Belief, Disbelief, Confusion, and Duality
We believe what we think. Yet our perceptions come from far more than our thinking minds. Our pre-verbal brains (the limbic brain, the one without words) contain our childhood experience, subconscious learning-by-example from our families, and the residue of any traumatic experiences (violence, rape, war, abandonment, and so on). Any of these can sabotage what we think we want to happen; affirmations cannot work when the subconscious mind and old beliefs hold sway.
As Gregg Braden writes in The Spontaneous Healing of Belief,
"Just the way sound creates visible waves as it travels through a droplet of water, our 'belief waves' ripple through the quantum fabric of the universe to become our bodies and the healing, abundance, and peace--or disease, lack, and suffering--that we experience in life. And just the way we can tune a sound to change its patterns, we can tune our beliefs to preserve or destroy all that we cherish, including life itself."
When we address our preverbal sabotaging beliefs, we can step towards the creativity, radiance, and change that are our essence. This is where our intent, our choices, and our receptivity help us engage.
A good example is when we work with a personal coach, minister, or counselor: they can guide us for months, but if we don't try the new approach, the new behavior they are guiding us towards, not much changes. If we are not receptive to suggestion and possibility, if we refuse the physician's medicine or the counselor's prescriptions, we're saying "I really do not want to change my belief." Our old habits and behaviors become more embedded.
Essentially, we have to experience a difference to believe in it.
In The Holographic Universe, Michal Talbott writes extensively about the placebo effect. Miracles of healing occur when we put aside our normal assumptions about power, proof, knowledge, and our place in universe. In essence, he says, "...our ability to control the body holographic is molded by our beliefs.
Confusion
Confusion "protects" us from taking action. It can be exhausting and addictive: if we tell ourselves we are confused and don't know what to do, we can wallow and avoid doing anything.
Confusion is often a mask, hiding our primary feelings, our mad, sad, glad, or afraid responses.
As Mark Wolynn of The Hellinger Institute explains,
"When grief is overwhelming, we are rarely able to complete its process. Instead, we remain frozen in secondary emotions, unable to access the very emotions that will bring us relief. We develop unconscious strategies-anger, numbness, addictions to substances, exercise or work-designed to keep us going, but often these strategies serve only to keep us stuck. Unfortunately, our children learn too well from us and often repeat our patterns. We see time and time again how an individual's unresolved grief becomes the family's unresolved grief, and continues from generation to generation...Yet, when we look back at the tragic events that devastated our families and remember those who suffered, and acknowledge them with great respect, we can begin to experience immediate relief. If we were to imagine the posthumous wishes of our dead ancestors, they would want only happiness and peace for us."
We see confusion and inaction masking despair and powerlessness on a global scale in people's responses to global warming, the effects of nuclear radioactivity, and violence. We see confusion and inaction masking despair and powerlessness on a personal level in our response to alcoholic siblings, friends who demean and bully others, or our own inability to speak our truth.
It is a huge shift of consciousness to step out of confusion by identifying and experiencing our feelings directly. It releases energy and frees us from a kind of internal entrapment when we ask ourselves, "Am I mad, sad, glad, or afraid?" When we identify our primary feeling, we can rest in it, or decide what we want to do about it, rather than exhausting ourselves with "confusion." Stepping into our primary feelings gives us great power and internal authority.
"From an energy point of view, every choice that enhances our spirits strengthens our energy field; and the stronger our energy field, the fewer our connections to negative people and experiences," writes Carolyn Myss in Anatomy of the Spirit.
Duality
Dualistic thinking--where we see only two possibilities, no middle ground, and no continuum of possibility--keeps us stuck. It reinforces cultural, religious, and political "truths" which are really just belief systems.
As Rumi said nearly a thousand years ago, "If you think there are important differences or divisions between Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims, then you are dividing yourself, between your heart-what you love with-and how you act in the world."
Many of us experience duality in thinking about our relationships and work: "If I leave this marriage, my life will be over." "I hate this job, but I'll never find another one in this economic climate." "No, I can't travel/go to school/learn a new skill because I have to take care of my child." None of these statements, which we so often hear from ourselves or others, allows for any range of possibility.
We see dualistic thinking even in young children. In first grade, for example, many children who are perfectly competent "artists"--in drawing, creating, painting, building--stop. Entirely. Why? Because the teacher praised someone else, or another child in the class does it 'better.' Seven-year-olds do tend towards black-and-white thinking: Their brains are not yet fully developed. Yet when a mother reprimands her young daughter for some naughty behavior, and the child keeps repeating "I'm a good girl. I'm a good girl," she cannot allow the possibility of "bad," let alone a mistake in behavior. How many of us secretly carry those kinds of thoughts into adulthood?
To shift into a more receptive frame of mind, we might consider a one-step-at-a-time approach. We might agree to try a different experience. We might explore complementarity, trying to discover how the "opposites" actually depend on and complement each other. The complementarity of the sexes; the reality that we cannot fully experience joy unless we have had some sorrow; and the well-known principle that the shadows in our emotional experience teach us how to be whole: all these examples of complementarity can work to modulate our dualistic thinking.
Blessings of our ripening gardens,
Meg Beeler/Earth Caretakers
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