What if the main issue with you having the life you want is what you think about reality?
Limiting Beliefs Explained and Explored…then moving on towards healing a jinxed life.
I often mention limiting beliefs in my writing. Today I am explaining them in more detail as well as talking about how to become aware of them and use that awareness to get out of recycled patterns in life.
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When trying to break repetitive inescapable cycles, exploring limiting beliefs is necessary to escape self inflicted jinxes.
You can google limiting beliefs and get all sort of quick and easy information about them. Today I am going to give you the more complex and in depth Nessa explanation of understanding and healing limiting beliefs.
Working with limiting beliefs is a perfect awareness exercise to use when you are feeling stuck by what life is throwing at you. To heal the trauma behind the beliefs takes more than awareness. Embodiment into emotional release and revelation is involved as well.
Simply Put
Limiting beliefs are beliefs about the world and the way it works that limit who you are and who you want to be. They not only limit your perception of reality and others, but they also limit what you can experience in life or attract or become. Ultimately limiting beliefs result in us limiting ourselves as well as the sense of life limiting us. This puts us into cyclical inescapable experience that challenges our beliefs in an attempt to heal soul wounds.
Any repeated and inescapable pattern is ultimately asking us to wake up to our true nature and stop limiting ourself. Ironically, the tendency that most of us fall into is to use the repeating patterns as an excuse to close down more and feel less. Until the pattern gets to be so intense we have no choice but to try something new, we stay stuck. There is a further catch around the jinx behind limiting beliefs. When we do try something new and actually try to change, the pattern remains. This is how we know without a doubt that the jinx is at play. Our understood way of dealing with a problem needs to be challenged. Our limiting belief needs to be less limited.
Reality Check
We all have limiting beliefs about the world. These limiting beliefs color our ability to be ourself, feel like ourself, and express ourself. They also limit our ability to experience the world as whole, abundant, supportive, trustworthy, and nourishing.
The first word to pay attention to in the concept of limiting beliefs is…limiting. Let’s face it. We all have limits to what we can experience and stay sane, connected, and alive. We also have limits to what we are willing to believe or not believe about reality itself.
Limits exist for a reason. It is important to understand that all people have a unique relationship to how their belief system is limited that is authentic to their soul path. Atheists may be judged by their limiting beliefs around god or religion. Environmentalists may be judged by their limiting beliefs around the future of the earth. Within the limitation there is a uniquely cut off possibility towards opening to a very specific part of being alive.
Limiting becomes a detriment when there is a loss of choice, perspective, and possibility. With limits we feel like there is no choice and also that it is impossible to have the life we want. Our own unique limiting beliefs limit our ability to have a full life experience of our own self.
We both consciously and unconsciously put limitations on our own reality. When we limit ourselves in any way and then consciously want to expand past that limit into another experience, our limiting is what is getting in the way of what we want. Has this paragraph used the word limiting enough? Like I said, it’s really important to remember.
Also notice for just a second how much absolute there is in limiting beliefs. Absolute is a sign of black and white thinking. The presence of black and white thinking is always a sign that healing is needed and possible. This pattern is true for more than just limiting beliefs.
Limiting beliefs keep us stuck in a paradox between desire and limitation.
Making The Choice Conscious
Without consciousness around limiting beliefs, we will use them as an excuse to close down and give up. In contrast, we could use limiting beliefs to question our reality, feel repressed emotions, and open to more possibility in life. Ultimately this choice is always our own. Choice is one of life’s gifts.
Not choosing to identify and work with limiting beliefs themselves will create cyclical suffering and even more inescapable repetitive patterns. First we can choose to break the cycle through searching internally for limiting beliefs and their affect on our lives. This can then change who we are in life and how we act in life. The existence of a sense of choice and an ability to choose is a process of maturation and self responsibility. We get to have more of our adult self show up in our life.
This adult capacity to choose is needed when emotions get strong and overwhelming. When existential emotions are arising without control in our being, we could see this as a choice point. Here is a chance to explore the message of awakening behind our limiting beliefs.
It is understandable to want to avoid the message behind emotions. Existential emotions are a lot to contain in our bodies and trust tapping into. Add to this the fact that a limiting belief is destined to arise. Our conscious mind does not like when unconscious material arises. When an existential emotion arises it feels greater than us. Disassociating, fantasizing, judging. blaming, gaslighting, or disconnecting are all reactions we will justify to avoid the change that unwanted emotions are asking us to embrace.
A Wake Up Call
There’s a good chance that any time you don’t want to take self responsibility (or want to accuse someone of not taking their own responsibility to avoid your own) that there is an opportunity to open to something new by exploring a limiting belief of your own (NOT another person’s!). Notice how I am stressing that this is about you waking yourself up, not you demanding other people wake up so you can wake up. The cycle of stuck will eventually get to the point where you want to change you. This is when you know you are ready to take on healing limiting beliefs.
There is nothing quite like breaking a limiting belief and having a new pattern arise where more is possible. Suddenly there is a freedom to be who you want to be. It is even more enlivening to feel supported in the new pattern. A piece of your soul expands into you and everything changes. Old emotional reactions no longer land as heavily. In situations where the cycle is present you yourself is different so the impact changes. It is as if a new voice arises out of your own darkness to tell you that possibility is present. There is something new inside that you never would have conceived as possible before. Doors open that were previously hidden. Self trust develops.
As you consciously create this new pattern within your being, a sense of choice is not the only possible change to be experienced. There’s more.
You get to find our own methodology of how to let go of limiting beliefs.
You can surrender into the process, knowing that inescapable, repetitive cycles signal growth instead of death.
There can be an ability to trust more of reality.
The self does not have to be idealized or fantasized as the only solution to expanding out of being stuck.
Who you feel yourself to be amidst repeating patterns is simply different and therefore the pattern itself effortlessly changes.
You get to try less and be more, relaxing into yourself and finding effortless flow.
Finding Limiting Beliefs
It is possible to start identifying limiting beliefs in order to simply begin the process of taking more self responsibility towards what you attract in life and how you metabolize reality. For some, identifying and questioning limiting beliefs is enough. Not everyone has to delve into the deeper work of healing a jinxed life. Simply consciously bringing awareness to limiting beliefs and trying to make different choices will definitely start the process of changing some of the stuck cycles of your life.
Book Recommendation: How to Be An Adult by David Richo. This book is short, well written, and PACKED with information and exercises. I consider it a beginners guide to self responsibility and becoming empowered to change life patterns. Many times over the years I have picked this book up to read and still felt it has something valuable to teach me.
One of the easiest places to look for limiting beliefs are in massive generalizations we make about reality in our own head. Try filling out the following statements with your view on reality or “just the way it is.”
People are…
The world is…
God is…
Relationships are…
Friends are…
Science is…
Religion is…
Medicine is…
Alternative Medicine is…
Men are…
Women are…
Friends are…
Notice the underlying theme to your unique limiting beliefs. It is important to understand how your own beliefs come together to protect your core wound which in turn protects your core self. Limiting beliefs feed into each other as a means of protection. They do have a purpose and a use.
If you want to go deeper, the next portion of my post is going to talk about embodying limiting beliefs to break you out of the jinxed cycles in your life.
Steps to Become Unjinxed
One: Identify the Limiting Belief.
First thing to understand is that limiting beliefs have both purpose and inevitability. We are meant to have them and meant to shift out of them if we want to make that choice. We aren’t meant to pretend we do not have them or that by working on just one the rest of our self is healed. Limiting beliefs come up in life all the time. When we are stuck in patterns, it is a signal from life. We can choose to get past the belief or get stuck in it. The choice is ultimately ours for how we want to live our life.
Cool fact: If you avoid looking at a limiting belief, it will resurface. You have time to choose. No pressure.
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