The Belief Trap

Taken from the Spiritual wisdom newsletter, November 2006

The Belief Trap Life is basically a contest between what you want, and what you believe.

In order to consciously create you first have to have a desire, even if it is something vague like “I want to be rich.”

The challenge of the material world is to align your thoughts to your desires and then take effective action. The Law of Vibration and the Law of Attraction help you to attract the people and resources you need to complete your project, but when your beliefs are not aligned with your desires, the result is stagnation and the same old stuff.

Desire gets suppressed by what I call the belief trap. A belief trap is two or more opposing beliefs that trap creative energy, somewhat like a cyst in the body traps toxins.

For example, if Karen believes “I can’t make money” and “I can’t go into debt,” what happens when she says, “I want to start a new business”? Well, she knows she can’t make money, and she knows she can’t spend it to start her business –– because that would put her further into debt –– so she feels discouraged and does nothing.

A belief trap inhibits action, because everywhere you turn, you feel fenced in. If you constantly procrastinate, you probably have one or more of these belief traps. Here was one of mine. Desire: “I want to have bestselling books.” Beliefs: “I can‘t handle publicity.” “I’m no good at marketing.” Well, good luck with that. In the United States alone, there were over 170,000 new books published in 2005! If you want people to buy your product, you have to let them know about it, and you have to answer their questions.

I have a friend who loves organic gardening. His dream is to have a farm where he can raise organic produce. However, his family owns a dry cleaning business and he is financially on the edge. He tells me, “I can’t close down the business because I need the money to pay the mortgage.” “But why don’t you sell the business?” I ask. “No one wants it,” he says. “Besides, I have 3 employees and what happens to them if the new employer lays them off?”

My friend is trapped. His dream of organic gardening will never be realized as long as he holds these opposing beliefs. His beliefs trap him in the dry cleaning business. What he’s done is to abandon his dream of organic farming, and find as much happiness as he can in dry cleaning.

In a belief trap, your beliefs oppose each other or they reinforce each other to oppose a desire. You never recognize what is happening because you never take the time to inspect your beliefs and your desires (I have designed a home study course called The Basics of Manifestation to remedy that).

Your beliefs all seem entirely reasonable, so you never bother to actually look at them! When I first started writing, I was horrible at marketing and I hated publicity and I just kept writing books and wondering why they never sold! It never occurred to me (duh) that if I wanted to sell a lot of books I needed to let people know about them. It’s just that sort of obvious stupidity that you don’t recognize in yourself that defeats manifestation. Of course it’s not really stupidity, it just seems like it after you figure it out!

If you take the time to write down what you want and then inspect the beliefs you have around it, you will undoubtedly find a set of opposing beliefs and/or desires. When you do that you can see how beliefs can stifle desire and prevent manifestation.

Self–limiting beliefs can actually lower your vibration! In the study of traumatic incidents, it has been found that negative emotion is held in place by a belief. When the belief is inspected, the emotion discharges. It is also true that emotions hold beliefs in place, because emotional energy –– here we are talking about negative emotion –– obscures the thought forms behind it.

Here is one of my "core" belief traps: "I feel better when I can tell everyone (and myself) how bad it is for me." Looked at rationally, this is insane – there are two diametrically opposing energies – but it made perfect sense to me, until I began to consciously look for these belief traps with a procedure called EFT. It also had the added benefit of making me a tough guy, so it became "valuable!" This is a perfect example of how a self–limiting belief can lower your emotional/vibrational tone and prevent effective action.

If you are having trouble manifesting your dreams, undoubtedly there are self–limiting beliefs holding you back. The good news is that these little buggers are YOUR beliefs, and so are under YOUR power. Life’s difficulties always boil down to a misalignment of your energy.

Exercise:

Is there something you have wanted to be or do or have, but have always felt stopped or stuck on? If so, try to formulate that desire in words. Now write down your thoughts and look for a belief trap. Once you have located the opposing beliefs and/or desires, you have a much better opportunity to resolve the impasse.

A conflict between belief and desire is one of the most basic ways you can get yourself twisted around. Therefore, it behooves those of us who want to consciously create our lives to mindfully inspect the most important relationship there is –– the one between you and you.

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