True Power: What do you believe?

Do you know what you believe?

Most people say yes. But I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most of the people who say yes, when questioned, don't really know what they believe about a whole host of things that affect their lives.

I believe (ah, here's one I know!) that what we believe is the key to how we feel, how we respond, how we live. I also believe (another!) that we can change what we believe; that things we hold as "truths" are more often than not "good guesses" and "cherished assumptions" that we've chosen to embrace; that many of those choices are based on faulty information and misunderstood (or missing) data; and that by changing what we choose to believe, we change how we see the world and how the world sees and treats us. Finally, and maybe most importantly, unless we do the hard and ongoing work of discovering what we believe and holding those beliefs up to the light, we run the risk of letting beliefs that don't serve us rule our actions.

To be in control of our own lives, we need to know what we believe, understand why we believe it, and ask ourselves, always, "Is it true? Does it serve?" Anything that isn't true and doesn't serve should be replaced.

We form beliefs based on things we're told, events we witness, experiences we have...and the way in which we perceive those things, with whatever level of understanding we have at the time, colors and shapes our beliefs. And since so much of what we think we believe about ourselves is based on input we receive and process and use to define ourselves and our roles in the world, we end up with colorful, oddly shaped self images, more akin to fun house mirror images than true reflections. We develop our beliefs about others in much the same way, often complicated and clouded by our ill-formed perceptions of ourselves.

Beyond what we believe about ourselves and others, beliefs about death, life, sex, work, love, learning, relationships...in short, everything that matters...shape our lives in ways we don't always think about. We act on what we believe most of the time, even when don't know or can't articulate those beliefs. At other times, we ignore what we really believe in favor of some false belief we've cooked up to justify doing something pleasureable or avoiding something uncomfortable.

Discovering what we believe isn't always as straightforward as it might seem. In fact, it's much more a sneak-around-the-back process than a front door process. Beliefs can hide, and often we have to examine both action and motive to uncover the belief.

My personal journey into my own beliefs started with a gift. My ex-husband brought me a little book, Celebrate Your Womanhood Therapy, one of a series called "Elf Help Books." It featured charming little drawings of elves and short insightful sayings on each page. I can't quote the page verbatim, but it said, in essence, "True happiness is not found outside yourself. Happiness is a result of your thoughts, your beliefs, and your actions in harmony."

The statement rang true to me and since I was anything but happy at the time, I started thinking about my beliefs, my thoughts, and my actions. What I discovered, to my surprise, is this:

my actions were based on what I felt;
my feelings were based on what I thought;
my thoughts were based on what I believed;
my beliefs were based on... what?

That's where I got stumped. I reasoned that if I didn't know what my beliefs were based on, then I didn't know why I believed as I did, And if I didn't have a clue why I believed it, how the heck did I know it was true?

For me, discovery started with discomfort. I wasn't happy; if happiness was, as the book suggested, the result of harmony, then places where I felt most unhappy were places to look for what was discordant. Once I started to look, I discovered just what a mess I was! Things I claimed to believe, beliefs I claimed to hold dear, were nowhere evident in my life. Some things I thought I believed, or maybe thought I wanted to believe, I really didn't believe at all; I thought I was supposed to believe them, so I said I did and went on. But my life was telling another tale and the discord and chaos were pretty damning evidence. One discovery led to another, like dominoes falling. It was and is a slow process, one that continues today.

I don't even know where to begin to tell you what I learned and am still learning. The biggest lesson of all,I guess, is that I am not powerless over my thoughts and emotions. When I feel discomfort - anger, disappointment, fear, sadness, betrayal - I am not "stuck" with that emotion. I can dig deeper, look for the underlying belief that causes me to think the thoughts that cause the emotion. When I find it, I can examine the belief, look for its roots, discern its truth. Often, I find that the "belief" I hold so dear is really an assumption, a creative filling of gaps between facts based on some deeper, bigger belief that I wasn't aware I held.

I also learned, in the absence of irrefutible facts, to choose to believe the explanation that brings peace. So much of the time, we fill in motives when all we have observed is behavior. Most behavior (and there are exceptions, of course) doesn't really affect us all that much. It's the motives for the behavior that cause us the most misery. If someone steps on my toe, it hurts for a little while. If I believe she stepped on my toe purposefully, that hurts a lot longer. And if I don't know for a fact that the step was dileberate, I choose to believe it wasn't. It hurts less that way.

Examining my life, I learned that anytime I was acting in a way that was not aligned with what my intuitive, knowing self knew and recognized as the path of honor and wisdom, my life was chaotic and discordant. Let me tell you, that little nugget of wisdom, as obvious as it seems now, was a long time in coming. I wasn't listening to my inner voice. But that inner voice is the voice of our truest, deepest beliefs. It's the one that tells us we're ok, even when we're surrounded by the echoes of other voices telling us we're not ok. It's the one that knows what we love and where we're gifted and our highest purpose in this life. It's the one that tells us when we're about to act foolishly and do something selfish, arrogant, stupid, unsafe, unethical, or unwise...the same one we ignore for so many ill-conceived reasons. I got married twice when my inner voice was saying, "NO! This is not right for you!" because I didn't know how to back out of the relationship and wanted to avoid the discomfort of dealing with it. Talk about trading up! There's discomfort, and there's discomfort! And I put myself through hell and contributed to my partners' hellish experience because I didn't pay attention to what I knew, what I believed.

So I ask you again...what do you believe? There is tremendous power in listening, asking, digging, and finding our beliefs, questioning them, discovering their sources. There is even more power in having the courage to change beliefs that don't hold up to scrutiny. One of my favorite Bible verses (yes, I have favorite Bible verses!), John 8:32 (World English Bible), says it well: "You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." The power to cause change to occur in our lives in conformity with our will is magic of the highest order.