In this series of posts, I have been talking about the four (4) levels of healing in an effort to experience more peace, happiness and joy in your life. In addition to mental healing, there are three other levels includingn spiritual, emotional, and physical. I’ve introduced the four levels of healing and discussed strategies for spiritual healing – the foundation for all levels of healing.
Today, I’m going to talk about mental healing. The mental level includes your ideas, core beliefs and basic attitude and approach towards life. This encompasses the basics of identifying thought patterns and limiting beliefs that weigh you down and keep you from living a fulfilling life.
In your early formative years, you developed specific core beliefs and attitudes about how the world works. These beliefs were established based on early influences such as your upbringing, religion, schooling, culture and life experiences.
Your core beliefs are mostly unconscious and are not based on reality. Rather, they are based on biased images about life. Your core beliefs inform how you interpret life, the world, other people and, more importantly, yourself.
Every day your beliefs are being challenged and you may not notice because these beliefs are so ingrained in you – they become second nature. To become more connected to your divine self, it’s important to become aware of your belief system, challenge it and develop a new system that better serves your growth and overall spiritual development.
Mental Healing: How to Identify Limiting Core Beliefs
Do you notice patterns in your life? A common issue or struggle that keeps popping up over and over again? This is usually because you are attracting this issue or struggle through your limited beliefs.
To identify your core beliefs, notice what thoughts go through you mind constantly. More often than not, the limited core beliefs manifest as negative self-talk (ie. I’m not good enough, I’m a failure, I always screw things up, etc.).
What negative beliefs do you have about yourself? Be as honest as possible and spend some time making a list. Write it down as fast as you can without judgement.
Next, identify where this thought comes from. Typically, it’s usually something that we learned directly or, often times, indirectly, from our primary care giver.
For instance, one of my core beliefs was “I don’t matter”. When I did some honest digging as to where I learned this it was from my mother. I used to practice piano in our living room and she’d shut the door so she couldn’t hear me. Or, whenever I called her, she wouldn’t answer until I used her first name!
These incidents sound trivial in and of themselves but … since they happened over and over again it sent me a message – I concluded that … “I don’t matter”. She didn’t say it directly. It was indirect for sure. But I picked up on the message nonetheless and carried this around with me until I started my journey of healing and transformation.
There are other core beliefs that come into play too. This is the beliefs about the world around you. Such as people can’t be trusted, everyone is so rude and mean, all (fill in the blank) are idiots, or life is a huge struggle, etc. What external core beliefs do you carry around with you?
As you become more aware of your underlying belief systems and thought patterns, you can begin to heal negative self-talk, recognize and dissolve the external beliefs that don’t serve you and reframe the way you see the world.
The mental aspect of life is necessary to create balance, well-being, harmony and joy in your life. It is fundamental to helping your heal the other three levels of self – spiritual, physical and emotional. When you have core, limiting beliefs it affects how you feel – it affects you on the emotional level. Your emotions affect you physically (tense muscles, shallow breathing, dull eyes). If you are stuck physically and emotionally, you’ll invariably be stuck spiritually.
Ahh … are you beginning to see how it all relates to each other? Kinda cool, huh?
So take some time, even it’s just a few minutes, to brainstorm on what limiting beliefs you have about yourself and the world around you. Where did those beliefs come from? Are they really valid? Could they be incorrect?
Start challenging your reality and you’ll discover a whole new beautiful, amazing world out there for you to explore!
Joyously yours,
Dana
