Once upon a time, there were two brothers.
Their father was an angry man who thought life was cruel to him, so he responded to life paying her with the same coin of cruelty.
An alcoholic and drug addict, this man indulged in every self-destructive behaviour you could think of and ended eventually in jail for attempted murder.
His two sons, who were born only 12 months apart, turned out very different from each other.
One of them took the same road as his father, walking a self-destructive path and having the same results.
Stealing and mistreating others were his way of life.
But his brother was a very different man…
He lives day in and day out with an inner sense of happiness.
Not the “jumping around” and “rainbow” type of happiness but more of a “peace of mind” type of happiness.
He is single and extremely happy to be so because it is his choice and way of feeling connected to God.
He works at a high-paying job that he finds challenging and very rewarding, a great reality that gives him every day a sense of excitement and joy when waking up and having a new day ahead of him.
He works out and has a killer body too!
Women like him very much!
How could two men who grew up in the same environment end up so different?
They were both asked privately: “Why did your life turn out to be what it currently is?”.
They both answered: “What else could I have become, having been raised with a father like that?”
As I said before, many times we mistakenly think that events and people shape our lives, but the reality is the beliefs and level of acceptance we have are the true game changers.
It’s not the environment or how others have treated us in the past, but more the meaning we give to those events that shape the person who we are today and the person who we’ll be tomorrow.
They key thing here to notice is that events are a guiding element in life that tells us what leads to pleasure and what leads to pain.
In front of situations and circumstances in life, our brain asks two things: “Will this lead to pain or pleasure?” and “What do I have to do to avoid pain and gain pleasure?”
99% of our own blockers come from our mind, subjective beliefs that negatively impact our lives with undesired situations.
These negative beliefs are blocked energy in the form of negativity, which can be either fear, sadness, anger, jealousy, guilt, criticism, or the most common one of all – envy towards people who seem to have it all.
This blocked energy “tightens” our spirit and creates a block in us that can be as great as stopping our spiritual, mental, emotional and physical growth.
And notice I said they are subjective.
Why?
Because they are generalizations, we’ve created based on our own interpretations of painful and pleasurable experiences.
The main thing is this can be very challenging because:
* Many of us don’t consciously choose how to interpret things unless we’ve learned how to do it.
* Many times they are misinterpretations.
* Once the belief is adopted, in our mind, is it “the reality” and we forget in it just our subjective interpretation.
We treat beliefs as universal truths and very rarely, if ever, we question them by doing a little bit of introspection saying “is this an empowering belief?”.
We are not random creatures, our beliefs are the results of what we think leads to pain and what leads to pleasure, and if we want to make meaningful changes in our lives then we must learn how to recognise, accept, work on and improve our limiting beliefs because they have the power to create and the power to destroy!
“We are what we think. All that arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make our world.”
THE BUDDHA
Have a look at any of these sentences:
I’m not okay… there’s something wrong with me…
I’m unworthy.
I’ve committed mistakes and done bad things to people.
I deserve to suffer in life for this.
The world is a cruel place.
Watch over your shoulder because people are essentially bad.
There’s not enough _________ (love, money, good things) in life so… why try when I’ll surely be greeted with disappointment?
Life is not meant to be fun or pleasurable.
Therefore, pain and suffering are the predominant elements in it.
Money is the root of all evil, so rich people are not nice people.
Any of them might sound familiar?
Maybe not, but the truth of the matter is that for many of us we’ve ended believing things like this, or very similar ones, which in turn created a series of events and results in our lives that matched these beliefs because it’s the thoughts we sent to the Universe.
If you reread them, you will notice that the main purpose of these beliefs is to save us from pain and gain pleasure.
A key distinction I want you to make is that these beliefs are blockers.
They are negative in nature and therefore the results that come from them also have the same attribute.
Nothing meaningful and life-changing can happen when abundance blockers rule our mind, and therefore our belief system.
The great news is that we all have the choice and ability to take any experience of our lives, past or present, and give them meaning that empowers us or disempowers us.
How great this news are!!??
GREAT NEWS, I tell you. 🙂 🙂
It gives us the choice to build one of our most powerful asset: control of our mind (aka control over the things we can have control in our lives).
Belief is nothing else but a feeling of certainty about something and they key effort from our part is making sure we dig deep inside of ourselves with an honest look and ask: is this something that empowers me or disempowers me?