What is a belief?
It’s a simple question, but not such a simple answer unless you’ve thought about it a lot.
All this talk about “beliefs” and how great it is to question them….but let’s start from the beginning today. (Enter soundtrack “Let’s Start At The Very Beginning” from A Sound of Music).
In Websters: An acceptance that something is true or that something exists. Something that one accepts as true or real; a firmly held conviction or opinion.
Nowhere does it actually say that it IS true or real. Just accepted as true or real.
Bruce Di Marsico who developed and taught the Option Method of inquiry before he died defined a belief as an assumption that something is true, an assumption that it is fact. He said that a belief is not the proof of truth. A belief about a thing’s existence is not the same as its existence.
I once heard a belief described in an academic lecture as something that is repeatedly thought over and over again.
How interesting! It is just something THOUGHT, over and over and over. It’s like the mind’s eye is scanning the world, the environment, our experience, and it is saying “Is it true now? Yes! Because look at this situation!” And then a year later “And how about now? Yes! This proves it to be true!”
The mind keeps finding evidence and support for what it has assumed, perhaps from a very very young age.
I am a loser. See! I must be–my wife just left me, my bank account just got emptied, I just lost my house, my son hates me, that person doesn’t want me, I can’t make any money, I’m a drunk, I have cancer, I broke my wrist, I am not happy.
Byron Katie offers this question to help us dive into greater awareness of our convictions, opinions and belief systems: WHERE’S YOUR PROOF?
A beginning starting place is to find out why you believe what you believe. Don’t dismiss it, even if it seems childish. See what your proof is….and notice if you don’t have any. That’s OK too. It doesn’t mean you have to change your mind.
You have to see what you believe in order to see other possibilities. You have to see what you believe in order to find out what is hurting you, what is bringing about your unhappiness.
“The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The unnamable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things. Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations. Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.”~Tao Te Ching #1
Naming your beliefs is the doorway to freedom. Start there…
Love, Grace
Turning Relationship Hell To Heaven In-Person Intensive Seattle 12/1 Noon – 6 pm.
Horrible Food Wonderful Food Weekend In-Person Intensive Seattle January 12-13, 2013 Saturday 10 – 5:30, Sunday 1:30-5:30. To register for either weekend workshop, click here!Fill in the workshop fee after you click the Buy button at the bottom of the page. You can use paypal or any credit card (you don’t need a paypal account).
Mark your calendar for Breitenbush, the end of June! We will be looking at all aspects of what we consider to be flaws in the body, and Un-doing our beliefs about them. Stay tuned if you’d like to join me and Susan Grace Beekman from June 26-30, 2013. You can change your internal beliefs about what you think bodies should be like….and change your entire experience of being in yours.
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