picture: kellepics (CCO Public Domain)
A belief is a mental attitude a person holds towards an event, an object or situation, where he or she believes something to be true. While a belief does not only influence the person’s mental attitude towards something, it also influences what they attract into their life.
What beliefs are and how limiting beliefs play into the law of attraction will be discussed in this article.
On your manifestation journey you most likely heard about beliefs and how important they are. As you are trying to manifest something you may stumbled upon some mental barriers. The mental barrier you experience are beliefs being brought to the surface. Because your frequency is created with your conscious and with your subconscious mind and beliefs are a huge part of the subconscious mind, they are causing certain blocks on your journey. That’s why it is worth studying beliefs a little more.
What is a Belief
A belief is a thought you keep thinking which then formes a belief in your subconscious mind. Any belief you hold in this moment has always been a thought. At some point you kept thinking the same thought over and over again which then formed a belief in your subconscious mind. Or you learned a certain lesson which caused a thought to become a belief.
You can imagine a belief like a computer program that is running your mind. The computer program dictates what you see on the computer screen and it also dictates what actions you can take in the program itself. Similar to the computer program, you are running a belief (program) in your subconscious mind (computer) which then influences the content of your life (what gets displayed in the program on the screen) and what actions you can take in your life (actions in the program on the screen).
While there are positive beliefs that are a benefit in your life like “An intimate relationship provides love and security” or “a friendship is a place where I can share my honest feelings”. There are also limiting beliefs that limit your capacity to manifest and to live and amazing life.
Limiting beliefs
A limiting beliefs is any believe that limits you in your capacity to act and to create in the world. Holding a limiting belief has the consequence of you not being able to manifest your desires because the belief is contradicting your desire. For example: You try to manifest 2.000$ in 10 days but you have the belief that you have to work hard and long for money. In this case the belief is contradicting your desires and you will not be able to manifest the 2.000$ easily and effortlessly.
In general, you know you have a limiting belief when you don’t get what you desire. When you are not able to manifest something it is not because you are not capable as a creator, but because you have a limiting belief around the subject you want to manifest that prevents you from receiving the manifestation.
Here are two more examples for limiting beliefs to understand this dynamic a little better.
One example might be that you believe everyone cheats in relationships. If this is the belief (program) you have in your subconscious mind (computer), you will experience the content of that belief (program) in your life (computer screen). This may translate in a constant distrusting of your own partner and always attracting friends and people into your life that tell you that they got cheated on.
You may hold another belief that money is evil. Having this belief will attract all kinds of life situations and events that make you have less money or even lose money because you deeply believe that it is bad to have money. When you then have a desire to make more money, you will have the limiting belief contradicting that desire, which causes you to have trouble making money.
How you got your limiting beliefs
You acquired most of your limiting beliefs between the age of 0 and 7 years. That’s the period where you didn’t know a lot about the world and where you were highly dependent on your caregivers. In this phase your mind is very open and receptive to new information and it’s then easy for all the programs (beliefs) to be installed in your mind (computer).
There are three ways a belief gets formed. Through observation, pain or someone teaching you directly.
Limiting Beliefs Through Observation
As a child you are very aware of your environment and you are very curious and open to learning. This is beneficial and important so that you can understand and learn quickly. But it’s highly dangerous when your environment is very limited and self-destructive.
For example, let’s say your family has always been struggling with money from the day you were born. Every toy you wanted to buy was not possible to buy new, instead you got old toys from friends and siblings. Growing up and observing this made you believe that money is always lacking or that can’t get what you desire. This belief then causes you a lot of trouble in your adult life when you try to manifest more money.
Another example may be that you grew up in an environment where you had to always fight for love and attention because you had a lot of siblings. This constant fight for love and comparison with your siblings, may got you to believe that there is not enough love for everyone and that you have to fight for someones love. Now imagine this playing out in your adult life when you start dating someone or you are in a relationship.
Limiting Beliefs From Pain and Trauma
A very common way a belief gets formed is through the experience of pain or trauma. Some time in our development you had a situation that was very painful for you. This pain made you shift your perspective on life which then caused you to form a belief about life.
For example as a child you might got home one day with something new that you are very excited about. Your father was already in a bad mood and then seeing the child coming home being happy and enthusiastic, triggered something in your father. He got angry and started screaming and yelling at you. This experience caused you to link excitement with someone being angry at you. This then causes you to be afraid of sharing your excitement and a belief like “sharing my excitement will make other people angry” got formed. As a child in this situation, you did not really understand that it was not your excitement that was wrong and that triggered the anger in your father. Your father was already in a bad mood which had nothing to do with you. But little as you were you were not able to see that bigger picture so you took it personally which then caused you to form a limiting belief around excitement. Now imagine this belief playing out in your adult life when you try to follow your joy and your excitement. Doing so will always cause you fear because of that belief which stems from the pain you’ve experienced.
Beliefs coming from traumatic experience, are highly emotionally charged and not easy to bring to the surface because they are linked to so much pain.
Limiting Beliefs From Teachers
Another very common way of getting a belief is by someone telling you directly how the world works. As a child you are completely dependent on your caregivers and you look up to them. You see them as these perfect beings that know the world and have it all figured out. So whatever they teach you at a very young age will form a belief in yourself if it’s repeated over and over again.
The problem with that is that your caregivers, which may have never investigated their beliefs, got their beliefs from their parents and their parents from their parents and so on. If in this line nobody ever investigates a belief, beliefs are hold as truths and passed on to everyone in the family line.
Seeing that this is an endless chain of someone holding a belief and then teaching their children, without anyone ever investigating a belief, makes you understand how there are even beliefs a whole society has or even the whole world.
Knowing this hopefully creates a curiosity in yourself of what, from everything you believe in, is actually truley based on your decision to believe that. Because if everything you know to be true was mainly formed at the age of 0-7 years and you were completely dependent on your caregivers at that time, how much individuality do you think you have now?
After knowing where your limiting beliefs come from, it’s important to understand a couple of facts regarding beliefs to then be able to start the process of discovery and resolving.
Fact #1: Beliefs are Individual
Beliefs are highly individual. Everyone has an extremely unique and individual set of beliefs. It may be the case that some person holds a belief to be true and another person has the opposite belief as a truth. For example, the belief of “a friendship is a place where I can share my honest feelings” may be a true belief for one person which then enables them to form deep friendships with people. Another person might believe the opposite. A belief like “a friendship is a place where I can never fully be myself because I am afraid I will get rejected” will give the other person a totally different experience and outlook on friendships.
This is important to keep in mind when working on your beliefs because any technique that helps you discover and transform beliefs will just show you where to look. And the technique will never be able to show you the direct belief you hold because your set of beliefs is so unique. That means that you always have to do the work by yourself and you can use teachers or processes as a guide.
Fact #2: Limiting beliefs are highly unconscious
All beliefs you have are highly unconscious because they have been operating for so long and they dictated so much of your life. Imagine a computer program on your computer or an app on your smartphone that you have used every day for more than 15 years but you forgot the name and there is no way you can find the name of the app or the program directly. Can you sense how hard it is for you to find the name of the app and to even delete it? Can you sense how deeply rooted that computer program or the app is in your system if you have used it for more than 15 years?
That’s exactly the same with your beliefs. In order to bring your beliefs to the surface, you have to do some serious self-investigation. You have to dig deep in your subconscious mind, find all the connections and resolve them so that you are able to delete the app (aka belief). And this is not always as easy as asking a couple of questions and then it’s done.
Fact #3 Beliefs Are Just a Perspective
What is very important to understand is that beliefs are not the reality. No matter how true you think your limiting belief is, it is never the ultimate truth and it’s always a perspective that you hold. And there is always someone out there in the world who is not holding that belief and therefore is experiencing a totally different reality. So every belief you hold is just one perspective on life and not representative of the whole structure of reality.
Fact #4: Beliefs are Always Restricting
Every belief you hold is based on your perception and therefore it is never representative of the true reality. A belief, limiting or not, will always be a concept that will limit you to a certain degree.
In order to move forward with your life, you have to look at your beliefs. Looking at your beliefs is very important when you want to achieve more than the average human being in the world. Because achieving more than the average human being requires the letting go of everything the average human being believes in that limits them to then rise above and live an extraordinary life.
Limiting Beliefs and the Law of Attraction
Beliefs dictate what you believe is possible in this world. When you go out and you want to manifest something into your life but at the same time you hold a belief that what you try to manifest is not possible, you will never be able to manifest what you desire.
That’s why it is very important to look at your limiting beliefs when you are manifesting your desires and work on them directly.
To identify and resolve your limiting beliefs you can read this article: Limiting Beliefs: Identify and Overcome your Limiting Beliefs
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