Four Steps to Challenging Limiting Beliefs

I remember when my dad died. it was a sad time in my life when we found out he had brain cancer and passed away within a few months. I am glad we had the time to say goodbye. Probably the thing i lamented the most was the fact that he would never influence me any more. We never had a really close relationship but his passing still effected me. There was no more blaming the way i was raised. What i did or did not have. He had done the best he could and now my future was up to me. This was scary and liberating. In the back of my mind there was always a childhood safety net, a place where if I fell over i could go back to for advice and comfort. This was starting to fall away.

Our parents come from a different time and place. We inherit from them skills that were needed to survive. My dad, like many of the time came from a place of scarcity. There was not enough to go around. Additionally, he had brain damage from a terrible accident at a young age. He lived fine balancing act that could come crashing down if he didn’t keep things ordered and working.

Now, I don’t have brain damage and we live in a time of abundance. How am I to choose whether to accept some behaviours which i have modelled from a very young age?

It is the duty of every generation to test and decide that for themselves. Rituals and practices form as a reaction to a stressor and sometimes become irrelevant when that stressor is no longer there. At this point we need to analyse whether it is worth taking on a new belief for the success of our community.

Culture should not be a static thing but should grow and change with our needs. Some people have a dogmatic view that we must stick to the way of doing things and that is it. It certainly is a lot easier to do this as it requires the bravery and creativity (usually from the youth) to challenge these. There is however a methodical system we can use to inspect culture to challenge, test and update it for the benefit of our community.

It requires some deep thought but the best place to start is to use a common meditation technique called RAIN. Rain is an acronym for Recognise, Accept, Inspect and Non identification. It is a method of inspecting emotional triggers from meditation teacher Tara Brach (https://www.tarabrach.com/articles-interviews/rain-workingwithdifficulties/). Instead, we step back and choose how we want to interact with them. It has been used successfully to treat addictions (https://www.mindful.org/craving-to-quit/) but is useful in many contexts to catch behaviours as they happen. Limiting beliefs operate in the same way as they are usually not rational thought but learnt emotional responses.

• Recognise — What is the belief that is running in my life. e.g. There is not enough to go around.
• Accept — This has had a place in my life and it is up to me to decide whether to move forward with it.
• Inspect — How does this belief show up in my life? How does it make me feel? What are the consequences when this belief is triggered? Do i want this in my life?
• Non identification — This is not my belief and I can react differently the next time this happens.

Getting this far is a huge step in the right direction but if you want to change anything then it will require repeated reinforcement of this process. This is where meditation really helps in providing the calm attention to catch emotional triggers and redirect our intention before behaviours are automatically enacted.