The culture that we are born into dictates what we learn as we are growing up. Our parents begin to program us when we are babies. They project their life lessons and experiences on us and through them, we learn that life is either a scary place or a safe place. All of their life lessons/beliefs become a major influence in how we interact with life. Often what we learn from them is what they learned as a child from their parents.
What I find so interesting is that few people challenge their parent’s belief system. We begin to question our parent’s point of view as a pre-teen or teenager. We may even openly rebel against their authority and what they want us to believe and how we act. Situations in our family may impress on us the fact, for instance, that we decide never to get married because our parent’s marriage was a train wreck.
Questioning what we believe and why we believe it might feel like a betrayal to our parents in a way. In some cultures, it is a crime to go against some of the societal beliefs. Again, return to the truth that we do have a choice in what we believe. We can choose to accept the belief as our own or change the belief to one that serves us better.
In my early twenties, a book I was reading (can’t remember the title) discussed writing down beliefs and tracking down where you learned them. It was a fascinating exercise. I discovered that many of my beliefs came from my father. This information led me to delve deeper into my beliefs and decide to change some of them to ones that felt better.
Changing what you believe is possible if you’re willing to do the work. The first step is to choose one that isn’t deeply ingrained in your mind. Once you choose one, trace it back to where you first learned this belief. If you have difficulty releasing a belief, remember, this is your life. You get to make choices about what to believe. Now that you are aware of it not being one that benefits you, choose another one to replace it. Write it down. Put it somewhere that you see it several times a day. Speak your new belief out loud when you get up and before you go to sleep. The more you can keep your awareness on it, the quicker it will become ingrained.
Once our beliefs are all ones we have chosen, there is a certain freedom that comes from this. It doesn’t matter if they are all accepted ones by society or if there are more than a few that stand outside the norm. We are able to stand in a truth that we chose. This brings a certainty with it as we know where we stand and why we stand there with our chosen beliefs.
When we stand in our personal power, strong in the knowledge of our truth, our creativity and unlimited potential to do what we choose increases immensely. We feel more in control, free to follow passions revealed by choosing our personal truth. We came here to follow our dreams, not to live a life that is someone else’s version of who they think we should be.