COMPASSIONATE INQUIRY

How do I change a negative unconscious belief into a positive unconscious belief? 

First, you need to really want to. This is work that requires a lot of your resources (time, energy, focus). You need to gauge how available you are to practice this work. Your gains compound on top of each other which is where the progress comes from. It’s helpful to remove distractions and interruptions from your life while going through this process to give yourself the best chances for real progress. If you feel you are ready and available, give yourself quality space to be with yourself and give yourself a chance to experience you (meditation). Depending on our ability to slow our mind down, the first few experiences may simply be learning how to be with only yourself. It gets easier with practice and determination. While in meditation, our focus is on nothing. Thoughts will still come up but our goal is to watch them with no attachment. Each experience of a thought does not need to be followed up with another thought. We are aimlessly watching thoughts as if they where a movie, each thought appearing and vanishing as a surprise. After we gain the ability to let thoughts appear and vanish as a surprise, now we give ourselves permission to talk with our thoughts. As a thought or belief comes up, ask yourself why do I believe that. After the ask, wait. Allow yourself to go back to an appear and vanish mode. Go back into peace with no need for an answer. In doing so, listen to the response you get. Nothing is also a response. It may mean you need to ask another question. There are no timelines to when these answers come. Enjoying being with yourself is the key to getting quality answers. The more comfortable you are with yourself, the faster the answers will come. As you get an answer to why you believe something, ask yourself, ok. Why do I believe that. Continue this process as you drill down into discovering why you are who you are. As certain answers come up, ask yourself is that true. Asking yourself is that true gives you the chance to open the door to that belief and rewrite it if you wish. 

​​

This process is something I like to call the why rabbit hole. I do so because we never know how deep this journey goes. Our job in self discovery is to continue to ask questions going further into ourselves until we’ve found the thing we wish to change about ourself.

 ​​​

The mind is extremely sophisticated. It knows what you are trying to do and will setup obstacles to detour you from your path sometimes tricking you into thinking something that isn’t the problem is. Your mind is protecting itself. You’ve given it permission to operate the way it has for some time. And it’s disagreeing with the new conversations you are having with it to make sure you really want the mind to operate in a different way. Remember the mind thinks it’s helping you. The only way to avoid these obstacles is to have a relentless determination to go deeper into yourself regardless of the answer that comes back to you. When an answer comes and you think you’ve discovered something, keep going. Thought has been protecting us for some time. We are looking for feelings in this journey. 

​​

When you do find an item you are looking to address within yourself, it will likely be an epiphany that often puts one in a daze simply because this work is hypothetical until you experience it for yourself. There’s a lot of effort, faith and trust required to drill down enough to discover what operates you. This moment is a tiny rebirth of whoever you want to become next. We become the new version of us by deciding how we want to reinterpret the event we are visiting. 

​​

This can be easy or it can be difficult depending on how prepared we are to re-experience the hurt of that moment. Sometimes the hurt is overbearing and we revisit the moment exclusively as the person we were back then. When this happens, temporarily retreat and recalibrate. It’s important that when you are revisiting hurt from the past that it’s a combination of who you were then with who you are today so that you can approach it with more compassion and understanding to insert the new belief.

​

Important notes to this process:

1). When you are having conversations with your unconscious mind, you must always be kind to the unconscious mind regardless of what you are exposed to. The unconscious mind operates as our friend and will listen and cooperate with us as long as you are kind. As soon as we begin to get upset or frustrated, the unconscious mind retreats from the conversation and returns to normal operation.

​2). Diving into past pain is often best done in doses depending on how difficult the pain is to go through. Only allow yourself to experience what you can handle. As struggle becomes overbearing, retreat and give yourself time to heal and strengthen between meditation sessions to give yourself space to better be prepared for your next experience.