August 14--Do Our Beliefs Move Us Forward, or Hold Us Back?

If you have a belief that the people who love you will leave you, then sure
enough, it will happen.  Over and over again.  So you had better become
aware of your unconscious beliefs.  They are creating your experience of life.

Leonard Jacobson

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Today's Meditation:

There are certain principles in life that are pretty consistent, and this is one of them.  How we act usually determines how we are treated, and what we believe usually determines how we act.  In the case that Leonard mentions, if you believe that people who love you will leave you, then either you're going to treat them badly or with distance or you're going to try to hold on to them too hard, and either way you're engaging in behavior that tends to make people want to put distance between themselves and you.

Most of us don't pay much attention to our unconscious beliefs because we never go deep enough into ourselves to figure out what they may be.  Do you believe that you're not meant to be wealthy?  That you're not meant to be happy?  That you're not meant to have a strong, healthy relationship?  That you don't deserve to be treated well?  I can't tell you how many people I've met who have had chances at great relationships with loving, caring people, but who have rejected those people in favor of others who treat them so poorly that it's completely unbelievable that they actually chose this other person.

In my case, one of my strongest battles is with the belief that I will always struggle financially.  It's a lesson that my parents instilled in me over and over again, and one that I internalized deeply.  It's a belief that I make true through my actions, and those actions come about because of the unconscious nature of my belief.  It's silly, but it's the way things are, and while I constantly work to change my situation, I also constantly work to change the beliefs that continue to make the situation reality.

In which areas of your life do you struggle?  Have you dug deeply and been honest with yourself about your true beliefs about those areas?  Are your problems in a relationship related more to the other person's actions, or to your beliefs about how the other person should act?  We all go through struggles in life, and many of them we cause ourselves, making them completely unnecessary, but no less true.  When we uncover those beliefs and work to change them, we can start to move ahead more quickly, for we will start to see our lives change, and then adopt a new belief to replace the old, silly one.

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Questions to consider:

How do we come to have the beliefs we have?

How can the beliefs that we have affect the ways we act?

When do we adopt most of our beliefs about who we are and what we deserve in life?  Is that the best time to adopt beliefs?

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For further thought:

The thing always happens that you really believe in
and the belief in a thing makes it happen.  And I think
nothing will happen until you thoroughly and deeply believe in it.

Frank L. Wright




More quotations and passages on belief.