Limiting and Empowering Beliefs

En-Witching

Aug 12

Written By Maggie Haseman

You’re in the right place if you…

want to learn how your beliefs influence your behaviors and feelings.
want to know how to recognize your own limiting beliefs.
want to discover how to transform your beliefs from limiting to empowering.

Limiting Beliefs and Underlying Emotions

So far what we’ve talked about is what a thought form is and where they come from. I’ve alluded to how they can effect you on a personal level but let’s examine it a little more closely now.

Thought forms occur in two forms: limiting or empowering. Both types of thought forms are beliefs that you hold about your own capabilities and what is possible for you.

Limiting beliefs are those that place a limit on what you can do in you life. They keep you locked out of your true potential and prevent you from your purpose.
Empowering beliefs are those that empower you to achieve what you want out of life. They give you confidence to succeed and search for opportunities for growth and improvement.

One of the easiest ways to identify some of these beliefs is to take stock of your current circumstances. You likely have areas of your life you are happy about and some that you feel you are lacking. You also likely have areas of your life where you can easily see how you can improve and some that seem impossible to remedy.

For example, you may feel content when it comes to your finances, but you struggle with health issues. You may be able to easily see how you can continue to grow in your career but feel hopeless when it comes to improving your marriage.

The reason you can feel so successful in some areas of your life and feel like a complete dunce in others is because of the beliefs you have formed around these subjects.

If you are content with your financial situation it is likely because you have what you need to live comfortably. Your thoughts, both consciously and subconsciously, probably sound like, “I can afford this.” and “I always have enough money.” And these thoughts are reinforced over and over again when you pay bills without the check bouncing, and make car payments without thinking about where the money will come from.

But if you struggle with your health, your thoughts may sounds more like, “I will never be able to do that because I am unhealthy,” or “My body is broken.” They become reinforced, when you continue to feel pain or when you try things unsuccessfully.

Everything you see in your life is bound up in thoughtforms that either propel you forward or hold you back. It is useful to examine the beliefs you hold that empower you.

Where did they come from? You? Your parents? Someone else? Society?
How long have you believed it? As long as you can remember, or more recently?
What reinforces this belief, or what evidence helps you believe it?

This give you an example of your individual process, that you can attempt to replicate when building new thought forms.

But what is more valuable is to examine the beliefs that limit you.

Personal Experiences

All of your beliefs are formed in response to experiences, whether they limit you or empower you.

For example, if you believe that you are lazy and stupid, this may root back to your experience in high school or before, when you struggled to understand subjects when other excelled. At the time you may have attributed this to others working harder and being smarter than you. Maybe because of this, you began putting in less effort in school and later in work, or decided not to pursue higher education and other opportunities. Your belief that you are lazy and stupid limited your potential.

When you examine your belief that you are lazy and stupid you might be able to trace it back to this experience. Maybe someone said it to you once, or maybe you thought it up yourself. But what’s powerful is how you can rewrite the story.

Perhaps you struggled to understand the subject matter because you had a difficult home life, your learning style differs from the methods, or there was incompatibility between you and the teacher.

In finding the root of the issue, you can know that the challenges you faced in school weren’t because you were lazy or stupid. And you can refocus your mind on this new truth, that you are NOT lazy or stupid.

Culture and Society

Lifelong exposure to cultural and societal beliefs can also influence your perspective of what’s possible.

For example, up until 1954, it was widely believed that running a mile in under 4 minutes was impossible. In the 1940s, the record was set at 4 minutes and 1 second and it was continually proven that no one could go faster. Since doctors and scientists said it was impossible to run it any faster, there was a cultural understanding that no one could do it. The human body would surely collapse under the pressure.

Then, Roger Bannister ran a mile in 3 minutes and 59 seconds.

Not only did her break the record, he changed the belief held by society, and others followed in his footsteps. Forty six days after Bannister broke the four minute record, John Landy broke Bannister’s record. And more people continue to run a mile in less the four minutes.

Once you stop believing something is impossible, it becomes possible.

Here’s another example…

Maybe you have a hard time believing you will ever be financially wealthy. If you work in a field that doesn’t pay well, you’ve probably just come to terms with the reality that your paycheck will always be small. You likely know that you have low odds for winning the lottery. You probably don’t foresee any of your relatives leaving you a significant inheritance when they pass on.

So, when thinking through your financial prospects, you have decided to just be happy with what you have and you’ve stopped dreaming of the wealth you desire. In doing so, you have also placed a limit on your potential by believing you cannot be wealthy.

It may seem contradictory, when there are facts involved, low paycheck, no lottery, no inheritance, what use is belief?

Well, you’re limiting belief is thinking that these are the only possible sources of significant wealth that could come your way. This is a cultural belief, to see these avenues as the only sources of abundance.

You reinforce these belief when you say things like, “I just need to work harder and then I’ll really make it,” or, “My problems would be solved if I could just win the lottery,” or, “Money doesn’t grow on trees.”

According to society, hard work and luck are the only ways you’ll ever have money. But this is provably false. There are plenty of people who are wealthy without working hard at all, and plenty of people who work themselves into exhaustion who never prosper financially.

According to society, it’s best to just be realistic about your financial prospects. “Sensible people accept their lot in life.” “Your desire for money is a fantasy to daydream about, but nothing more.”

Digging Deeper

As I’ve said before, it’s important to not focus on the how of the matter. Trying to figure out how something will manifest puts limits on your potential because you can only see things from your perspective.

When you try to discover the mechanics, this is actually a limiting belief as well, because you are saying that things can only happen for you if you understand them. You have to trust your ability to create circumstances that are different from what you’ve experienced before.

Additionally, there is often a lot of emotion that surround the thought forms we hold. It’s important to address these emotions in order to change the belief.

Money

I have found that money is one of the most complicated topics for witches, other magic users, and energy workers. There is a huge variety of limiting beliefs and associated emotions involved with the idea of money.

There is something called, “poverty consciousness,” or “scarcity mindset.” These are terms used to describe people who perceive matters of money in terms of “there never being enough”. The emotions tied to this, and therefore to money itself, are often fear, misery, anxiety, and other low vibe emotions.

With these emotions vibrating at such a low frequency, it’s unlikely that a person in this state would ever attract a positive experience with money.

Another complicated relationship that some people have with money is guilt. Guilt about wanting more than what they have, or having a hard time understanding that you can be grateful for what you have and also desire more for yourself.

Money is often referred to as “the root of all evil.” To want it, is to be greedy, and greedy people are not good people. It creates a contradiction, if “I am a good person, I shouldn’t want to have money.”

Then, some people decide that money doesn’t matter and choose to focus on what they deem more important aspects of life: family and friends, spirituality, giving time and money to causes, etc. But if more good people believed that they deserve to have money, the world would be a better place! Good people can direct the money into projects that help people and the planet. Good people become the custodians of money and use it to do good deeds.

There are some people who have a lot of money and do things we disagree with, so we associate the money with the deed. But ultimately money is just a tool. Bad people use money to do bad things, and good people use money to do good things.

Love

Another area people often struggle with when manifesting is love and relationships. This is because there are a lot of strong emotions involved in how we interact with others, and there is confusion about what love is, and pressure from society to find a person to settle down with.

If you feel sadness, anger, or other emotions of this nature when trying to bring love into your life, you would be better off taking time to heal and raise your vibration to attract joyful, loving relationships.

There are also hidden emotions that influence relationships. How much you love yourself, your level of fear about being alone or being abandoned, your overall sense of happiness. If you don’t work through some of these issues it can be much harder to build a long lasting relationship.

If you have witnessed many divorces in your life, your parents, your friend’s parents, your friends, you might have a belief that marriage always ends in divorce. If your friends are constantly talking about their awful partners, you may have a belief that no one is ever truly happy in a relationship.

You may have created barriers consciously or subconsciously for how you meet and relate to people.

Again, it’s important to let go of trying to figure out HOW you desire manifest, and just put out the intention THAT they will.

Other

Any area that you are looking to change in your life can be complicated by your life experiences, your emotions surround those experiences and the thought forms you have created.

What can you do?

Once you are aware that you probably hold beliefs that limit you, follow these steps to help you identify what they are…

List of the areas in your life that are challenging you. If something in your life displeases you and you’re not actively doing something to fix it, there’s likely a limiting belief involved.
Identify any beliefs that contribute to the challenges you’ve listed above. Don’t be tempted to label these beliefs as “good” or “bad” as you list them, just get them all out on paper so you can analyze them later.
Look at the list of beliefs and decide which ones are having the greatest negative impact on your life. Genuinely examine them and consider how your behavior would change if you didn’t hold each belief.
Organize the beliefs that are having the greatest negative impact on you from most challenging to least challenging. Focus your time and energy on changing the belief that will have the greatest impact on your reality first.

With your list of limiting beliefs organized by greatest impact in hand, you can follow these steps to start changing these beliefs into beliefs that empower you instead.

Read the belief out loud and ask yourself, “Do I really know that this is true?” Think about whether you have actually experienced this yourself enough times to be confident in its truth. Experiencing something a few times is not enough to accurately draw a conclusion about it.
Investigate where this belief came from and whether the source is a valid source. Any beliefs you hold should come from your own personal experiences and from expert advice. Find an expert in the area of your belief and research what they say about it.
State this intention to yourself: “This is simply not true. I choose not to believe it anymore.” Then, look for evidence like reasons and examples that prove this limiting belief is false. Keep looking for expert proof online and in books until you feel a sense of doubt about that limiting belief.
Create a new belief that serves to improve your life and supports your ability to make changes in your life. This new beliefs might be the opposite of the limiting belief but at least somewhat related.
Search for examples to support this new belief. Just like you need supporting information and evidence to disprove the limiting belief, you need to prove the new belief to yourself. Imagine that you have to prove its accuracy to someone else.
Measure yourself every day and audit how you feel about your new belief. Check in with your intuition to see how your behavior is changing. As your beliefs change, your behavior and feelings change, too. What you believe manifests into how you act and how you feel.
Keep your list of limiting beliefs and continue to work on it. Your life is dynamic and each new experience, goal, and obstacles has the potential for new limiting beliefs to rise to the surface or develop. Add these new beliefs to the list as you recognize them you and replace the ones that are already listed with empowering beliefs.

Repeat all of this regularly. Make a habit of documenting your beliefs every time you set a new goal and when you are going through hard time. Sit down once a week and make a new list of limiting beliefs that you can work toward getting rid of.

Now it’s your turn!

What kind of belief system were you raised with? Do you feel it suits you, or are you making a change? What are some of your deeply held beliefs surrounding your power? Is there somewhere you need to shift your mindset about?

Maggie Haseman