Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive. – Howard Thurman
Today I want to talk about one of the best and also worst things about being human .. our minds. For most of my life I’ve fed my mind like it was an insatiable creature, even neglecting other parts of my existence in the process. This is clearly not a whole-self loving thing to do. I have loved my mind, and it has, in return, kept me entertained, occupied and driven to move forward. I have also attempted to ‘free myself’ using my mind, except that my mind had me imprisoned with a clever prison guard who offered scraps of hope and glimpses of freedom while keeping me fully trapped.
I recently tried out a process which provides a key to the jail cell and a way to reinvent your reality. It was so powerful that I am sharing it here.
Jail Bars of Belief
Tool #6 from Teal Swan’s ‘tool kit to self love’* is titled Jail Bars of Belief. It offers a process for identifying and then dismantling any belief. I will attempt to summarise the process and will share my own process as an example.
Your beliefs determine your life
Your reality is a physical reflection of your thoughts and beliefs and is unique to you. If you want to live a happy and fulfilled life, it is imperative that you don’t stay stuck with beliefs that cause you to be unhappy. This is part of loving yourself. It is not your circumstances that make you unhappy, but your thoughts about your circumstances that make you unhappy.
Living in the moment
The ‘Jail Bars of Belief’ chapter describes two different approaches to dismantling thoughts and beliefs, the first of which is very similar to Byron Katie’s The Work. I will discuss The Work in a separate email except to say that it is a profound way of challenging thoughts and beliefs by turning them around and inside out to offer a radical new way of looking at any situation in your life in a totally new light and releasing the suffering those thoughts are causing.
Identifying a hidden belief
The second process is what I want to share. Using this process I had a profound shift that helped me to identify an unconscious hidden belief that was controlling me and holding me back in profound ways. When negative beliefs become embedded in the subconscious they sabotage us without our conscious awareness. When we make them conscious we can replace them with more helpful beliefs.
The ideal opportunity to identify a negative core belief is when you are in a situation where you are experiencing strong negative emotions. You do this by chasing every statement you have with two questions:
Why would that be a bad thing?
What would it mean if that were true?
Sharing my process to show how it works
I want to preface what I’m sharing below with an explanation. When I look at it as it is written it looks strange, so I imagine it will look strange to an outside observer. It was essentially around a struggle I’ve been having around finding work I can do that doesn’t feel like it destroys me in the process of doing it. And when I tried to think of making my focus the sculpture project I was sabotaging and stopping myself with a fear that I was being ‘selfish and indulgent’ .. which is something I seem to have spent my life avoiding by being ‘selfless and denying’ .. but of course the things we resist we also give power to. Anyway, here is what I wrote:
I feel as though I’m selfish and indulgent and I don’t feel like I have anything to offer to the world.
Why would that be a bad thing? Because I am taking from the world but not giving enough back so I’m a drain on the earth.
What would it mean if that were true? It would mean that I’m a parasite .. that I’m a taker and not a giver .. that I don’t really belong in the world because I’m not giving anything.
Why would that be a bad thing? Because I have so much to offer but I am being stingy and holding back on what I have to give.
What would it mean if that were true? It would mean that I am mean and stingy and that I’m a bad person.
Why would that be a bad thing? Because it would mean that people will judge me and think I should be doing something to offer the world or to contribute to the world and they would not like me and they would reject me.
What would it mean if that were true? I would be despised by others and rejected and I would feel lonely and sad and hopeless.
Why would that be a bad thing? Because I like people and I want people to like me. Because if I am alone and rejected and hopeless I would rather be dead.
What this process uncovered
This might not be the best example of this process but it gives you an example which hopefully helps you to understand it. In this case, the negative core belief, according to my understanding of the book, would most likely be ‘if I am alone and rejected and hopeless I would rather be dead’ .. which goes to show what a strong hold these beliefs have on our life. Doing the process something shifted for me. I started to see how my resistance to feeling selfish had me trapped in a state of denying myself whatever I desired. I saw how I had actually been living my life only doing things that didn’t feel good to me because if I did what I wanted I would feel selfish. My fear of being ‘selfish’ meant I had tended to reject my own desires to cater for others needs, leaving me feeling drained and resentful. This is what drove me to choosing, a long time ago, to prefer being alone to being with other people, in an ironic twist, since this was the only time I felt I could sense or attend to my own needs or preferences.
Experiencing the emotional hold this belief had on me by identifying the core belief that was holding it in place has helped to free me of this belief. When I got to the core belief, which had me in tears as it touched on the deep rooted fear, I was able to shift how I saw that belief, like a cord had been cut. And the freedom I felt from releasing this belief had me feel like I was floating .. like an anchor that had been holding me down had been released.
An example of this shift in my experience happened the following day during a trip into Bellingen. I passed by a person who I had tended to get stuck talking to because cutting off the conversation felt ‘selfish’. It was like I suddenly had permission to do what I wanted and I walked past the person (who didn’t notice me) guilt free. That’s probably not the best example, but you get my drift.
There are so many beliefs that hold us trapped in our life and challenging and dismantling these beliefs, and creating new and beneficial ones, is how you can transform your reality into one that allows you to thrive.
But wait, there’s more
The process of identifying the hidden belief is only the first part. What follows is a process of dismantling the belief and replacing it with a new one. The book uses the analogy of a table, with the tabletop representing the belief and the legs of the table representing the evidence supporting that belief. Superglue securing the table legs to the floor represents the emotional payoff for keeping the belief.
5 steps to dissolving and replacing a negative core belief: (using my example to elucidate)
Step 1: What is the emotional payoff of keeping the belief and is it worth the pain it causes?
If I believe I can’t be selfish then I get to rely on everybody else’s needs to determine what I should do and this takes the pressure of making my own decisions off me. I then can’t be judged for what I do since it isn’t ‘my choice’. I ‘take myself off the hook’ for being responsible for what other people experience since it is what they want. I’m also not responsible for what happens to me. I get to feel like I am a victim. I get to feel good about myself for being ‘selfless’. I can feel like I’m ‘being a good person’. I have an excuse for going off and doing things on my own. Step 2: Seek out alternative evidence / explanations that undermine the validity of your detrimental belief.
A. As a toddler I needed to ‘be selfish’ as that is a healthy part of childhood development and differentiation. If I was judged at this stage in my development I might have turned the judgement back on myself and tried to stop ‘being selfish’
B. I like to do things ‘my way’. This is part of my uniqueness and doesn’t need to be seen as a fault. It could even be seen as a gift.
Step 3. Work out a belief you would rather believe.
I have an unconventional way of doing things.
Step 4: Find evidence to back up your new, more beneficial belief.
I don’t like doing things the way that other people say they should be done without question. I like to work out my own way. I like to be a free thinker. This way better solutions can be found than those that currently exist. Doing things in different ways is fun and a creative process. Often the way things are done are just routine patterns that are done without thought and I like to think about things and not just ‘follow the leader’. Doing things differently makes life exciting and interesting. Quite often people and societies get stuck in unhealthy ways of doing things and I don’t want to be party to that. I want to be part of the change, not part of maintaining the status quo. Life is about change not stagnancy. It’s my life so I want to do it my way.
Step 5. Look for the emotional payoff of the new belief.
I can inspire people to look at things differently and live their life according to their own choices. I can be an agent for change. I can help to deconstruct stale and unhelpful patterns within society. I can help to liberate people. I can help people to see things in a different way. I can feel a sense of agency and control over my life rather than feel trapped by what others think or expect. I can help shed light on what no longer works. I can be like a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale environment. I can feel a sense of purpose and meaning in my life and not feel like I’m a pre-programmed robot. I get to feel more alive. I get to feel more me.
We have the power
As you can see, this process involves consciously dismantling and then reconstructing your beliefs. And how amazing is it that we have the power to do this?! You can recreate your life in a more beneficial way using this process. And as Teal says in the book, “You Are Worth the Effort”.
Through writing this email I’ve taken myself more deeply through this process than I had gone before. And having done it once I’m ready for the next strong negative emotion to come up to help shed light on, and shift, another limiting belief.
“The old payoff just isn’t worth it any longer.”
Your turn
This is life-changing work. Next time you feel a strong negative emotion, rather than feel stuck in the pain, try this process. If you feel like sharing I’d love to hear how you go with it. And if you’d like support in the process, please get in contact.
By creating new beliefs and thinking thoughts that feel good, you will be creating neural pathways in your brain that reinforce these new positive thoughts. As you starve the old beliefs and feed the new ones your reality will improve.
Yes it takes effort, but this is your life – and you’re worth it!
With love, Orly
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The alchemical process of turning lead into gold happens because of something being taken away. So too, self alchemy begins with what we are willing to let go of or give away. – Teal Swan
Have you heard the story of the Golden Buddha? During a violent invasion a huge, solid gold buddha at a monastery in Thailand was protected from plunder by being covered in terracotta and coloured glass. Over time the knowledge of the existence of the Golden Buddha was lost. It was discovered by accident, almost two hundred years later in 1957 when the buddha was being moved to a new location. Cracks in the clay surface revealed the gold within and the Golden Buddha was revealed, perfectly preserved.
This story has become an analogy to what happens to us in our lives. Our gold, or our essence, becomes overlaid with the ‘mud’ of our limiting thinking, unconscious conditioning and layers of human experience, and we lose sight of our essence and of what truly lights us up.
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.
In order to fully embrace our being, our essence,we need to differentiate our human experience and ‘life lessons’ from our core truth. It’s easy to get lost in this process .. to get stuck in the mud so to speak.
Having spent a lifetime searching for what I could do that would be in alignment with my natural strengths and gifts, I’ve gone down path after path only to find yet another ‘dead end’. In many ways the journey was the destination except that the lack of clarity and feeling of lostness has had me return to a sense of hopelessness and despair time and again.
But over the past week I had a breakthrough that has transformed the way I look at my life. This new perspective has offered a sense of hope and clarity and shifts a lot of the self judgement that has weighed me down. This shift is the result of an exercise I did as part of a program I’m in. The exercise, which is very simple (but not necessarily easy) is to come up with your top three values.
Your values are those things that are really important to you and motivate you on a day to day basis. They can be found by looking back at some of the turning points of your life and defining what thoughts or feelings were behind the decisions you took. They can also be found in looking at where your time and energy go each day, or identifying peak moments in your life.
If we aren’t aligned with our values we can spend a lot of time and energy striving to reach something we believe will fulfil us only to meet our goal and find we feel disappointed or empty inside.
I went into the exercise of defining my top values with hope and excitement, only to end up in a swamp-like state of helplessness and despair. Coming up with a big list of values wasn’t too hard, but when I tried to prioritise the values was when I got stuck. In trying to choose one value over another I went into a deep-rooted limiting belief of “I don’t know” and ended up on the coaching call with the exercise unfinished. But when my coach, Karen, asked me what my top three values were, I looked down at my list and rattled off three, almost without thinking – connection, creativity and curiosity.
She then asked me, “If you were living a life that had connection, creativity and curiosity in it .. how would you feel?”
And my response: “I would feel satisfied, excited, inspired, meaning, purpose, grateful, driven.”
My response is so enlightening to me. So much of my life has been driven by other people’s values which, though they are all valid, have often left me feeling unsatisfied, depressed, ungrateful, unmotivated and lacking in meaning and purpose. This exercise is SO powerful.
When Karen asked what actions I could take this week in alignment with my values, I thought of this newsletter, and how it aligns with my values of curiosity, creativity and connection. And similarly, the Cloudscape sculpture is totally in alignment too.
One of the most damaging things we do to ourselves is to compare ourselves to others, and to other’s experiences. ‘Comparison is the thief of joy’ is such a true statement. Instead you need to get clear on what it is that is truly important to YOU – and to bring love and attention to that. Being clear on your values is a great way of staying aligned.
Your value, your essence, your gold, is often invisible to you, trapped under layers of society conditioning and adaptation to the needs, desires, opinions and expectations of others. But it’s there. And by discovering and aligning your life to your values, you can bring your best self to the world and feel more purpose, joy and connection to yourself. And in this way, aligning with our values helps us to bring more love and light to the world.
I would LOVE for you to identify your top values and for you to let me know what they are. And if you’d like some help identifying your top values, please get in touch!
With love, Orly
PS For a simple guide to help you to find your top values, click here ..(link coming soon)..
I must be a mermaid, I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living. – Anais Nin
How beautiful is this bee!
On Thursday it was walking slowly around my desk and Friday it was dead.
After I posted it on my Fb business page a friend of mine who runs a bee business – selling honey and educating people about bee-keeping – reached out to me saying this was ‘her favourite solitary bee, a blue banded bee’, and asked if she could keep it as an education piece. These are the times where I love social media – when it sparks random connections and insights.
Looking closely or deeply at anything (or anyone) makes me love it, admire it and respect it. And zooming in on things in the natural world makes them ever more complex and beautiful.
I was watching an interview recently where the woman being interviewed, who is a face reader, talked about how her gift was ‘seeing people’ and how for many people it is the first time they are truly ‘seen’. One of the gifts of her work was, she said, that people vulnerably allowing her to see them was a form of love. I really resonated with what she said. And the beauty of it is that, the act of opening up and being seen is an act of love, which as a witness inspires love, which allows that person to be seen with love and allows them to then see themselves with love.
I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, but it feels related to a conundrum I’ve been pondering as I search for clarity around work I can do to bring together my gifts and interests in such a way that I get to bring my best and highest self to the world.
Yesterday, as I was driving home from the beach, pondering this question, I had the thought that it is the journey I am enthralled by and perhaps the idea of trying to land upon a ‘destination’ is my problem. Freedom to explore is important to me. Deep connection is also important. And perhaps my constant studies and explorations, driven by a desire to understand, have been my way of loving and connecting. Or maybe I need to come up to the surface, lighten up, and stop ‘searching’ to find my answer.
I could go round in circles here so I will finish up and send this as an incomplete exploration.
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. – Pablo Picasso
Have you heard the quote: We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
What do you think of the idea that we are spiritual beings having a human experience? Does it speak to you?
I’ve tended to put more value on the spiritual, immaterial aspects of life, perhaps as a result of finding my human existence confusing and unsatisfying. I’m finally understanding how those feelings arose and learning to enjoy and appreciate the more human, physical aspects of existence. But most of my life has been dominated by a sense of meaninglessness and a restless search for meaning through constant study, observation and exploration, scrambling to keep my head above water and, in moments of despair, wanting to give up and ‘start fresh’.
The time when the feeling of meaninglessness and sadness would come up most strongly for me was my birthday. And so it was, on a recent trip to Sydney for my birthday, when I felt myself drowning in the existential void, that I got a glimpse into a new perspective on ‘meaning’.
A heavy blanket of sadness hung over me as I set out on a day of adventure with Joey, traversing Sydney by scooter. Thankfully Joey seemed oblivious to my feelings and I was somewhat buoyed by enjoying a day of connection and play with him. From Bondi beach we rode into the city. At Hyde Park we looked down into a war memorial artwork where Joey searched for and joyfully spotted Dorrigo, Bellingen, Urunga and Fernmount among the places where fallen soldiers had hailed from. He proudly posed in front of a sculpture of giant bullets while I took a photo. And we glided past the Archibald Fountain and through the Domain, en route to the Botanic Gardens and Circular Quay. As we passed the Art Gallery, Joey agreed to a short visit inside.
One of the ways I’ve sabotaged myself this lifetime has been judging my artistic dabblings as selfish and indulgent. But as I walked into the gallery carrying the ‘weight of emptiness’ I felt a sense of peace. I had a realisation, as I looked at the artworks, that this is meaning. It felt like a breakthrough – an almost defiant acceptance that ‘art’ is a valid and worthy response to existence. With art, spirit meets matter and the world and our human experience is explored. There will always be people who judge art .. particularly given it is often hard to understand and far removed from the practicalities of life. To a hard-nosed realist, art can be hard to rationalise or justify. But there is more to life than basic survival needs. Art can be transcendental.
When I studied architecture, personal preference was not allowed as a reason for doing something. Everything had to be justified. And perhaps learning to justify my ideas has been an important lesson for me. I feel like armouring myself against critics through gathering information and understanding different perspectives has driven a lot of my life and held me back from taking action. I’ve given so much power to critics, including a very harsh inner critic who was more powerful and destructive than any person ever could be.
I used to admire critics for their boldness and confidence in their beliefs and their bravery to take a stand and declare what they believed in. I valued the opinions of others highly and often to my own detriment.
No more!
Though I’ve tended to wait for clarity before taking action, I’ve learned that clarity comes from action. And having spent too much of my life influenced (and stopped) by the opinions of others, I feel like I know enough of what I need to know to work things out in my own way. After all .. It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is not effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.– Theodore Roosevelt
Here’s to imperfect action – critics be damned :)
With love, Orly
PS What are you striving for? Let me know so I can cheer you on!
For the present is the point at which time touches eternity – C.S.Lewis
There are many presents as I write this week’s offering. Many moments of eternity. Now .. and now .. and now.
I’ve tended to love the spaciousness of time .. the way it can expand and stretch and I can get completely lost. I have spent many years, almost fifty, lost in an expanse of time. And while I’ve liked to ‘take my time’, I also see, more and more, how deadlines and structures offer a sort of scaffolding to the limitlessness of time and enable for things to actually get done.
Being more conscious and deliberate about my time, rather than greedily desiring more and more of it, is something I’m currently focused on. For me, this correlates with stepping up and being the leader of my life. It means having clearer boundaries around my time rather than allowing myself to get lost in boundary-less time, which has been one of my favourite escapes.
And in honouring of time I will keep this note short and sweet. May you leap over your deadlines with joy and ease and appreciate many special moments on the way.
With love, Orly
PS The following poem is an inspiring call to leadership:
For a Leader, by John O’Donohue
May you have the grace and wisdom To act kindly, learning To distinguish between what is Personal and what is not. May you be hospitable to criticism. May you never put yourself at the center of things. May you act not from arrogance but out of service. May you work on yourself, Building and refining the ways of the mind. May you learn to cultivate the art of presence In order to engage with those who meet you. When someone fails or disappoints you, May the graciousness with which you engage Be their stairway to renewal and refinement. May you treasure the gifts of the mind Through reading and creative thinking So that you continue as a servant of the frontier Where the new will draw its enrichment of the old, And you never become a functionary. May you know the wisdom of deep listening The healing of wholesome words, The encouragement of the appreciative gaze, The decorum of held dignity, The springtime edge of the bleak question. May you have a mind that loves frontiers So that you can evoke the bright fields That lie beyond the view of the regular eye. May you have good friends To mirror your blind spots. May leadership be for you A true adventure of growth.
I help creative entrepreneurs (and curious explorers) who feel stuck, confused or disconnected, to find clarity, take action, and fall in love with life.
Your presence is needed. Your voice is important. Things will get better.
With a journey through the Enneagram and a project you want to complete you will start to see your blocks, break through and into action, enjoy the satisfaction and learn the lessons that project taught you.
Your learnings then take you through into your next project.
About me
Orly Grace
Writer, Sculptor, Guide.
I share lessons from my quest to find clarity and meaning in life.
I use the Enneagram as a system of divine transformation that shows you your lessons and helps you to see your aligned path forward.
Choose your project to get started. You can do my free QUIZ.
