Reprogramming Your Mind – Overcoming Limiting Beliefs
Personal empowerment is something that can happen when we reprogram our minds and open out our thinking. In many areas we may find we habitually stick to a limited, narrow view of our situation and so prevent ourselves from moving forward. In this post I want to look at our attitude to those things over which we feel we personally have no control – things like bad luck, missed opportunities, not being able to see into the future. How can we change our attitudes to all of these thing in such a way as to transform our lives and even – dare I say it – to achieve our dreams?
Franz Alexander, M.D., tells us that "the fact that the mind rules the body is, in spite of its neglect by biology and medicine, the most fundamental fact which we know about the process of life." This is a big claim. How can it be so? Many feel that changes taking place in their bodies are beyond their conscious control. If not, why shouldn't we be able to achieve the body beautiful simply by willing it? And why should we not be able to attain perfect health with a simple command by the mind? I wish, for example, that I could move around the soaring skyscrapers and streets of a great city like Spiderman. Also, when I am in a majestic mountain range, I long to be able to fly and swoop among those mountains instead of toiling along steep jungle-overhung tracks. But is it likely? No. So what is Franz Alexander on about then?
In order to illustrate my point in this article I'd like to take the example of Jean de Florette, a character in a famous French novel. An idealistic, high-minded city dweller, Jean inherits a farm in Provence and takes his wife and child there intent on the rural idyll. His dream is to create a thriving lifestyle, breeding rabbits and growing produce. But he needs water. And it seems there is no water nearby and he has to rely on a relentless back-breaking trek to a well, which over the course of time eats into his energy and his time and creates a terrible knock-on effect eroding his livelihood and leaving him vulnerable to drought, crop failure, financial losses, and eventual ruin and tragic accidental death. And all the time there is an abundant spring very near his farmhouse. And it has been secretly blocked up by his callous and scheming neighbours whose one desire is to get their hands on his land and gain all the benefit of the spring with their own carnation-growing enterprise which will make them rich. And they don't care if they destroy lives on their way to their goal.
How could the high-minded, gentle dreamer Jean de Florette have succeeded in the face of that ? by gaining the confidence of the local people and thus hearing the gossip that there was a spring on his property and that it may even have been blocked by those very schemers. Then he would have found his way to the truth, overcome adversity and achieved his dream.
Very often people such as Jean fail through tragic flaws. Jean was gullible, naive and stubborn. And all these three characteristics come down to one thing: a limited view of his situation. We all do this, when we take things at face value, when we fail to follow our intuition, when we disregard the need to gain the confidence of other people, when we rigidly follow just one narrow way of attaining our dream. It could be that there is an abundant spring very near by – but we have shut our minds off to the possibility that it even exists.
It never occurred to Jean that there might actually be water on his property much nearer than he thought – if that had occurred to him his first major business expense would have been to invest in a professional dowser; and it also never occurred to him that his apparently friendly neighbour Ugulin who constantly visited him might not be all that he seemed (something his little daughter Manon saw instinctively).
There are many other examples in literature of a high minded, idealistic man brought to tragedy by the combination of a fatal flaw in their character blended with unfavourable circumstances. But one common element to them all is the failure to consider a different way of viewing things; thus, they stuck with their limited belief. I believe that all these tragic heroes may have succeeded by opening out their minds and freeing up their beliefs: even Oedipus Rex or Romeo! Of course Aeschylus or Shakespeare would not have had their stories if this had been the case.
But it is well worth us considering: how may we see things from a different angle? Perhaps we could brainstorm, follow word association, trust our instincts for once, turn something upside down, imagine that something we believed impossible is, for the sake of argument, possible; perhaps we could swap round cause and effect for fun. Who knows? In this apparently irrational process, you may find the key to overcoming a limiting belief – and thus reprogram your mind.
S.C. Skillman is the author of an exciting new psychological thriller novel "Mystical Circles" that will keep you in suspense. The word "mystical" in the title is used ironically to mean "mysterious behaviour, events that keep you guessing, and people playing at cross purposes". Reviewers have enjoyed Skillman's "exploration of a community of complex characters who inhabit an eerie and atmospheric retreat" and have found it "a very entertaining read with plenty of action and sparky dialogue." If you are interested in people and their foibles you will enjoy this book. You can buy the novel on Amazon and through the Kindle Bookstore or visit the author's website to find out more. Click the secure payment gateway to buy a signed copy at www.scskillman.co.uk
