There is this wonderful Cherokee tale. You might have heard it. It goes like this: An old Cherokee tells his grandson: “My son, there’s a battle between two wolves inside us all. One is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, lies, and ego. The other is joy, peace, love, hope, kindness, truth, compassion and faith. and truth.” The boy thinks about it for a minute and asks: “Grandfather, which wolf wins?” The old man replies: “The one that you feed.”
I believe that what I give energy to grows. For years, I practiced being aware of what I think and believe, and focus on positive thoughts. Only recently, I started practicing being aware of what I really feel, and started focusing on what feels good to me. I already understood that focusing on the positive side of life brought me more positive experiences. And for some things that was easy, for other things not so. With those things I kept struggling. What I understand now is that I overstretched my beliefs on those subjects.
Our beliefs are not as static as we may believe them to be. Of course, on the intellectual level, we either believe something or we don’t. When it comes to the heart level, things are not as black and white. Ideas have a feeling tone. Something our heart doesn’t want to believe feels off, period. When ideas feel uneasy they are on the outskirts of our belief system. They are either long-overdue, in that case we need to let them go, or they are too avant-garde, and don’t concern us yet. Somewhere in the middle is our belief set point. It reflects perfectly where we are now. But most interesting to us are the ideas that feel good. The ideas we want to believe, that are perceived to be believable and that we can easily be persuaded to believe. Our heart is excited about their potential and our mind is reassured by what seems to be a solid body of evidence.
In these past weeks, I was stuck in a recurring situation. It had happened in the past on a regular basis, and now it was happening again. Only this time, the situation seemed to get worse over time instead of better. Nothing serious, just a minor physical ailment. A seemingly non-cooperative knee.
It took some time for me to get annoyed enough to make time to review my thoughts and beliefs on the subject and how I felt about them. I sat down and did a brain dump. I wrote down every thought I had on my knee. I categorized them in the feeling tones ‘good’, ‘neutral’ and ‘uneasy’. The power of what I did next just blew my mind. In my note book, I started to elaborate on those ideas that that felt good. I free wrote about how and why they make me feel good. I included good-feeling ideas about my knee, my body, my health, my love for my knee, my body, my health, and myself. I let all these good-feeling ideas, the thoughts and the emotions that come with them flow on paper. I did not censor myself. I just allowed myself to feel good about those subjects and where I was in relationship to them. Once I got going, it felt so good that it got addictive. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. I let go of the idea that I have a weak knee, and am continuously focusing on the belief that my body is whole, always gravitating towards health.
It has been less than a week, the infection in my knee is gone, the swelling is noticeably less, I can move it freely, it is pain free, I can walk and bike again. Every day, I am regaining mobility and functionality. However, the miracle isn’t about the knee, it is about a shift in focus. It is about me letting go of old beliefs and fully embracing newer, better-feeling beliefs. What happens when we focus on better-feeling beliefs is that we are reprogramming our belief set point. You have to know that our brain can’t really distinguish between what goes on on the outside and what goes on on inside. When we focus on beliefs that feel good, when we think about them and write about them as much as we can, they become practiced. They become our new ‘neutral’. And the beliefs that first were too avant-garde for our mind to believe, become accessible by associate, and move into the realm of what feels good and is believable.
What is so great about this is that we don’t see the world as it is, we see the world as you perceive it to be, and our perceptions are ruled by our beliefs. When you allow our beliefs to evolve into beliefs that feel better, that represent who we are now, and we do that consistently, the world we perceive will change accordingly. The beliefs we feed win, they manifest. When we ask ourselves which beliefs we do want to manifest, what we do you want our world to look and feel like, we set ourselves up for a better experience. When we feed the beliefs that feel good, we are creating a world that feels better.
picture by Me Me