400 Days of Surrender — Day 14: Your beliefs vs truth
New to this series? You can find Day 1 and why I’m writing this here.
After yesterday’s post on my Ayahuasca experience, I got numerous reactions. One theme was that “I’m not that courageous because I’m scared of the drug.”
What has allowed me to make big changes in my life was my willingness to question my beliefs. Because our beliefs are just that: beliefs. They can be facts or even truth but they can also be completely wrong.
Many beliefs about who we are and how the world works we picked up very early in life and unconsciously accepted as truths. Now we carry them as hidden baggage and they constrain our ability to fully embrace life.
I used to think — like most people — that illegal drugs are dangerous and to stay far away from them. That’s what most of us are told by parents and society. It’s a belief and it’s wrong if you take them time to do your research. We can see a similar thing now with Covid where so many people and politicians think they understand it when the reality is very different as it is presented.
Again, doing your research will bring you closer to the truth, sometimes you need to dig deep. And it might be uncomfortable as it’s much easier to stay in sync what most people are told to belief. But as a result you will be much more fearful than you need to be — and the opposite also applies, you might be unconcerned about something that is actually much more dangerous than presented. What most people do and think is not necessarily right.
Back to drugs: I didn’t touch any drugs, it was a taboo up until five years ago, where with trusted friends I took the first time MDMA in the form of ecstasy. It was a beautiful experience full of love and deep connection. It opened my eyes to the world of so called drugs and it made me realise I need to dig deeper. While I have tried various things (as you can only understand something that you have actually experienced, everything else is again just a belief), I have always been careful and I always respected that mind altering substances are not to play with.
That’s the advantage of doing something at an older age and not out of per pressure. Most people think legal drugs are safe and illegal ones are not. That’s just a belief and not the truth. I stoped consuming caffein, alcohol and most processed foods and have significantly reduced my sugar intake and try to stay away from pharmaceuticals if I can. All of them are drugs. They affect our body chemistry.
Most people don’t realise that 150,000 people die of Ibuprofen per year in the world (taken as instructed not from abuse), 170,000 people die from prescription medications in the US per year (again just from taking them as instructed), you have the opioid crises because people are in emotional pain because of our way of living, they can’t take it without their prescription drugs.
There is a reason why they all come with large lists of side effects. The third largest cause in the US for deaths is medical malpractice. You visit a hospital to heal and you might die in the process.
Now Ayahuasca, if taken correctly and not in conjunction with other drugs, has not killed anybody, it’s a potent plant but it’s a healing substance as I shared in yesterdays post including healing physical diseases like cancer. Yes, it’s a drug but it’s a good drug.
To get closer to the truth the best thing is to challenge your beliefs rather than look for confirmation — which is what we like to do because it’s much more convenient and socially accepted. Changing what you belief can be challenging but it’s liberating. It opens your eyes to a bigger world with more possibilities whether that is in regards to the above or to who you are, what you identity could be and how you live your life.
The Harvard Business Review recently posted that scientist found that a chetah is so effective in hunting not because it is fast but because it can change direction in an instant, it adapts to changing circumstances. We can learn something from the chetah, to be more agile rather than stay stuck in the world we constructed in our head.
That’s also what must of my coaching work evolves around: Helping people to see possibilities they deny themselves because of what they have come to belief — limiting beliefs. We build our own prisons unconsciously and because of fear of the unknown and those mental prisons hold us back from experiencing the full range of life as well as often keep us in a place of getting by rather than thriving.
Children ask a 100+ questions per day, adults ask 3–5. That startles me. As an adult you know about and are aware of a lot more stuff and hence you should have much more questions but because of our beliefs and social conditioning (you don’t want to come across as if you don’t know), we deny ourselves the right to ask both ourselves and others way too much and it is what’s holding us back.
Go out and explore life and its possibilities rather than continuing building yourself a prison of convenience. The longer you wait, the harder it gets. All the good stuff is on the other side of fear. And most of the time it’s just fear not danger. ✨ PS. The picture is my cat Lexi when her old beliefs were shattered and she discovered new possibilities 😉
Continue to Day 15: The struggle within.
