Limiting Beliefs

www.spiritual horsemanship.com
Copyright (c) 2009 Lif Strand

Here’s something to ponder: Limiting beliefs are what keep us stuck in trying mode.

What does it really take to move from trying to doing?

As has been said by many before me, the sky’s the limit when it comes to what can be done in this world. If you can imagine it, you can do it. But most of us – even though we think we’re imagining quite well (vision boards, affirmations, life scripts, even daydreaming) – never seem to be able to get to where we want to go.

That’s because we’ve got these built-in constraints called beliefs, which exist in the domain of the subconscious.

I don’t know how much time you spend thinking about elephants, but have you ever wondered how it is that those big animals can be confined by chains that they could easily snap? I’ve been told that what happens is that when elephants are babies, they’re tethered at the ankle with chains that are too strong for them at that young age to break. They learn quickly that getting free of the restraint is impossible. As elephants grow up, even though they become so powerful that they could easily snap the chain that keeps them in place, they believe that the chain is too strong, and they never try. The belief they developed as babies limits what they think they can do.

Of course, elephants do break their chains sometimes – but that only happens when they panic or become enraged. Other than those rare occasions, they don’t believe they can – and so, they can’t.

People do the same thing. How many times have you heard about the petite mom who lifts a car to save a loved one? Or maybe it’s the kid who can’t read in school, but who is a whiz at computer programming. How about the timid, shy bookish type who tackles the convenience store robber, saving lives? Each of these is an example of people who have beliefs about themselves that they, nevertheless, can and do overcome – when they stop thinking.

Here’s the key to it all: The subconscious mind has the limiting belief that governs the conscious, thinking mind and makes it impossible to act – and no matter how smart, logical or powerful that thinking mind is, it’s the only the subconscious mind that can break that belief.


No wonder you get stuck in trying, not doing.

You keep attempting, but nothing happens. You decide to do something - maybe you carefully plan your actions, you create a vision board or a mind movie or repeat affirmations – but all of this is using your thinking mind. Problem is, it’s your subconscious mind that has the belief that limits what you can achieve – and the thinking mind can’t communicate with the subconscious mind. So, no matter what you do with your conscious, thinking mind, that subconscious belief tells your conscious mind that you can’t do whatever you’re wanting to do - so you get stuck in try mode, repeating the attempt again and again. You just can’t get where you want to go if you don’t believe you can get there. Your belief limits your ability, no matter how much thinking, talent, education, planning, help or luck you have. (You say - but what about luck? Well, you’ll find that limiting beliefs will sabotage that, too.)

Limiting beliefs can be tricky things. They’re not always obviously connected to what you’re trying to do, and that makes it hard to figure out what the problem is. And sometimes there’s more than one limiting belief involved, making it even harder to get past trying and into doing. Limiting beliefs define the line between try and do, between negative emotions and positive emotions, between able and not able. Quite honestly, all beliefs are limiting beliefs – because they define the boundaries that make you who you are. The beliefs that keep you back, that keep you from doing what you want to do – these are limiting beliefs.

Limiting beliefs are those beliefs that keep you from changing. They’re what keep you trying, rather than doing. And if you’ve decided to change, but your limiting beliefs are holding you back, keeping on trying is not a good thing, because trying just feeds the limiting beliefs.

Doing the same thing over and over isn’t a bad thing. The power of feeding proof to your subconscious mind is why practice works. But doing the same thing over and over is only a good technique if you’re doing the thing well – your belief that you can do it is fed by the doing, and your belief is strengthened.

The more you try, the more power the belief gets – trying feeds proof of the validity of the belief to your subconscious mind. When your conscious thinking mind says “rise up out of the swamp, spaceship” and for the umpteenth time the spaceship doesn’t even quiver, your subconscious mind says “told you so”, and the belief that you can’t do it is even stronger.

You really don’t want to get stuck by keeping on trying.


I believe it, therefore I am

“Seeing is believing” is how the saying goes, but in fact, what you see is what your beliefs tell you you’re going to see. People look in the mirror and see fat when there isn’t any, and then starve themselves into anorexia. Perfectly great looking people think they’re ugly, or stupid, or any number of negatives, and can’t trust others who compliment them if the compliment contradicts that belief. However many witnesses there are to an accident or a crime, there will be that many different descriptions of what happened. Magic works because the magician sets you up to believe you will see something other than what is really there. People walk on coals without being burned because they believe they can.

Beliefs are extraordinarily powerful things. The limbic system is the place where those beliefs are located, because beliefs are the limbic system’s version of lessons learned, based on memories – of real things or imagined. The system is primitive, involved with survival mode – it’s still there because it works.

And then again, there are lots of times when it doesn’t work, when beliefs limit you from doing what you want or need to do. You’ve got to get around the limiting beliefs, sometimes. Full panic mode can allow you to overcome limiting beliefs – panic (or rage or any strong enough emotion) causes the limbic system to release adrenaline into the body and people can do things that would ordinarily be impossible. Elephants can pop those chains that never were very strong – but more importantly, they can break the chain of limiting beliefs.

Of course, we can’t go around getting panicked and pumping adrenaline into our systems in order to overcome our limiting beliefs. That would be pretty self-destructive in ordinary life.

There are basically just a few ways to change your limiting beliefs. One is to get rid of the belief entirely. The other is to just alter the belief.


Raising the Bar

You can’t really just get rid of your beliefs – not in a meaningful way. There is no delete and defrag for a healthy mind. Amnesia will do it, but that’s not desirable. But what you can do is change how a belief affects you. The easiest way is to raise the threshold, the point where the belief triggers the limbic system to take over, so that you have more leeway to act.

You can’t do this by thinking about it, since as I keep saying, the conscious, thinking mind can’t “converse” with the unconscious mind. There are various techniques for doing this, but the simplest and fastest and most pleasant – at least so far as I’ve discovered – is to feed new memories (of the right kind) into the old. With enough of the right new memories, you can dilute the belief system, in effect reducing its hold on you or raising the threshold where it impacts you. It’s kind of like adding white paint to black or any color – you add enough and eventually the color gets lighter and lighter until it is so close to white as makes no difference.

But you can’t do it by thinking about it, or you get stuck in try mode.

You can find advice everywhere about how to do this, but I had a hard time with it until I found the simplest way. This is really the heart of the Law of Attraction and Spiritual Horsemanship. If you think about the problem, you bump up against your limiting belief and you can’t make progress because you’ve just made that belief stronger by touching on it. And your limiting belief keeps you from thinking about the success you want in a positive way, which is what so many advise you to do (think positively, visualize success, repeat affirmations, make mind movies showing you success, etc.).

But what if you come at it the sneaky way? What if you figure out how to drum up the proper feeling of success without even touching on the limiting belief?

It can be done! Ask yourself this: What happens when you succeed? If you’re healthy, you have this great feeling of achievement, maybe of power, of being “in the zone”, of perfection. What does all that come down to?

Happiness.

Happiness is the state of mind when you’re feeling achievement, when you’ve connected with your personal power, when you’re in the zone. Yes, they may all feel different, but they all are versions of this particular state of mind. It might be called different names – bliss, harmony, peace, nirvana, pick one. For convenience’s sake, they can all be considered positive emotions, the opposite of opposite of the negative emotions (rage, panic, depression, misery, etc.), although negative emotions can be good - but let’s go on.

Emotions are what cement the memories in your limbic system. Memories form your beliefs. Negative emotions trigger the limbic system to take over, and that creates limiting beliefs. Eliciting limiting beliefs over and over just strengthens them.

But positive emotions dilute limiting beliefs. And that’s it, right there.

That’s the answer to raising the bar, to overcoming limiting beliefs, to lifting the spaceship out of the muck. Experiencing a positive emotion – the more often, the better.

Getting happy. Not through drugs, or hypnotism or any artificial means, but by truly experiencing happiness. It doesn’t make any difference whether or not you're happy because you’ve achieved success at a task that you thought you couldn’t – the limbic system isn’t about logic. You’re not likely to be doing that anyway, if you’ve got a limiting belief. What you can do is experience happiness for other reasons at the right time – when you’d ordinarily experience the negative beliefs elicited by the limiting belief.

Your limbic system can’t tell the difference, it only stores information about whether you’re experiencing a positive or negative emotion when a belief is triggered. The more happiness you can drum up in your life, the more you dilute limiting beliefs. Yoda called it connecting to The Force. Others call it connecting with your spiritual self, or the Universe, or God. Doesn’t matter. The one commonality is that it feels right. It feels authentic. It feels good.

Next: Getting Happy