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Online LibraryBeliefs: Do You Really Believe Them? Volume Three, Issue 10 Spring/Summer 1995 Most of our core beliefs formalize themselves in our thinking process long before we have the ability to discern their true meaning or their impact upon us. The result of this is a world of many adults living their lives based upon unexamined beliefs picked up and absorbed during childhood. The act of deeply investigating our own personal belief systems is truly a revolutionary and enlightening one. Why? Because as we examine a particular belief we hold, we can then see if we really believe it, and if we do not, we can drop it by identifying what we do actually believe now, in the present. Thus, we replace old, worn out and perhaps unproven systems with one that we choose using our current intelligence, wisdom and discrimination. When we participate in bodywork sessions, either as client or therapist, we may experience beliefs surfacing. One way this can be seen is as an attitude one has toward an injury. A client of mine had shoulder surgery a few years ago. Due to an "old" fear of dislocating her shoulder, she did not move her arm in many positions. She anticipated much pain if she did and so she mentally set her limits for that shoulder and lived within these limits. In each session, after adequate loosening and stretching, we moved her shoulder through full range of motion, painlessly. We then did the same with the other shoulder, also painlessly. We compared shoulders. Now the interesting point here, for me, is that we did this procedure for four sessions. We acknowledged what happened (painless movement) and talked about it. Yet it wasn't until the fourth session that I think (for I am not certain) that she actually believed that her shoulder did not hurt through full range of motion. It was not enough to simply experience it one, two, three times. Until her belief system was able to take in new information, the old belief formed her reality and even empirical evidence could not shift it. The "proof" we often look for in life to substantiate our beliefs may or may not exist. Proof, facts, evidence--no matter how objective they may seem--will always have a subjective component to them. A human being observing anything is using the only lens we have available to us, and that is a subjective one. Even quantum physicists acknowledge that the mere act of observing an electron configuration changes it. So check out your beliefs and see if you really believe them.
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