Working with the power of belief

The topic of “what do you believe?” is especially important to delve into when you are in recovery from illness and concerned with your ongoing physical and emotional wellbeing or wanting to shift through any stuck areas of your life; so I am sharing a post that I published on Spinning the Light this morning. I particulalrly want to recommend the two oh-so powerful books referred to – The Sponteanous Healing of Belief by Gregg Braden and Dr Joe Dispenza’s “Becoming Supernatural”, both of which I would consider essential reading on any healing journey.

This weekend, I finished the book I mentioned in a couple of my recent posts, Gregg Braden’s “The Spontaneous Healing of Belief”. It was, as I had already hinted, an extraordinarily powerful book; both familiar in its content and yet directing me towards all the ways I hadn’t yet learned to apply this deep, innate knowledge about the power of belief in our lives and so, in that sense, a real game changer that I can feel rippling out into my daily experiences, in tangible ways. I have instigated, and experienced, some incredible changes in the last couple of weeks whilst reading that book!

Relatively short and extremely accessible, with a few exercises to focus the way you learn to apply what is being shared, this book is now one that I vehemently recommend to everyone I know (at least three have taken me up on the suggestion). To you I say just read it and realise your own unclaimed power to take part in your own life like never before; which is to make all the other stuff that is “happening to you” quite irrelevant since that is not truly where it is at, nor is anything being “done to you”. No, really. Belief is everything, as Braden amply demonstrates with his most astonishing anecdotes…and with his science.

This last point was both important and timely for me, having realised many times over, lately, that to be convinced of anything, I seem to need it to appeal equally to my most logical, analytical intellect and my most esoteric side, simultaneously and in balance. What Braden shares does that very thing, offering both science and miracles in equal proportion, often crossing over….and it’s in that very crossing place that we tend to make our most powerful breakthroughs. In an era when the melding of the left and right hemispheres holds all the potential of our next biggest leap, this is so relevant and important. Our very grasp of this dichotomy is the magical ingredient since “both ways of seeing the world are absolutely correct” (Greg Braden in his introduction to Dr Joe Dispnza’s “Being Supernatural”). You could say, this is our “new” quantum base-line and we will grow in proportion to how prepared we are to accept its refusal to fit to our old paradigm that physical, measurable and predictable was all that “mattered”. A sizeable crack has formed in the ceiling of that old mentality and we are now ready for this mastery of beliefs like never before; it being like the golden key to the door of our evolution.

Braden’s book is where I want to direct you; rather than paraphrase and pick it apart but rest assured, you will be left feeling its reverberations across every layer of your life both during and (a long time) after you read it. This is no passing place of a book on a Goodreads marathon…it is fundamental to each and every one of us that we “crack” this stuff to move ourselves on now. So unless you have your beliefs all neatly lined up and accounted for, nothing in there the inherited viewpoint of someone who influenced you as a child or an unchecked expectation of the culture you are part of, I suggest you get the book and dive in; it won’t take you that long to read but it packs a benevolent punch. It will demonstrate to you the “real” tangible effects of belief. Put simply, “”Belief is expressed in the heart, where our experiences are translated into the electrical and magnetic waves that interact with the physical world”…and not just within or around our individual body but with measurable repercussions in the world at large. This realisation is the very basis for quantum science. Even heart scientists admitted to Braden that the estimated limit of eight feet of influence from the “field” of a human heart was merely due to the limit of their equipment to measure any further; though HeartMath Institute and others have gone some way to demonstrate the effects of heart-coherence on the outcome of actual circumstances at a distance. This is, surely, the “new” science that knocks everything else into a cocked hat!

With such regularity and ease, these weeks, my dreams have brought up to the daylight many stories of where such beliefs came from in my childhood: belief that even the closest, familial love was, ultimately, conditional and withdrawable at short notice; that the outside world (just outside my house) was a “scary” and aggressive place; that material lack was the state of norm against which tide I would spend a lifetime swimming; that obscure and vague “symptoms” ignored would lead directly to the most devastating disease; that authority figures such as doctors lacked knowledge, humanity or genuine interest in people; that I had to be good, quiet and passive to retain my “safe” place in life; that bullies could be children and, equally, adults though the behaviours were very much the same on whatever scale they occurred; that I needed to concede many personal preferences to hold onto those people to whom I had attached myself; that adulthood meant surrendering all that gave me innate joy and that those things were childish, self-indulgent and without currency in the “real” world.

These and many more have surfaced lately, not for me to pick over or to re-live the small dramas that brought them to my childish attention but so I could let them gently unwind, all on their own…fully…revealing their many layers and, thus, loose their energetic charge, gently surrendering them up as the packages of non-helpful belief that they once were to me. Yes, in realising the memory-thought is there as I arise from sleep or some other reverie, and then fearlessly allowing it to have its say, these nuggets have done all of their own work and me the passive observer. In now seeing where and how they became embedded in my body, even more deeply and un-emotively than all the other times they had “come up” for scrutiny, I have been able to realise that this new phase of maturity asks only that I put those beliefs away, like the broken toys of childhood, ready to create my own beliefs born of vastly more mature “thinking”. Perhaps (I suspect…) reading Braden’s book these weeks, not least at bedtime, has helped in the process and yet I suspect…no, I know…that many of us are going through this same clearing process right now for I am hearing versions of it left and right. We are collectively maturing our beliefs and it can feel bumpy and regressive (like “our past” has come along and stood directly in our way when we were least wanting to think about it…especially if we have previously done “work” to put it all to bed). Yet its not like all those other times we addressed it because now we possess the ability, like never before, to effortlessly see behind the curtain of how those stories became cogs and levers of behaviours that have kept us running along similar train tracks for a very long time…now ready to make the leap onto a completely different track.

How did we ever embed the biggest of those defunct beliefs, though they undermined our very wellbeing, day after day? The big one that came up for me to reconsider was: when did I truly cease to believe I was safe? I realised, that happened later, in adulthood, though childhood threw up many hints. By then, there had been many traumas, “very bad” things that had “happened to me” but I truly lost my belief in safety when my mother was diagnosed with cancer.

The bottom of the world fell out that day; all the worse because I hadn’t seen it coming. I wanted, with every most vehement cell of my body, for it not to be true, to not have her “taken away” and for life to “see reason” or own that there had been “a terrible mistake” but I was shown there was no negotiating this time. Within 8 months, I had lost my rock, my most stalwart ally, my one intimate companion through all life’s thick and thin…she was gone and the world echoed its empty sound at me each morning as the awful realisation greeted me anew, like a shock announcement on endless repeat…and I lost all faith in the benevolence of life. I was barely an adult at the time.

That belief in non-safety rippled out and quickly distributed itself into all the cavernous spaces of my energy field, making its way into every most-fundamental belief that played a subconscious part in the most minute operations of the unseen yet crucial parts of my biology. From every outward human drama that then played out to the way my cells planned ahead for the long-term state of my body, longevity and a belief in an ability to thrive, of nature being on my side, was removed from the equation to be replaced by a non-stop state of “flight or flight”. Then, of course, life began to deliver me more and more reasons for that belief, with ever-more consistency…because that’s how belief works to create the very bricks and furniture of our “outside” lives.

In my next read, Dr Joe Dispenza’s incredible book “Being Supernatural: How Common People are Doing the Uncommon”, he recounts a persuasive anecdote of a woman turned right-around by his processes who, before meeting him, had witnessed her lifestyle and health cascade from perfectly fine and pretty rosy to where she was experiencing an array of quite terrifying symptoms, paralysis and cancer, multiple autoimmunities, hopeless depression, poverty, abuse and more. This “happened” as a result of such an emotional bottom suddenly falling out of her world when her husband killed himself without warning, leaving her “no longer safe” in her belief system, thus minutely influencing every single aspect of her existence, from the cellular level up. “She had finally physically manifested the pain and suffering she’d emotionally experienced in her mind” and this is because “When the fight-or-flight nervous system is switched on and stays on because of chronic stress, the body utilises all its energy reserves to deal with the constant threat it perceives from the outer environment. Therefore, the body has no energy left in its inner environment for growth and repair, compromising the immune system” (“Becoming Supernatural” – Dr Joe Dispanza). It also floods the cells with the chemicals of fear which, unsurprisingly, are quite different to the chemicals of love. In his books and renowned workshops, Dispenza presents incredibly powerful methods for turning such a dire situation around and this is where my next immersion project lies…

So what happens when we change our beliefs and can we really do it or see the reason why to make the attempt? Can we grasp with newly liberated minds how what we think of as “reality” is nothing but the projected theatrical backdrop of those most built-in and grasped-onto beliefs we have carried around all our lives? Can we see how a similar set of beliefs led to the circumstances of those we have used as the “reason” for our own; how my mother’s beliefs (without judgement) carved out her life and death just as those of all the other people who influenced my childhood so profoundly had their own set of inherited viewpoints, many of which got passed down generation on generation…and would continue to do so unless we, the ones inheriting them, become conscious enough to see them there, allowing them to gently unravel and loose their charge in the light of day, thus halting the long-running process in its tracks. For this is what we do when we bring the machinations of the subconscious mind, which accounts for up to 90 per cent of our thinking processes, into the daylight to be audited and re-selected from choice…or not, when they no longer serve who we truly, and most consciously, are. Bringing consciousness into the equation is what makes all the difference.

For instance, Braden recounts a fascinating story of a family where all the males for a couple of generations had suddenly died in their 35th year until one of them, through consciously changing the fear-driven expectation, as he approached his own 35th, was able to halt this tragic momentum and write a new ending. There is no end to what we can do with belief…as both books referred to here will demonstrate in the most compelling of ways. We can actually signal new responses from our genes (in the way of epigenetics) “ahead of the environment” when we immerse ourselves in positive sets of emotions ahead of the circumstances that we want to manifest by believing in them, and setting our minds to feel what those circumstances will feel like when they happen up-ahead. This is when we become true creator beings, manifesting what we choose to experience, from within the so-called limited experience of being a physical human being. We can start doing this the very day we choose how to react to literally everything that life puts on the menu…our way…not the pre-conditioned way that used to dictate to us before.

I can clearly recall when I first began to delve into “spiritual” ideas, belief was sometimes mentioned as though it was almost a dirty word, a trapping of the ego to be transcended beyond. What I have since come to realise is that having belief is a fundamental aspect of the human state, at least at this stage in our evolution, so when we try to push belief out like it is no longer welcome, the void that this leaves will only fill up with something else; typically some newer defunct belief (such as that beliefs themselves are “bad”). My best experiences have been to take ownership of beliefs, making them conscious and taking part in choosing them, guided by the highest frequencies I am as yet able to embody.

Another “trickster” area of working with belief is that claiming your own can seem to run you against the grain of others in your family, social circle or work place so, in those early stages, my advice is to do the inner work for yourself but don’t necessarily expect to discuss your new perspectives with others; in fact, it can be demoralising to do so. There’s no need to put your fragile new state to such critical scrutiny by those who white-knuckle grip to the way they have “always” seen things, if they are not ready, or have no incentive, to change. Quote Braden” Belief is our acceptance of what we have witnessed, experienced, or know for ourselves”, so we need no audience, validation or round of applause. As ever, doing the process for ourselves is quite enough and requires no drum roll or distribution of what we believe into the more visible aspects of our life except that, as we upgrade our beliefs, the positive effects will inevitably become more visible as our manifest life…and that is quite enough to transmit the message to a receptive audience, without having to say a single word; we literally strobe the frequency of our own higher-belief system to others as a frequency, not a manifesto.

There is one other key of all keys, however: “We must believe in belief for it to have power in our lives” (Greg Braden – The Spontaneous Healing of Belief”).

This “big one” was my missing link; grasping this, at last, is where I have got to now…and believe me, the switch-up of gears is quite tangible! As soon as we clear what isn’t truly ours from the old slab of beliefs that was, as it were, written in stone for us even before we were born in so many cases, we find we have the most startlingly white blank slate on which we are quite free to describe the next trajectory of our lives. Even as we start to gain momentum in this process, we can detect the whiff of freedom on the air and it is quite intoxicating which, in itself, helps to fuel new beliefs, and build higher joy quotients, about what we are truly capable of; just like falling head-over-heels in love with life, because the mechanism is much the same. “As soon as we change our thoughts from fear based to love based, the whole of the body is literally flooded with “a cascade of emotional and psychological processes that reflect your new reality” (Greg Braden introduction to “Becoming Supernatural”). This is powerful new biology because it is participatory biology; “you’ll change your biology from a past-present reality to a future-present reality” (Dr Joe Dispenza – “Becoming Supernatural”) and then its positive effects spiral out into the world at large.

In my case, I had reached a point where my nose felt pressed up against the wall; I knew I had to rewrite my beliefs or suffer consequences that my most switched on “logical” intellect, and even my strongest intuition or “gut feeling”, both knew were almost inevitable unless I made a dramatic change. Yet if this sounds like my project is survival driven, I can assure you it is not so in the sense of “fight or flight” any more but, rather, of reaching a crossroads and consciously choosing to “go towards” joy and health, towards vitality, life and LOVE itself, as my birthright realised. In realising these are already mine and all that remains is to claim them off the shelf where they got filed a very long time ago, though they still clearly bear my name and only wait for me to reach out for them, I know I get to change the direction of the story for me, the individual and, as a contributing part, for the whole of the collective…as we all do.