We often hear about the importance of mindful living, but have you ever wondere
d what makes mindful living so difficult? Have you ever felt clear and grounded about your Path in life, only to find your focus waning until you one day realize you have strayed off course? What makes it so hard to maintain mindfulness?
One of the many missing puzzle pieces of the human mind that holds us back from the success we seek is the development of faulty belief systems for running our life. We can think of belief systems as a type of computer program that we use for making decisions in life. These programs most often run without conscious thought, and most of us are unaware that the programs exist, when they are running or how they became implanted into our minds in the first place.
I like to think of these programs as a “default modes” where our minds go to when we stop thinking actively and start reacting to life. Usually, we lose control of mindfulness or active thinking whenever we hit rough spots in life and the programs most often start running their course in reaction to stress or emotional suffering. Unfortunately, most of these belief systems are based on models of ineffective living. They are based on poor models because these programs are often written and implemented without our conscious minds fully examining to see if they are logical, sensible and correlate to the way reality actually operates.
These default programs start to form at an early age as we grow up and begin to form concepts about the world. The initial programs are usually taught or learned because they have produced some positive results in our lives and so we believe them to be credible. The problem, however, is that human beings tend to formulate their ideas for these programs based on their own personal experiences in life. And because we tend to place positive and negative value on our personal interaction with the world, we can sometimes change a program’s function entirely. In most cases, we take beliefs that were created to solve small, simplistic and specific problems and try to apply them to address problems in life that are large, complex and ambiguous. This all happens without conscious thought.
Let’s take a look at a real life example so we can gain insight and understanding into our own minds. I had a client who was an accomplished musician approach me about the incredible amount of stress and mental anguish she was suffering in her life. She told me she felt completely on path, but could not figure out why she was suffering so much emotionally and why she didn’t feel the happiness with her current successes in life. When I asked her to tell me some of her strongest beliefs about life and where they originated, we stumbled upon a belief system that had become a small Pandora’s Box in her life. Music had made a profound impact on her life and she remembered a specific teacher who taught her a very important principle while studying music. This teacher taught her that, “you can pay the price now, or you can pay the price later”. This concept proved to be an important learning point and led my client to train harder which ended in her becoming an accomplished musician. She found value in working very hard to learn her skill correctly from the beginning (pay the price now) so that she could avoid having to correct bad habits that would slow her down in the long run (pay the price later).
Enter the flawed mind of the human being. Because music had such a profound impact on this person’s life, she began to implement this rule into almost every area of her life. The problem came about when she suffered some unrelated traumatic events that left her (unbeknownst to her conscious mind) changing the meaning of the concept of “paying the price”. Where paying the price had before meant applying great effort (I can apply great effort now, or greater effort later), her mind started to equate the “price” to equal “suffering”. Her mind accordingly created a belief system deep within her that she could “suffer now, or suffer more later”.
So, what do you think this person experienced in life by running a default program that made her believe that she could suffer now or suffer later? It meant that if she wasn’t suffering in the present moment, that she was fearful that she would suffer even more in the future. And when some inevitable act of misfortune fell upon her, the first thing she believed was that she was suffering now, because she hadn’t suffered enough in the past. She would then implement corrective action by making sure she was suffering even more in the present moment to avoid future pain. What a horrible loop to be caught in! As she moved through time, she never allowed herself to reach a point where the suffering ceased, because there was always greater future pain to avoid by suffering in the present moment. Her belief system that was set up to help her master life was actually just producing mental and emotional anguish and understandably, it was doing a pretty good job of tearing her down.
So, why didn’t she just change her belief system on her own? She did not change her way of thinking because the basic belief that you can pay the price now or pay it later had accomplished her great success in the past (with her music). Because she had seen and felt a positive result from this rule, her mind bought into it wholeheartedly. Her inner mind was hiding the truth from her and kept telling her she was doing the right thing to attain mastery of life. This leads us to a crucial discovery about the inner workings of our minds. Once the inner mind buys stock in a belief system, it will viciously defend that belief regardless if the belief is producing healthy or destructive results.
So, how do we overcome these dangerous programs and replace them with belief systems that will produce healthy and successful results? Join me for Part II of this post where we will examine how to take control back from harmful mental programs.