In Violation.
You’ve got these rules don’t you, although since you’re probably not aware of them on an everyday basis, let’s call them beliefs instead.
They are the structure of your functioning universe, the glue that holds your patterns together, the marshmallow in your rice-krispie treat. Without your beliefs, the whole world falls apart.
So let’s start breaking them.
And I get it, if the thought of that makes you uncomfortable, because it usually does.
We like our nice little ordered world and our subconscious calculations that allow us to make sense of what is otherwise an incomprehensible deluge of experiences that threaten to overwhelm and overload our brains, until the very weight of a billion pieces of data destroy any hope of understanding what is going on.
So we structure our beliefs so that everything makes sense, even when it doesn’t.
Now please understand, I’m not talking about your religious beliefs, because those are your business, and none of mine.
The beliefs I’m talking about here are the “well, that’s how the world works”, and in order to ‘do’ this, I have to first ‘be’ that, or my personal favorite… everybody else thinks that way, so they must be right.
And what’s the one thing they all have in common?
Control. For each belief that we carry about how the ‘world functions’, there’s almost always a part of this belief that holds us in place, where we feel comfortable.
Not convinced yet… I understand. The realization that most of your ‘beliefs’ are simply comfortable walls you’ve erected to avoid confronting something outside is not one that we enjoy coming to.
But growth isn’t about comfort, quite the opposite.
Believing that “I can’t” is most often just a side-step around the truth that you possibly could, but to do so would also risk failure, so you’d rather not.
The belief that “I shouldn’t” is often an appeal to the psychological dogma of those who have come before, rather than a deeply thought out understanding of the present system at hand.
The ways that we limit ourselves are endless.
In case you’re not sure, I’m not talking about breaking the law here, or even going against the rules of a contract, or an established understanding.
The things you need to break through, to violate, are the things you’ve told yourself about yourself that have no basis in fact or reality, and are really just the lies you’ve pasted over your fears so you never had to confront them.
And unless you have absolutely no self awareness at all, you know exactly what I mean.
Because here’s the terrible thing – you’re running out of time. With each passing moment, you’re moving closer to the day where it will be too late to try the things you’ve always wanted to do, but never found the courage to start.
One day, all the little lies that you wrapped yourself in will turn into the shroud that you’ll bury your dreams in. You’ll be there, at their funeral, and you’ll feel the soul crushing scream as the hope that you once had is placed in the cold ground of the past, never to return.
And that day, you’ll know the terrible taste of regret, and you’ll experience it for the rest of your life.
Unless you start breaking the beliefs about yourself that have been holding you back.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings