“The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.” -Pema Chodron
Even if you think you’re open-minded, odds are you aren’t entirely. Most people have areas where they’re willing to accept new information and others where they just won’t budge. In a way, this gives order to chaos. It gives you the illusion you understand how things work and will work from here on out.
It’s rarely that black and white. And sometimes what you believe in just isn’t so.
For example, an overweight woman believes only thin people get respect. She thinks no one could love someone her size. She believes she’s too mentally weak to stick to a diet. The sum of her beliefs: she’s stuck the way she is, and as a result will always be unhappy.
None of that has to be true. People aren’t universally disrespectful of others who happen to carry extra weight. People fall in love with large people every day. Anyone can muster the strength to change their situation; whether she realizes it or not, that includes her.
Our beliefs serve only to limit us, sometimes in small ways, and other times on a much larger scale. Religious beliefs have vastly limited our ability to connect with, hear, and learn from others who happen to see things differently. They’ve even led us to harm them. Nothing else has caused more war.
Oftentimes, we’d rather cling to what we think is right and cut off 95% of the possibilities available to us than admit we could be wrong. We always could be wrong.
Nothing in life is certain, least of all your limiting beliefs about who you are and what you can become. Today when you come up against an idea that limits you or the people around you, ask yourself this question:
“What possibilities would I open up if I accepted that this might not be true?”
