A common question I see posted on various forums and that is frequently posed to me is “How do I change my (life) experiences?”
Many many teachers have talked about how to do this but it starts with understanding:
Your experiences are a direct result from your Thoughts & Beliefs and your Feelings & Emotions
Your brain sends the same chemicals when you remember an event as they do when you are experiencing event. This is why just thinking about or remembering a past wrong or situation can make us upset or sad or happy.
If you want to change your experiences (or reality), you must change the inputs to your behavior—>experience loop.
The easiest place to do this are the Thoughts / Beliefs inputs as mastering and changing Feelings and Emotions is a bit more difficult.
Most of our core beliefs about the world were programmed in at a very early age and most people don’t spend much time thinking about their relevancy, universal applicability, and the if we want to keep those beliefs for ourselves. Heck, most people dont even know they can dump (limiting) beliefs that arent useful for you.
The following image demonstrates the above cycle.
Another way to view this cycle is below:
Our programming, which began at an early age, perpetuates most of these thoughts and beliefs. Most of these are Brules (Bullshit Rules). The don’t apply to everyone and they don’t HAVE TO apply to you once you decide they don’t need to.
How do we start to notice brules or our thoughts and beliefs? There are many coaching quizzes you can take to get a sense of your beliefs and core values but meditation and mindfulness are another important way to begin to take stock of your current thoughts, beliefs, feelings and emotions. When you are feeling upset you start working backwards on why you are feeling that way, what triggered it, what belief has you upset or feeling unheard or less than, what thoughts were brought about by that situation. Did you react or respond to the situation.
Lastly, the above is core to my coaching practice and something I do with each client. We also go into depth about limiting beliefs in the Infinite Possibilities class. If either of those are of interest to you please reach out for more information.