Do you remember some of your childhood memories? Perhaps you have 3 or so dominant memories. Are you aware that a belief was made by you from them?
When I first learned about and practiced meditation and hypnotherapy, I had NO idea that I created a story based on an event that happened close to two decades ago. As a young man, I simply thought it was simply a memory… Okay, so that happened and that was it. Many of us who thought that way have been promptly mistaken. Despite it being unconscious at young ages, whatever the conclusion we drew from a certain experience, we went on to create a belief based on the conclusion we made.
On one day in my early childhood, I hid under the baby crib. I was old enough not to sleep in it anymore, but we still had in our home. I don’t remember the events leading to it, but I crawled under and covered myself with many Beanie Babies. I was a master hider because even when one of my brothers laid down to look under the crib he couldn’t see me. I hid for long enough that my parents called the police to look for me. After some time, I decided to come out and “surprise” my grossly worried family waiting on the couch in shock of my presence. “I was playing hide and seek,” I responded in a prevaricate way after noticing anger and confusion in the room. Feeling uncomfortable I probably was hiding from expressing what happened and why I hid. I ended up having to speak with one the neighborhood policeman (who became a great family friend!). That’s what I remember.
As mentioned above, though, I was not aware of the beliefs I adopted from that experience. One belief I subconsciously concluded was that I must hide and not share what I am doing. This unconscious belief can be limiting in how one lives and perceives life, especially someone, as you can imagine, like myself who shares events, experiences, and information for my coaching on social media, my website and podcast. Some say that’s part of this career. Yet, often it was very challenging for me to share stories, lessons, and information.
Another childhood memory was from a birthday celebration for me. I was sitting with birthday cake in front of me and guests singing happy birthday. I felt uncomfortable and ran out crying. In this experience too I created a belief that I was not worthy of love.
Are these beliefs true? Of course not. We each have valuable lessons to share and we are each worthy. We intellectually know this but it will benefit others and ourselves when we learn to embody it.
How does an experience become embodied as a belief? An event becomes a long-term memory based on the emotional quotient connected with it i.e the more heightened the emotion from an experience the more you’ll remember it. If the conclusion we make about experiences goes unquestioned, as it most likely did as children, then it can become our perception of the world. The thoughts and feelings create moods and attitudes, attitudes create beliefs, and beliefs create perceptions or personality traits.
If someone once told us we’re unhealthy, that we can’t do things on our own, or any other limiting belief and we accepted it as true, it may be manifesting in different areas of our life.
In order to change, we have to look at emotions we memorized. When we can become aware of and get beyond the emotional reaction, then we can keep those limiting beliefs from running our lives and we can return to who we really are. Furthermore, we can think of the memory without the emotional charge connected to it.
In conclusion, as a health coach this area of emotions and beliefs is a major component of helping someone step into the person they want to become. The more we can unlearn limiting beliefs and relearn empowering beliefs, the more we can arrive into greater expressions of health with less strain and stress.
PS I just finished riding bikes with my mother and shared with her my experience. I asked what she remembered from this memory. Apparently, she had asked my brothers to watch after me when she went into the shower. She later found the front door was cracked and she thought I ran away (lol).