Yes, I chose to use a slightly controversial title for this weeks blog – to prick your interest, to get you to open it, read it and then hopefully take some time to think about it.
And in answer to “Do you have foolish ideas about who you are?” – YES, you do, I do, we all do – to some extent.
These ideas or beliefs about who you are, are created by us when we are very young children. We all learn how to feel about ourselves and about how we believe life works from the adults around us. If we have lived with adults who constantly express fear, anger, guilt, hatred, resentment then we will have absorbed and learned very negative things about ourselves and also about the world we live in.
Now, this is not a ‘point the finger and blame your parents’ email. The majority of us want to do the best for our children and we do what we think is right based on our belief system (which was learned from the adults we grew up with)….so it is not a blame game, but an awareness game. Awareness of why we have certain beliefs and thoughts and why we all have foolish ideas about who we are……with a slight caveat for those that have high levels of awareness and have done an awful lot of self-development.
If we don’t have awareness, and so many of us don’t, especially when we are young adults ourselves, then we will create the emotional environment of our early childhood. We will also go on to create the same energy in our relationships that we experienced in our early childhood.
It is impossible for us not to, as we have absorbed and learnt our belief system at such a young age.
Let me explain a bit more about what I mean when I say foolish ideas about who you are. Many of us may have grown up learning that “I will never do anything right”, “I am not clever”, “I am useless, stupid, pathetic…” . They are extreme examples, but what about “I’m not as good as my sister, brother…”, “I am not sporty”, “I am not artistic”, “I am a glass half empty person” and so on. What if you were never listened to, your parents were always busy, always at work, always out, always on the phone – what beliefs are you absorbing here? What if you were poor, never had enough money, your parents were always worrying about where the next penny was coming from – do you think you will have absorbed the message that it’s easy for money to be in your life, that it’s plentiful or scarce? Think about the way you view your body, have you been taught to love and cherish this magnificent, amazing body you have or maybe you have been taught that your body is not good enough, its too tall or too small, too fat or too thin, doesn’t look like all the other bodies out there so it can’t be good enough. We have all absorbed and learnt many negative things about ourselves, that leave us feeling deep down that we are not good enough.
This is what I mean about the foolish ideas we all have about ourselves.
Now, here is the most wonderful thing – our beliefs are just thoughts and we can change our thoughts!
We all know our past is over, it is gone, we cannot go back and change it, we can never change what has happened, what we have experienced but we can do one really powerful thing and that is to change our thoughts around it, thereby creating new beliefs and we will feel different about it. Once you change the thought, the feeling will go.
Why is it so important to be aware of our thoughts and to change them to serve us better?
If you are full of thoughts of resentment, criticism, guilt, fear and anger then the feelings that come from these thoughts will cause problems for you emotionally and physically. We know this, yet many of us carry all those outdated, useless, irrelevant thoughts around with us today!
Remember, our thoughts create the life we live, if we want to live a better life then look really hard at the foolish ideas you have about who you are and then take action and change them.