Last week we learned about the five different kinds of beliefs (Basic, Personal, Authority, Derived and Inconsequential) and which ones can be changed (Personal, Authority, Derived). We were also introduced to Terri, who has just been let down by a man, one more time. And we saw the beliefs Terri has that were triggered by this most recent betrayal.

Now, let’s get down to it and see how to change those undesirable beliefs!

In Terri’s situation, in which she felt betrayed and was lied to by her fiancé, we asked this question: “What kind of beliefs would Terri have to have to create the experience of betrayal and being lied to?” We mentioned two possibilities; I can’t find a man who will love me the way I want and men are untrustworthy liars. It’s also possible that Terri has a belief that she is not lovable and/or does not deserve a lasting, loving relationship. Or that love doesn’t last. Or the men she loves don’t love her.

Terri can begin to change these beliefs in two ways. One is with the use of affirmations and the other is with “choice statements”.

Affirmations are positive thoughts that you intentionally insert into your consciousness (especially your subconscious mind) to produce a desired state or experience in your personal reality. Affirmations can be very effective and powerful when applied properly. So, what is the proper application of affirmations?

The way the old beliefs became implanted in your consciousness was through repetition, i.e., hearing your family and cultural beliefs repeated over and over again, sinking into your subconscious mind until they became a part of you. That’s why these beliefs take on the appearance of “that’s just the way it is”, without questioning. Until, like Terri, you begin to wake up to the subconscious programming that is determining your experience in life and relationships and decide to do something about it.

There is an art to inventing affirmations. Basically, you want to craft a statement that is roughly the opposite of the undesirable experience and reflects the desired experience.

Let’s take Terri’s beliefs, “I can’t find a man who will love me the way I want” and “Men are untrustworthy liars” as an example. If Terri wants to have an experience of being loved the way she wants by a man who is honest and trustworthy, it might sound something like this. “I, Terri, am now attracting into my life an honest, trustworthy man who loves and appreciates me just the way I am.”

Now, this will seem like a lie to the part of her mind that is convinced that not only are there no men in existence like that, but if there were, she couldn’t find them! The project of working with affirmations is to convince your subconscious mind of the truth of your affirmation until it is accepted. The way you know your affirmations are effective is that you begin to see evidence in your experience.

There are two powerful ways of applying affirmations to transform your beliefs at the deepest level. One is with writing and the other is verbally with a partner. Here’s how they work.

When writing affirmations, you want to be sure to work in all three persons, like this:

1. “I, Terri, am now attracting into my life an honest, trustworthy man who loves and appreciates me just the way I am.”
2. “You, Terri, are now attracting into your life an honest, trustworthy man who loves and appreciates you just the way you are.”
3. “Terri is now attracting into her life an honest, trustworthy man who loves and appreciates her just the way she is.”

Number one is the first person, number two is the second person and number three is the third person. Second person affirmations are very powerful because that is how we received much of our programming when we were young. The third person is as if you are overhearing others talk about you.

It is recommended that you write your affirmations three to five times in each person at least once a day.

Working verbally with a partner is very powerful and is a great way to encourage and support one another in your goals and dreams. It works like this. Select an affirmation and say it with feeling to your partner. Your partner will enthusiastically agree with you, then repeat.

After a few rounds in which your partner agrees with you, your partner will then repeat your affirmation back to you, and you agree with them, then repeat your affirmation to them. This process is described in our book, Straight From the Heart, and includes lots of examples of affirmations for relationships.

Now, sometimes the difference between your current reality and the state of being you are affirming is just too great and seems impossible to achieve. When this is the case, you may feel inner resistance to the affirmation, which is counterproductive. That’s when you want to use the “Choices Method”. (The Choices Method was developed by our friend and colleague, Dr. Patricia Carrington, as an advanced form of Emotional Freedom Techniques – EFT. You may learn more about EFT in our online multimedia EFT Training Program – http://www.efttrainingonline.com/)

Here’s the difference between traditional affirmations and Choice Statements. Notice how it feels to say each one aloud.

• “I am wise and discerning.”
• “I choose to be wise and discerning.”
• “I am attractive.
• “I choose to acknowledge my attractive qualities.”
• “I feel peaceful.”
• “I choose to feel peaceful.”
• “I am wealthy and prosperous.”
• “I chose to take steps to become wealthy and prosperous. I am determined.”

For Terri’s affirmation, the Choices Method might sound like this, “I, Terri, now choose to attract into my life an honest, trustworthy man who loves and appreciates me just the way I am.”

You can work with Choice Statements exactly the same way you work with traditional affirmations. You may find working with Choice Statements to be more convincing and more readily accepted by both your conscious and subconscious mind.

Affirmations and Choice Statements are like a grappling hook thrown into the future you desire. You use them to pull what you want to you and you to it.

Working with your beliefs to transform your experience is working at the causal level. Trying to improve your life and relationships any other way is like trying to reach into the mirror to adjust your clothing.

“Men!”, Terri exclaimed, her eyes red and swollen from crying. “I’m so tired of having my heart broken. Why can’t I just find a man who’ll love me the way I want him to?”, she asked no one in particular. “What’s wrong with me?”, she cried.

She just learned that her fiancé was still seeing his former girlfriend and had been lying to her. And this was just one more in a long string of betrayals for Terri. She just didn’t know if she could take another one, but here it was. This could mean the end of her engagement if they didn’t get this sorted out. But, she felt so hopeless – and wasn’t even sure she wanted to sort it out.

Reading this, it is easy to feel that Terri has been “done to” one more time. Yet, sympathizing with her about how bad men are does not empower her to see her part in creating her circumstances. And, more importantly, changing them.

The best way for Terri to reclaim her power and dignity in this situation – and that is to look at the beliefs within her that helped to create this painful event. Your rerlationships reflect your beliefs about relationships and about yourself. Until she can discover the beliefs within her that have contributed to her string of betrayals, she will never know lasting peace of mind in her relationships with men.

Your beliefs are fundamental to your sense of self and the world. You are oriented to the world through the medium of your beliefs. Many of your beliefs are so close to you that you can’t even see them. You are essentially embedded within them and experience them as who you are and how the world is.

For Terri, at least one of the beliefs she has is that she cannot find a man who “will love her the way she wants him to.” She probably also has beliefs about men being untrustworthy liars. The problem is that these troubling beliefs lie deep within her subconscious mind, well below her everyday awareness.

An important part of becoming enlightened is simply learning to observe your beliefs, without judgment. “But, if my beliefs are hidden in my subconscious mind, how can I observe them?”, you might well ask. One of the best ways to do that is by looking at your experience and asking yourself, “What beliefs would a person have to have to create an experience like this?”

In Terri’s case, what beliefs could create her experience of betrayal and being lied to? We mentioned two possibilities; I can’t find a man who will love me the way I want and men are untrustworthy liars. It’s also possible that Terri has a belief that she is not lovable and/or does not deserve a lasting, loving relationship. Or that love doesn’t last. Or the men she loves don’t love her.

Your experiences in life are born in your consciousness, from the seeds of belief. If you plant tomato seeds in a garden, do you expect to get corn? Of course not! The problem with the beliefs planted in your consciousness is that, for the most part, you don’t remember planting them because they were planted long ago in your childhood. So, by the time they appear in the garden of your experience, they appear to come out of nowhere. Unless you can identify the seeds of belief that have been planted in your mind and begin to uproot them and plant new ones, they will continue to produce their predictable results.

Dr. Milton Rokeach, a renowned psychologist, distinguished five different kinds of beliefs.

1. Basic beliefs that are socially shared, e.g., “We all need to eat in order to live.” These kinds of beliefs tend to be facts about our universal experience as human beings.
2. Personal beliefs that are not socially shared, e.g., “I can never do anything right.” or “I am God’s gift to women.” These beliefs are concerned with self-identity and one’s view of the world and are completely subjective. These kinds of beliefs are assessments and may or may not have anything to do with reality.
3. Authority beliefs are those that are outside our direct experience. They result from others whose authority we assess as credible, e.g., “CNN is the most accurate news network.”
4. Derived beliefs are a variation of authority beliefs in that they rely on identification with the authority. This is how we acquire beliefs from our culture, religion, and our family, e.g., “Suicide attacks on our enemies is justified because martyrdom is good and we have no other means of defense.”
5. Inconsequential beliefs are simply a matter of preference and personal taste, e.g., “Steve Martin is a funnier comedian than Billy Crystal.” They are opinions.

The negative beliefs that are worthy of changing are in numbers 2, 3 and 4 – personal beliefs that determine self-identity and world view, authority beliefs that we accept from others we see as more informed, and derived beliefs from authorities with whom we are identified.

Now that we have identified the kinds of beliefs and which ones are subject to change, in next month’s edition we will talk about the process of belief change. We will work with Terri’s beliefs and show you how you can use the same tools to identify and change your undesirable beliefs.

Romeo Roars

Our male cat, Romeo, actually lives up to his name as a sweet, loving, gentle cat. Except sometimes when he thinks he is a big, bad, roaring lion!

I was watching the President’s speech tonight and the MSNBC pundits’ commentaries afterwards. Often during this whole Iraq debacle I’ve had the thought, Beam me up, Scottie. Let’s just go to another planet, why don’t we?

If you’re a Star Trek fan, you know immediately what "Beam me up, Scottie" refers to. We are both avid science fiction fans and have favorite shows on the SciFi Channel – Battlestar Gallactica, Stargate and Stargate Atlantis. We’ve seen every Star Trek movie and all the Star Trek TV shows, especially all the later ones, like Star Trek Next Generation and Deep Space Nine.

Even if you’re not a Star Trek fan, "Beam me up, Scottie" has become such a part of our American lexicon that you probably know what it means anyway – at least intuitively.

Then I remember that the only technology capable of "beaming" me into another reality is my own consciousness. And right now it’s not taking me to any other planets. This is it, for now.

I had been working professionally as a seminar leader and trainer in the self-improvement field for fourteen years when I enrolled in a rigorous two year business program. It was one of the most life changing, world-view-shifting experiences of my life. This program was modeled after the work of the former Chilean Finance Minister, philosopher and linguist, Dr. Fernando Flores.

One of the seminal texts of this program is a book entitled The Tree of Knowledge by Drs. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, both neurobiologists concerned with, among other things, the nature of perception and how our nervous systems interact with the world around us, creating the world as we know it.

"Knowing how we know" is the subject of this book. Maturana and Varela present a new view of cognition that has important social and ethical implications, for, they assert, the only world we humans can have is the one we create together through the actions of our coexistence.

After decades of spiritual and metaphysical studies and deep, life changing transformational experiences, what I learned from this book and business program changed me forever. What I came to understand in a profound way is that our brain and nervous system receives raw vibrations of certain frequencies and translates them in such a way that what we see, hear, touch, smell, taste and interact with, and take for granted as an objective world "out there", is in fact being brought forth moment by moment by our individual and collective interactions with those frequencies — and with each other.

My lived experience that the world is "coming at me" is, in fact, an illusion. The world I experience with my senses is being continually "brought forth from within me", literally.

Now, I can get that spiritually and metaphysically and conceptually. But, getting it biologically was an epiphany for me – especially in a hard as rock business program!

And what it means, to me anyway, is that I am contributing to the world I see, including George W. Bush, the war in Iraq, the Madison Avenue marketing machine churning out ever new things to want, the natural world of the Sangre de Christo Mountains outside my office window, a multihued sunset, the pristine snow falling in our yard, my beloved Layne — all of it, every bit of it — and there is no escaping the effects of my interpretations.

I make up the meanings of the things I experience and I live with the consequences.

It’s easy to be thrown into a deep, dark pit of existential despair, thinking I cannot possibly make a difference, there’s nothing I can do anyway and just give up. Or, perhaps worse, I could become narcissistically self-involved in just getting whatever I can get while I’m here, ’cause this is all there is, Baby.

Another choice, and the one I endeavor to make, is to act as if the truth is true – that who I am makes a difference in the immediate world in which I find myself – and to make the most empowering interpretations I can imagine and take enlightened action where I can. Since I do not have the President’s ear, I will write to or call my Congressman and make my views known. I try to live lightly upon the earth. I endeavor to be kind to others. I look for ways to participate in such a way that the world I want to have manifest through me might actually come to pass.

In short, I spend time on my meditation cushion and I get up and participate in the world as I find it.

Scottie isn’t going to be beaming me up any time soon!

Paul