We often find that our mind is occupied with distracting, looping thought patterns and limiting beliefs that don’t seem to serve a purpose. These thoughts and beliefs limit us, keep us small and prevent us from what we have been put on this earth to do. As long as our mind is left to run wild it will conjure up false beliefs, ‘I can’t do this’, ‘This person is better than me’ ‘I am not enough’, ‘I will never be that good’ we will never step into our authentic self and become the person we truly want to be.
The unconscious stories that we tell ourselves become the stories that we live our lives by. When we compare, judge and criticize ourselves we feed the ego and remain stuck. The ego wants us to stay safe. We repeat the same stories in our minds, which are reflections of our familial, societal and cultural conditioning that have been imprinted on us since childhood, adulthood and in working life. When we listen to these limiting stories, we don’t take action, we stagnate and we do not grow.
Becoming aware of our thoughts and learning to understand and work with our minds can have a transformational impact on the way we live our lives, how we perceive ourselves, and our reflection onto the external world and those around us. Acknowledging that we are not our thoughts helps to overcome the ‘monkey’ mind chatter and frees up space where there is often a lot of noise and chaos. We can choose to listen to our limiting beliefs, or we can choose to observe and witness our thoughts, reflect on them, detach from them, release them and step into the new awareness of what is present.
Continuous practice of letting go of unwanted thoughts is part of the journey of self-discovery. Self-discovery comes from within. It takes patience, courage and determination to understand yourself, to accept yourself and to hold compassion in your heart. It takes time to become the master of your own life and consciously create the life you want to live.
Growth is a process that is not linear. Evolving into the person you aspire to be requires taking small and consistent steps. Sometimes it’s scary, sometimes it’s exciting, sometimes it’s beautiful and sometimes it hurts. To give permission to yourself to be all those things when you need to be allows you to move through any situation with grace and acceptance. Knowing that when you acknowledge these feelings, the energy that resides within you is free to move through your body and is released.
It’s possible to liberate yourself from your own limiting thoughts. Your thoughts are just constructs that you have created. When you become aware of this, you begin to live freely. You begin to be guided from a place within rather than believing that you’re ruled by external circumstances that you cannot control.
