Belief Creates Reality:

    I have lived most of my life only believing in things once I was able to see that they worked, be it a new contraption or a business idea. This has led me to a lot of disappointments as those ideas kept falling short of what I had hoped of them. Needless to say, this created a downward spiral to left me at a point in my life where I dismissed most of the things in life that could have made my life better because my assumption was that they would fail. Recently, I realized that this sort of pessimism was not the life I wanted to live in and have been working on changing my outlook ever since.

    As I worked on changing my outlook, I came to really understand something important in life. There is a simple fact that our minds and our bodies have far more potential than we give them credit for and it is the belief we hold that limits us in those regards. A poignant story is that of a group of mountain climbers who got trapped in a cave due to an avalanche. Due to their experience, they were able to determine how much time they had to live to be rescued. The interesting point is that only one of them had a timepiece and made sure to fudge the time when asked so that they others believed they had more time. As it turns out, the only one of them to die before they were rescued long after their calculated time was up, was the one with the actual time. The other’s belief that they still had time convinced their minds and bodies to keep fighting, keeping them alive long after the one with the timepiece had given up and died.

    This story is an example of how our belief can affect our lives and how we live them. With my belief that no venture would succeed, I was internally making sure that they didn’t succeed. Once I came to hope again and to take that hope and turn it into a belief that things will work, I am finding that things work out positively more and more. I have chosen to no longer be the guy with the watch, instead looking for the signs that reinforce the beliefs that I want to hold.

    This practice takes work, just like any other shift in the mind. For me, it takes being very conscious of my own mental processes as a approach a new idea or endeavor and making sure that I focus on the positive beliefs and hopes rather than the doomsday crier in my head. It is a very active thing for me at present and time and again I find myself falling back in to old patterns, but as I keep struggling against those old patterns, I find it easier and easier each time. Soon, I will live in a place where my positive belief is shaping the reality of my life rather than my negative beliefs. The simple fact that I came to realize is that my belief was already shaping my life, so it was time to change my beliefs.