Posted by Kimberly Rex
How Attitude, Beliefs, Challenge, and Development Lead Your Response to Life
Your attitude, beliefs, challenges, and development lead your response to life. The question is, “What is driving?” Is it fear or reactivity from the unconscious material, unresolved issues, or the conscious desire to create kindness and resonance with direction and positive change? This article will explore the influence and possibility of attitude, beliefs, challenges, and development to expand your experience of life.
Attitude Leads to What You Believe
Your thoughts, beliefs, and feelings create your view of life. When your attitude diminishes yourself or others, this leads to life-depleting and limiting outcomes. If your mindset is fixed you are more likely to feel like you cannot try or experience life differently. When you experience a mindset based on the potential for growth, a growth mindset, you are more likely to engage energy, motivation, and respect for your journey whatever it is and where ever it leads.
Having an attitude for example that “I can’t learn that material because it’s too hard ” vs. “I haven’t learned that material yet, but I want to learn,” creates different views of the world. Which view opens the door to new possibilities?
Taking inventory or questioning your attitudes about different areas of your life can give you insight into what holds you back and what can also shine a light on opportunities for growth and transformation. Asking yourself what holds you back from getting an inspiring job, a nourishing home, a relationship, experience of peace or relaxation is a way of beginning to sketch out what your life experience is attempting to teach you at the moment. Asking and then working with the response is essential to positive change. How would your life be different from a new perspective?
Beliefs Lead to How You Meet Challenges
Beliefs create an automatic filter through which you see and experience the world. Your brain is wired for bias to create survival behavior. However, the threats in earlier evolutionary stages of the world as well as of your body-mind system can overshadow your ability to experience greater calm, joy, love, and vitality as well as your experience of safety in the world.
Tara Brach speaks to Papancha, a Pali word for “mental proliferation,” the chain reaction of thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and feelings that causes suffering.
Pause and notice you are in a spin of suffering, name it and allow it to be present. Allow it to be. Give it space. Get in touch with what you are believing and the stories you are telling yourself. Each time you interrupt the pattern and chain reaction allows you to return to mindfulness and create the blueprint for new pathways to reconnect to your innate inner wisdom.
Take time to get in touch with inner kindness and wisdom by asking yourself these questions.
- Can I get in touch with my breath to take a pause until I can begin to shift inner awareness and consciousness about what is happening?
- What am I feeling or sensing in my body and my heart? Get in touch with your body sensations and what this tells you about your feelings.
- Who am I blaming? Can I forgive or just be this awareness? Can I give it space, give kindness, and allow the feelings? This allows you to build neurotransmitters for other perspectives, intelligence, and awareness of possibilities.
- Begin to examine your reactions, responses, or behavior in different situations. Identify your triggers, and ask yourself if you want to continue responding in the same way. If not, how could you interrupt or respond differently to break the cycle of the fight, flight, or freeze reaction? This allows you to connect to the good within yourself and others.
By doing so you start to change the inner landscape of your vision by expanding the rules and circuitry of your belief systems that have been embedded by earlier experiences, family system rules, and inculturation.
Challenges Lead to Your Development
“Life is a challenge. Meet it.”~Mother Teresa
When meeting challenges of any form, it’s important to know that what you believe upfront will determine what comes next. All of us have been thrown into situations where we felt overwhelmed, afraid, confused, hurt, betrayed, etc. It is for this fact that resonating with having been able to move through and out the other side of challenges in the past can allow you to work with a challenge in front of you now.
Challenges come in different durations and intensities. Putting challenges into perspective allows you to meet what is in front of you with both inner strength and wisdom when you resonate with having met challenges that created a sense of empowerment. This awareness reduces resistance and creates encouragement for what life is dishing out right now.
Of course, some challenges are larger than others, and not all challenges might feel like they are met with success. For example, if you spill coffee on your shirt, it is different than receiving a phone call about an ill family member that needsyour help that you can’t provide at the moment. Getting centered in both circumstances is beneficial. Being able to calm yourself first allows you to be more available to problem-solving, decision-making, and delegating.
Instead of reacting with the fight, flight, or freeze, it’s important to move out of fear into a greater sense of calm so that problems can be solved by calming the stressed mind to allow life-enhancing and creative choices to be considered. This also allows you to be kind to your own life to learn from past experiences where it might have felt you “failed” so you can apply what those experiences taught you to your current situation.
This is why getting in touch with your breath, taking a few moments, or using a phrase to remind you that you are in the here and now is beneficial. My personal favorites come from 12 Step Programs: “ First things first,” “Keep it simple,” or “One day or one moment at a time.”
Having the strength to get through some life challenges takes time and effort over the long run. Resonating with continuing to come back into your center allows you to pace yourself over time.
Development Leads to Direction in Life
Earlier versions of yourself carry information that can inform your life today. In the same way, your current version of self is able to inform earlier experiences and parts of yourself. You are not an abridged edition, rather you are an expanding and developing being of light and sound.
Your unconscious and conscious material that inform your attitude, beliefs, and responses to challenges make up your overall experience of life.
It’s important to acknowledge that the newborn version of you did not know what you knew as a 2-year-old. Your 7-year-old part of yourself did not know what you knew as a teenager, etc. The way that your body-mind system developed allowed primary functions for survival and feeling states in stages then became more complex with reasoning and logic paired with increasing networks of communication and creativity.
You would not expect your 2-year old part to drive a car, balance a checkbook or make scrambled eggs, yet earlier parts continue to inform and influence choices about bonding, separation, fear, calm, and safety as an adult. This is due to the developmental stage memory imprints from the past that continue to signal to you today.
Your adult self has navigated many developmental stages, challenges, relationships, and structures over time. Taking care of and listening to earlier parts of yourself is essential to developing greater harmony and balance within your life today.
The direction you take in your life is led by your personal and family system’s unconscious material. It conducts your journey until it is brought into the light to create greater conscious awareness and understanding of new possibilities from the perspective of your adult and Greater Self.
Kimberly Rex, MS is an Advanced Resonance Repatterning® practitioner, a Master Wellness and Well-being Life Coach, and a Person-Centered Expressive Therapist. She works with clients all over the world with Resonance Repatterning sessions that work with personal and generational unconscious material to facilitate this process of updating your body-mind system to experience greater integrity in your wellness and well-being.
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