you want. The truth is, you literally can't do something unless you believe it. If deep inside you think that money is evil, you will not allow yourself to have money.

Given that beliefs run your life, wouldn't it be great to know what your beliefs are? And better yet, be able to change and believe those things that will make your life great?

People say "That's just the way I am", as if you can't change your beliefs. Actually, it's something we do all the time, every day. What do I mean? New information creates new beliefs. Say a new story comes on TV about a politician you voted for who just got caught embezzeling state funds. That new information makes you stop and re-evaluate what you thought about the guy (your old belief). You then add the new information to what you knew before and, most likely, change your agreement with yourself that he was a good person to represent you. You now believe he's a crook and you decide not to support that politician in the next election (your new belief). That's how quickly and easily you can change. New information is the key.

And notice that the new belief drives the actions you take from this point forward. You'll probably share you new opinions with someone. You may find yourself researching other candidates who you could vote for in the next election. You could feel outraged enough to join a political action group to weed out corruption in government. At the very least, when voting day comes you'll cast your vote a different direction.

Here's the problem. Believe it or not, your beliefs act as filters that prevent new information from coming in. That's why people get so frustrated about changing beliefs. It sometimes takes outside help to see what you can't see, a new perspective. Hypnosis is one way I help my clients. It allows us to bypass the conscious barrier and install new information at the deep levels where the unconscious beliefs live. I also use a questioning process (called quantum linguistics) that help me wiggle through the belief filters and find new handle holds that allow you to create the new beliefs you want.

If you don't like what's happening in your life, find a way to discover your beliefs and values. Start with a specific area of your life. Ask yourself, "What's important to me about X?" Write down all of the answers that come to you. Then, ask yourself again, "What's important to me about X?" Again, write down any new answers. Then repeat the question a third time and write down all of the answers you get. You may be surprised at what you discover. Send me an email and let me know how it goes!

You have to take action in order to change your beliefs.

A kazillion intuitive realities

The intuitive world within us is our unique reality. A brief definition of reality would be to say that it represents a set of laws that govern our ability to interact with the external world. The physical world has it's rules and patterns, most of which have been measured, studied and documented by science. The intuitive world also has its own rules and patterns.

We each have an intuitive reality that is uniquely our own. It is made up primarily of two things: 1) the common knowledge and understandings we share as human beings, what Carl Jung would call the collective unconscious; and, 2) the learnings we have gathered from our personal experiences.

The collective unconscious is where we all begin, the stuff we were born knowing without anyone having to really teach us. Each one of us is cut from the same universal fabric and therefore we all share its common threads, patterns and textures. What's interesting is that this fabric is a dynamic thing. As we change, new threads are added that represent our new discoveries. As new humans are born, they naturally inherit the qualities of that expanded universal fabric. For example, have you noticed that young children today seem to understand intuitively how to use computers? It's as if our collective unconscious expanded over the last 15 years to include a knowing about computers and their role in our lives. Today's children are born with the expanded awareness and they don't even realize it. It is only we who were born before the innovations who recognize the difference in reality.

Sometimes I think of the collective unconscious as our "spandex factor", the potential we have within to stretch our imaginations. The more humans witness new discoveries, the more they and their children can imagine even greater things. Our human awareness expands along with the discoveries we make as a society.

The other aspect of our intuitive reality comes from our own personal experiences. These create the laws and patterns we have in our own lives. As we go through life, we experience things and we make decisions about what those experiences mean. For example, if someone pulled my hair when I was six, I decided what I was going to think about that experience. Maybe I decided something very specific such as "that girl really doesn't like me", or maybe I generalized to something broader, "nobody likes me at all". Little decisions like that get tucked away inside of our intuitive self and we begin operating based on that assumption. This happens every moment of every day. We continue having experiences and making decisions about them, and soon we have created an entire reality that becomes our day to day life. As we do, we stop seeing anything that doesn't fit our expectations and we become fixed in our beliefs about what is "real" and what isn't.

Imagine how many realities there are out there! In NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming), we call that a person's model of the world. And what we've learned is that every single human being has a unique reality inside them that is more real to them than anything else in the universe.We cannot change another person's reality; only they can do that.

One of the most fascinating things about my work as a hypnotherapist is that I get to peek inside the realities of my clients. In doing so, I have expanded my own reality and I have learned that so much more is possible than I ever dreamed when I was limited to my own model of the world. There are more ways to expand your reality than I can possibly list here. I hope you'll find one...or two....or however many it takes to awaken your intuitive self to more than it knew before.

Side note.... I like the way Michael Harner describes the idea of realities and their truths in his book, The Way of the Shaman. He speaks of the Ordinary State of Consciousness (OSC) and the Shamanic State of Consciousness (SSC). In one "reality", the person experiences something as real while in the other that same something would be called a myth or fantasy. Ordinary things like trees and water look one way in the OSC, but when experienced in the Shamanic State of Consciousness they appear as energy or light, or even as speaking entities who are aware and who possess power. Isn't this true for other realities, too? Think back to the last dream you had. Isn't it true that odd things happen in dreams and you accept them completely at the time because dream realities are different than the Ordinary State of Consciousness? Then there's the reality that happens at a family gathering, where we all seem to slip into some other regressive state of being that doesn't reflect the truer selves we live day to day. Reality truly is relative to our state of consciousness, or what could be called our intuitive self.

A new start

I didn't realize how long it's been since I've written until I popped in today and saw the last Post date. Yikes! Time flies.

Much has happened since the last entry in 2004. Consider this a new start.