We can only experience what we believe to be true. Reality uniquely matches our experience to our own unique cascade of limiting beliefs. Limiting beliefs limit our reality. Our cascade of limiting beliefs take this one step further. Our own cascade of limiting beliefs morphs our reality until it becomes impossible to know that possibilities exist. When we are stuck in our own cascade, we cannot understand that a different reality is possible.
Becoming aware of your own cascade of limiting beliefs is what comes out of the process of facing repeating inescapable patterns. The cascade of limiting beliefs occurs as a group of related limiting beliefs. (If you have questions about limiting beliefs and repeating patterns, I suggest that you read my post here first before reading today's offering.) One limiting belief piles onto another which piles onto even more limiting beliefs. This is the cascade. The cascade is a joining of limiting beliefs that together create a closed perception of reality. We project the cascade of limiting beliefs outward to affect what we know to be true as all that is true.
Audio Version for those who prefer to listen to my voice
Your Sorcerer
The picture I get is a person running into a wall, turning and running into a wall again, then turning and running into a wall again, repeat, repeat. The walls exist because of the image that we are projecting around us. The walls exist because our limiting beliefs coalesce into a spell. While we may want to get mad at the wall or blame it for being there, this really isn’t going to do anything about the walls. It is not until we try to figure out what is making the walls that a doorway may develop to get out of the place we are stuck in.
To get under the spell of your cascade of limiting beliefs is to notice the theme around them. Your cascade of limiting beliefs all interconnect as thoughts and emotions, as well as taking root in your body. Do your limiting beliefs point to feeling unsafe, justifying anger, staying small, not expressing yourself, trapping yourself?
We are all sorcerers, living the result of the spell we weaved from the conclusions drawn in our childhood pain - a young child continues to create your own limited experience of adulthood.
It is necessary to note that most of this sorcery started when we were young. It is the result of mostly unconscious resistance to emotional pain. When we experienced something that was too big for us to understand, we put it away. We shut down. We limited ourselves to avoid the pain. We began to create the reality we knew and understood as the reality of life. This all happened when we were incapable of understanding a bigger picture. Your young sorcerer has created the reality that is now holding you back from the life you want.
Why am I using the word sorcerer and not magician? Sorcerers work with dark energy, magicians aspire to work with light energy. Avoidance of the negative is the result of a negative emotion. The negativity connects a part of our true self as bad or wrong to the cause of the pain. The belief that comes out of all this is one in which we decide to be less to save ourselves. Limiting our light is the work of sorcery, not magic. The inner sorcerer is holding us back from experiencing who we are while also making sure we only experience what we expect.
Persistence and Awareness
We cannot break out of something we believe to be true and real. If we don’t question our beliefs, we don’t understand we are limiting ourselves. We have to break out of the cycle of our own shut down. Consistent awareness is the first step whenever we want to attract something new into our lives. Persistent awareness is needed to observe that there is more outside of the reality we have created from our own cascade of limiting beliefs.
Untwining reality from our cascade of limiting beliefs is two fold.
A persistent awareness of the interconnection of your limiting beliefs is affecting what you experience.
Persistently noticing that others who do not have similar beliefs do not have the same issues.
Simultaneously understanding how your cascade of limiting beliefs is affecting you negatively while also noticing that this is not true for others who are experiencing life positively creates the possibility to challenge your own reality.
We need to know how our limiting beliefs interconnect in order to build awareness on the powerful spell they are weaving on our reality. We also need to notice that others do not have the same limitation.
We actually have to get tired of our limitations and how they create our version of reality. We have to feel how we are not just limited, but closed off. This desire for more will bring greater awareness to the cascade of beliefs that create our limited reality. We need to challenge the entire conglomerate of cascaded limiting beliefs to live differently and have a sense of choice.
Beyond Thoughts
We cannot simply change something with thoughts. Avoidance of emotional pain is what is driving the system. Only by addressing the underlying emotional pain beneath the cascade can something new arise. We can expand our perception of reality. The process is not an unconscious one or an avoidant one.
We absolutely have to be willing to meet ourselves and reality and not shy from either. The conscious mind needs to notice that something is not serving us and needs to change. Curiosity arises in this conscious noticing. We then have to open to confronting the beliefs by feeling the emotion our instinct says to avoid. Only then will expressing ourself differently create a reality that reflects the new possibility we want to opened to.
Into Images
A cascade of limiting beliefs point us towards our deeper issues. They point to the place where we have created a projected reality. They feed into each other. A cascade of limiting beliefs is an overlay. Below the cascade is a stagnant image about reality that has formed through your life experience. Images incorporate everything - life experience, the cascade of limiting beliefs, emotional avoidance, and your way of processing life that then projects the what you expect reality to play itself out on absolutely everything and everyone.
We cannot escape images. They show up in minor and major relationships, things we care about, and things we can care less about. They fuel all the reasons we need to be different than who we are. They allow us to stay separate from others, our emotions, our experiences, life itself, and our self.
Images project themself on reality to justify living life incomplete.
The Sorcerer’s Power Words: "If, then"
What happens inside us when limiting beliefs cascade? They form an image. Images have a different makeup than limiting beliefs. Limiting beliefs are blanket statements about the reality of the world. Images are statements that insert the self into reality. Images connect the self to the world. With an image we begin to understand that the way we are in the world affects us and others…with the limitations of the limiting belief. We believe that our actions create a predictable outcome. This is how we are projecting a limiting reality that reacts predictably.
Images are found in “If, then” statements. The body believes the statement and orients itself instinctively around the statement. The physical world literally proves this image right. What we believe happens. Our own internal sorcerer’s spell acts unconsciously and also consciously on the world. Nothing invites us to wake up when we run into the projected spell of our images. There is only the reality that the image is the true reality or that reality itself is unescapable. We react and interact predictably when we run into an image. We think “what other choice do I have? This is the way the world is.”
Our predictable norm is at the root of our own discomfort.
An image that most people understand can be found around the emotional expression of anger. We have some sort of “If, then” statement that says something about anger, the self, and relationships. “If I let my anger out, then no one will want to be around me.” or “If I allow my anger out, someone will get hurt.” The way your unique image works, if it has no consciousness behind it, means you will experience exactly what you are avoiding when you challenge the image. When we finally do choose to let the anger out, we will projectively create what happens using the image. We will find people who absolutely will leave us if we get angry. We will surround ourselves with people who cannot possibly withstand our anger. We literally will not even energetically be attracted to people who can withstand our anger.
Until we start to bring consciousness to the powerful spell we weave, we will not break out of the image.
For instance, if we know that every time we get angry we hide the emotion, our image around anger is going to eventually have to get challenged by getting angry. Now this does not mean getting uncontrollably angry and proving the image right. No. This means trying to express the anger in a new way or with a different intent. Perhaps we only express anger passive aggressively to strangers. Instead, we might try to express anger to someone we care about or therapeutically. We may want to tell someone who we feel frustration towards that anger is building and we want to explode. We may want to talk about the emotion before it happens or let it happen with someone we know is comfortable with anger. There are so many ways to break out of the spell of the image. All of them involve making a different choice, one that is outside our comfort zone.
We need to find actions and reactions inside us that act outside of the image that we know and understand.
Because self sabotage is a huge issue when breaking images, we do need to question our initial impulse. Most likely the first impulse we are attracted to when trying to break out of an image is going to unconsciously demand that the image be proved true. We will find, unconsciously, the most unsafe person or group of people to challenge the image on. Take this in for a minute.
Especially if you have been trying to work through repeating patterns and are still incapable of breaking out of them. Your defensive or self sabotage instinct keeps reality the same. The voice you need to listen to in order to break through an image is the quieter one that feels scared or vulnerable. You may need some quiet time to feel into both the image and the instinct at the same time.
We all have if,then statements that define our images around reality. Finding them can be as easy as them just slipping out of our mouths by accident and noting their importance. To work in a healing or transformative way with images, the image has to land in the body. It cannot just be a thought. You have to feel exactly where you are holding yourself back or changing your authentic self.
You have to know what is happening to change something.
Seeking the Magician
An image has an emotional charge to it that makes experiencing a different reality impossible. We do not believe that we can survive the strength of feeling that is linked to the image. Only by allowing the emotional charge under the image to vent itself can we trust a different reality. Trusting a different reality is simply opening to something new that is already present and not seen.
Venting emotion removes the blinders from the reality around you.
Once we have vented the emotional charge, we understand that we can withstand the pain inside the image. We also can consciously link the feeling we are having to the image itself and dissolve the belief that we need to maintain a separation from our true self to live. With the awareness of being able to withstand the emotion coupling with a sense of choice in how we express ourself, the image starts to dissolve. The spell unravels. Our sorcerer loses power. From this point it is simply a matter of making choices that keep us out of the lure of the spell we have limited ourselves with in our life.
Case study:
This morning I had the pleasure of working with a couple that had mutually hit their own walls of cascading beliefs. They had been talking together about how relationships entered into in middle age have the baggage of all the failed relationships that have preceded them. The image that there is something unlovable about them or not ever meant to be experienced in life was very strong for both of them. This couple deeply love the core being they see in each other. They both know that the love they feel is bringing up a familiar image that is clouding how they see each other. (“If I show my lover how negative I can be, then he/she will leave me.”) They came to me asking if I could support them in trying to break out of their cycle.
What happened during the session was a surprise. As one of the partners in the relationship started to feel the intense fear that he was holding of losing his partner, an emotional boiling point arose. Simultaneously, he was feeling how his sabotaging behavior had surprisingly not created the rejection he expected. His partner saying she loved him while he was feeling his fear and remorse caused something to burst. Together we all rode the waves of a supported emotional release. The terror of losing his partner, the burden of striving perfectionism, the loneliness of his heart were clearly related to a cascade of limiting beliefs around needing to control himself in order to be loved.
The awareness is now connected in a way that was unpredictable and also previously impossible. Suffering alone no longer feels like the only way to be. The couple opened a doorway today for communication, yes, but also for emotional vulnerability and honesty to be part of their lives. Something inexplicable changed. The sorcerer's spell is diminished.
The Magician’s Power: Choice
Steadily we can choose to embrace the emotion as a doorway into a different way of being or acting. Slowly we open our eyes to possibility and aliveness. Something integral shifts in us and the unwelcome emotion becomes a personal messenger for how to awaken ourself. The uncomfortable path is the path of less suffering. We know this because we have a sense of choice instead of feeling consistently stuck and hopeless.
The thing with choice is that we can actually track choosing the familiar path of acting in our spell and then witness how we then run right back into the familiar pattern. We can also then choose differently and see how the pattern does not show up. Suddenly we can know something is able to change instead of feeling like we are out of the loop. Suffering starts to feel like a choice too. We feel empowered in our own lives to make our own decisions and know that we are in charge of getting out of what we feel stuck in. We begin to open the door to trusting that there is more to life than what we know.
I don't know if I can stress enough how doing this kind of work changes lives in the deepest way possible. There is choice. There is self. There is expression. And something else starts to happen. As we feel like we can choose between suffering and living, we also start to develop a trust in something that is greater than us. We begin to feel like we are meant to be here now instead of forcing ourselves to repeat this as an affirmation or reminder. We also can start to surrender to something bigger than us in a connected and unforced way. Life literally flows in unexpected but vital ways when we choose to challenge our spell. Our magician is activated.
When you can make different choices that act outside of the spell and notice that your life changes as a result, you have embraced your magician. No longer does the sorcerer run your life. Now it just sits in the background, guiding you towards your own expression of self.
Steps to Heal Images or Embracing Your Magician.
Step 1. Find the interconnection point of your own cascade of beliefs. If you need help doing this, use the journal exercise and meditation I have provided below.
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