Beliefs and Expectations Affect Outcomes
Research has shown that our brain responds to our expectations. We can learn to harness this capacity to work in our favor.
A powerful approach to begin to use our brain’s natural tendencies more consciously is to ask WHO is doing the choosing of a particular goal, or who is holding a specific perception or viewpoint.
We are all the product of so many influences and as a result have multiple sub personalities living inside us. To get clear on how they are each operating can help immensely in clearing the blocks to how we see and receive the world.
One helpful way to unearth what may be coloring your perceptions, and thus your choice-making-apparatus, is to make a list of your beliefs.
Exploring Beliefs helps Take Charge of the Brain’s Default Mechanism
Which beliefs keep you from fully experiencing ease, joy, and fulfillment?
Which ones create stress within yourself and relationships?
Which ones that keep you bound in fear, anxiety, helplessness or hopelessness?
Sometimes it can be most helpful to get in touch with feelings that arise in response to a particular aspect of life and work backwards to what belief may at work. Your beliefs are your story, the drama you live through every day.
Questions for Exploring Faulty Beliefs
What are areas can be explored when looking for faulty beliefs?
How do you really feel about Men, Women, Mothers, Fathers, Siblings, Relationships, Love, Self, Others, Prosperity, Success, Abundance, Deserving, Playing, Work, Money, Health, Illness, Body Image?
1. Take out a sheet of paper and write down what you don’t want to keep happening or how you don’t want to keep feeling. Write for as long as you like. Then, look at your “story” and underline or highlight the charged words the words that hold emotion for you.
Write these phrases or words in a vertical column. Now on the other side of the paper, write the opposites. For instance, if you are feeling stressed, the opposite might be relaxed. If something that you want is not happening, the opposite is that it is happening. If it should be easy, the opposite is that it is easy. If you are feeling it’s just a dream, the opposite is that it is real.
Next go through and simply repeat each pair of opposite phrases out loud. See how it feels to bring the issues to consciousness and to look at both sides. Discover where you are caught in the spin and who you are without your story.
Keep in mind that you may have some wonderfully strong, helpful and supporting beliefs within you that you certainly want to keep. The suggested exercises can also help you see your strengths as well as the weaknesses what has gone well in your life. Let your consciousness rest on that for a time and build on that strength. All too often we look at only what is off instead of embracing the totality, working with the good to help us in our release of the less graceful material.
In addressing any of these, remember there is a difference between what we WANT to believe we believe AND what we really believe deep down. By sitting quietly with each topic area you may become aware of deeper emotions and issues that signal something that needs to be cleared within you. These are simply the results of not knowing, they are not sources of fodder for self-flagellation or caving into hopelessness!
2. Another method of uncovering and working to release problem beliefs that cloud perception is chakra work. The chakras provide us with a roadmap of consciousness. As we work to clear and balance our chakras not only does perception clear but all other aspects of our mind-body health also improve.
3. Meditation is a another great method of uncovering faulty beliefs as well as for creating the space for their release. In addition, meditation practice opens you to another level of mind that is beyond the conditioned mind with all the beliefs and stories. Meditative methods reduce stress, heighten self awareness, enhance creativity and ultimately deliver us to true freedom –to that portion of the Self that is beyond habituated perceptions.
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