Beliefs are our long held thoughts that become fact. They help us navigate the world in a specific way. Gleaned as we grew, most of our belief systems have been in place from childhood lessons and most could use an update or releasing.
Emotions are healthy and should be expressed. Stories and conclusions get layered over emotions in an attempt to understand or cover the pain. This prevents us from fully feeling the emotion, this is the minds way of protecting us from the pain but often serves the reverse role, in that we feel echoes of the pain for the rest of our lives rather than experiencing the short lived but intense feelings in the moment. Revisiting the pain and releasing the stories helps us to let go of the tension and live a fuller life.
Thoughts – We use thoughts to navigate, discern and learn in the world. To assess what is good for us and what is bad. They are also an excellent way to stop living in reality, when our thoughts overtake our experience of reality, we stop engaging properly with it and lose track of ourselves. Seeing thoughts as concrete increases the movement away from the self and as we better learn how to process and release them, we naturally have more room to come back into who we really are.
Expectations of others – We spend a lot of our time looking at society’s expectations of us and the expectations of people around us. Living in this space usually involves mindreading situations and using the sandbox in our mind to guess at what is and isn’t expected of us in every day situations. The more people end up in this process, the less in control they feel and it’s important to shed as much of