The beauty about belief is that it is changeable, mutable and malleable. Think about it, the beliefs that you had as a child of the Tooth Faerie, the Easter Bunny, Santa and so on are distant memories shelved in the department of Faerie Tales. The beliefs that you held as a teenager, filed in Adolescent Mysteries perhaps. The beliefs you held in your twenties, thirties and so on (depending on how old you are, of course) have all shifted and changed as you have grown and expanded through life. There will be things that I write on these pages that may change for me in the coming years as my perspectives widen and my awareness deepens, in fact, who knows something in me may shift in the process of placing my inner contemplation onto these pages and something I write here in this chapter may no longer be true for me through the coming chapters or by the time I have completed this book. This applies to the ingrained beliefs that we hold of ourselves and our lives both consciously and unconsciously. Our conscious beliefs are obviously easy to work with, it is the unconscious ones that are the tricksters as they play out beneath the surface and we simply say that this is our personality or who we are.
I was driving with a friend and she shared with me a story of unhappiness in her relationship and dissatisfaction in the fact that she felt like she should be able to share everything in her life and about herself with her partner. I could recall a time when I felt precisely the same way, yet I had learned that it was not necessarily the truth, not for me anyway. My perspective on this is that we have different people in our lives to fulfil different roles. We share certain parts of ourselves with certain people, which does not necessarily mean that we are being pretentious, it just means that we meet each other in our similarities. We have friends or family members that we may be a certain way with that we quite possibly do not express with others. For example, my younger Sister and I have an incredible knack for being ridiculously silly and find ourselves outrageously funny and while my partner and I are silly together it is not quite the same. This is the specialness of the relationship I have with my Sister. My partner and I have a playful relationship with each other that involves silliness expressed in a different way that does not satisfy the type of expression I have with my Sister and vice versa. We have people that we connect with on all manner of levels and each interaction is going to be unique and fulfil an aspect of who we are and who we choose to be. When we can look at it this way it takes the pressure off one person to satisfy all areas of our lives and opens us up to healthier relationships.
As I shared this perspective with my friend, I asked her three questions, which I wrote down because they were quite poignant in moving through the story, the feeling and the belief. I now use these questions with people that I work with in groups or individually as they are a quick and effective way of cutting to the core of what arises for us and recognising what we believe and how much energy we have vested in these beliefs. When we open to this inquiry, we are able to choose what we wish to believe, whether or not it is worth the output of energy and if we would like to reclaim this energy and let the belief go.
Firstly, we need to frame the story, then we ask the questions.
1 What are you feeling?
2 What is the belief attached to the feeling?
3 Is that belief true?
An example:
Story: “Life is a real struggle right now and there is not enough money to make ends meet. I am having to get payment extensions on bills, and I am getting really stressed out because I am working so hard to get ahead.”
1 What are you feeling?“I am feeling frustrated, annoyed, confused and maybe even angry.”
2 What is/are the belief/s attached to these feelings?“I should be further ahead in my life at this age with a solid career, family and money in the bank. I was told that I shouldn’t bother because I am going to fail anyway.”
3 Is the belief true?“No.”
The interesting thing about these questions is if the same story or belief keeps showing up, we are receiving regular reminders to choose differently and change our perspectives. Another reason they may keep coming up is that we may only be scratching the surface and we can look at how honest we are being with ourselves. When we are experiencing something that creates discomfort in ourselves and we ask these questions, if we truly dig deep the answer to the third question is most often going to be no. I have had a few people answer yes, but as we peel back the layers and get to the core the answer almost certainly shifts to a no. It is at the surface level that we might answer yes. Let’s go peel back a layer. Imagine that this is the same person, they were able to move through that first layer of the belief and began to create change. Yet the same story arises in a new situation.
Story: “I am working so hard and I am actually making really good money now, but I just don’t have time for myself to do the things that I want to do.”
1 What are you feeling?“I am feeling frustrated, annoyed, confused and maybe even angry.”
2 What is the belief attached to these feelings?“I have to work hard in order to get ahead in life and that means I must sacrifice the things I love.”
3 Is this belief true?“No.”
These examples are straight out of my own life, stories with unconscious beliefs that cycled beneath the surface creating more of the same experiences for me. For the purpose of deeper understanding I will explain the beliefs around these stories a little more.
“I should be further ahead in my life at this age with a solid career, family and money in the bank.”
Society tells us that we should go to school, then go to University, then get a job, get married, have children and live behind a white picket fence in order to be considered “successful.” In white South African culture, working as a waitress was a job you did when you were in school or in your early twenties and not something that you were still doing later in life. It was a “stepping-stone” that you used to earn money while preparing yourself for your future career. At almost 37 years old, I had a conversation with my partner about what I had been interested in studying when I was younger and it was only then that I enrolled in a Diploma in Counselling and embarked on my chosen career path. I also believed that I had to have children at least in my early to mid-thirties and by this stage I should be completely self-sufficient financially. The proverbial “dream life.” So, are these beliefs true? No, we do not all fit into a square, some of us are circles, triangles, stars and all manner of different shapes and sizes.
“I was told that I shouldn’t bother because I am going to fail anyway.”
This one is a beauty! The story that goes with this is of me as a young girl, in my bedroom and studying. My father, (not