Challenge Your Beliefs to Become Free

 Happy Day Beautiful Souls,

I write this to invite you to challenge your beliefs to become free or freer in your life. As I write in my book, The Beauty of Being Free, “Freedom is a mindset. No form of subjugation can contain a free mind, one that is conscious and aware. To break the chains of oppressions of any kind is to first break the shackles of mental bondage, which can color your perception of reality and greatly impact your ability to be a productive and consequential force in the world.”

In some cases, our belief systems have become the mental shackles that keep up from experiencing and living our best life.

From young, patterns of beliefs are developed often to help make sense of the world and everything around you. These beliefs are established from emotional attachments to perhaps parents, teachers, pastors, or other people who have been in your sphere of influence. Beliefs however can be empowering or limiting.

What are beliefs and how do they come about?

A belief is a “conviction of the truth of a proposition or alleged fact without knowledge.” They are conditioned perceptions that a person develops over their lifetime that stems from various experiences, whether positive or negative, and then attach emotions to it. They are conclusions people draw of situations and circumstances usually from childhood. Yet, they are not necessarily based on fact or actual facts.

Beliefs are established in our own personal lives by some experience we had with someone or something and we put emotion behind that experience. The emotions commonly are attached to parents, religious leaders, teachers, romantic involvements, and others who may have had or has significant influence in our life and how we view the world. Sometimes we hold people in our lives so dear that we handle information from them as the full gospel and in many cases don’t question or challenge the information within ourselves to see if what is being shared or given is true for us.

Because we love and trust them, when they share principles with us, we don’t always measure it against our own higher self to see if it resonates and instead we take the information completely, internalize it, and then establish it as a belief.

Why are beliefs important and when do they become limiting?

Having a belief system is helpful in that it provides a sense of stability and helps us to make sense of things and provides a basis for context and perspective. However, if our beliefs are limiting and hinders our success or keeps us from achieving our goals them we must assess them and challenge them to see if they are from the premise of an erroneous thought or faulty logic.

Beliefs can be either empowering or limiting. Empowering beliefs enable us to grow, evolve, and flourish. Limiting beliefs stops us from growing, evolving, and reaching our destiny.

An example of an empowering belief is “I AM worthy and deserve to have the best in life.” An example of a limiting belief is “Money is the root of all evil.” Another example of an empowering belief is “I AM free to express my truth and to say how I feel,” or “I have everything I need at this moment to achieve my dream.” Another example of a limiting belief is “I need to keep my feelings in because they really don’t matter,” or “It is way too hard or will take way too much work to accomplish my goals.”

People develop limiting beliefs around their esteem, their style of dress, their manners, their abilities, and more. They put limitations on how they go about things as a result of false information and consequently self-sabotage their own success.

Recalling a limiting belief I let go of to become freer

I can recall one limiting belief system that I had which kept me from one of the joys in my life. I love swimming and I use to swim every day. However, at one point in my life I took on a limiting belief that came about on my spiritual journey. I was taught that I was not supposed to show my body in a bathing suit in public so I stopped going swimming if it was in a public place and since I did not have a swimming pool that meant I did not swim for quite some time. I deprived myself of the joy of swimming because someone else defined what modesty was and I believed them without challenging it. Because I loved swimming, I made this swimming suit that not only made me look ridiculous, it restricted me from swimming effectively. At the pool, I drew so much attention to myself by wearing the ridiculous get up because I was focused solely on covering up rather than what I was there to do. Before, when I went swimming, no one was remotely paying attention to me and if they were I didn’t notice because I was focused on getting my swimming on and releasing negative energy and imbibing the positivity from the energy of the water.

However, after the ridicule by others around me and mocking, I stopped even swimming in public for the most part because I took on this belief that it was “wrong” to show my body in public and that it was not modest. However, at some point, it was necessary for me to challenge that belief because I was depriving myself of something that I not only loved to do, but that was very good for me. I realized that for me, modesty is not a “look,” it is a behavior and it really does not matter what a person is wearing as it does how they behave. A person can be all covered up and act lewd and with very little self-regard or they can be uncovered (e.g. model for a painter) and present very beautifully and with the highest level of regard for self.

Finally, I boldly challenged that limiting belief and learned to appreciate my love for swimming and my good taste in a choice of a swimming suit that worked for me for what my reasons for being at the pool were. I was not there to entice others to look at me; I was there to swim, so there was no reason for me to concern myself with an attitude that had nothing to do with me. And being modest was not about what type of suit I was wearing it was more about the type of behavior I chose to take on. I let go of that limiting belief and returned to the joys of swimming. When I released that particular limiting belief, it opened the way for me to confront many more that was impeding my ability to be happy and successful.  Success for me is not solely about money and material things, it is about peace and contentment of mind.

What limiting beliefs do you have in your life that are holding you back or keeping you in a state of bondage?

I would love to hear your feedback.