Where do your opinions come from?

In this time when many of us believe the exact opposite of what a fellow American thinks, I believe it is a great time to look at why you believe what you believe, and if you ACTUALLY really believe it or are just “saying” you believe what your parent or your friend believes. I had a 4H leader tell me in High School; “it’s okay if you hate somebody. Just know why you hate them, and have it be a valid reason”.

It is important to know WHY you believe what you believe. After all, the perspective can be very different, depending on where you are standing!

This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Flourish.

Core Belief Systems

A Core Belief is a belief that is passed down from family member to family member, just swallowed whole without consciously challenging it. An example of this would be joining the religion of your family. In my small town, everyone was Protestant or Catholic. Those were the choices. Of course, I joined my parents church and embraced being a Protestant.

The stories were familiar to me because I had been hearing them since birth. It wasn’t like I looked at every religion out there, had the good and bad points presented, then decide which one I believed the most. It was passed down as culture and core belief. Our core beliefs are passed down from our culture and family of origin.

Our family and community create the reality we have when we are born. These beliefs can be compared to the operating system in the computer software. The operating system is making the computer work even though we aren’t specifically looking at it. Core belief systems and soul contracts allow us to make decisions and function while focusing on a myriad of topics and tasks.

After working with people on manifesting their best lives and consulting on problems, I firmly believe that we create our outside physical reality from our thoughts. Even Bernie Siegel (the oncologist that created the first cancer-support group and wrote several best-selling books like “Love, Medicine & Miracles”) said that he tells what type of cancer a patient had by what their vocabulary was. A woman saying that her neighbor was a “pain in the neck” would have a tumor on her neck.

The culture subconscious you have written your “operating system” on may need to be updated. You may look at it and want to make different, more informed choices now that you have more experienced under your belt. This is easy to do, but it must be done in a specific, conscious way.

Also, a core belief system often is created because there is a soul contract behind it. If a core belief system is passed down for generations, it becomes a soul contract. The difference I find is a soul contract is attached to the DNA, so they need to be changed with the help of God while a core belief system is a something that you change within your own mind.

We should not blame our parents for the soul contracts and belief systems they have handed down to us. Most are not aware that what they are doing can be so toxic. Also, it is common for a parent to think they are “better” than their own parents, their role models because they don’t do things “as bad”. But you can only change so much without actually changing soul contracts. Many times, they also respond to something they hated about their parents by doing the exact opposite, which is probably better but still problematic.

For example, my father told me numerous times that “I had to work on the farm, but he was going to pay me because his father made him work and never paid him”. I had a checking account starting in third grade, which created other issues. People will say, “My parents smacked me around, so I don’t do that. But I see nothing wrong with yelling at kids. I AM NOT AS BAD AS MY father/mother!”

We need to clear our soul contracts from the energy brought from the past. Then the feeling of crap that the world of my dad’s generation and other generations have created for us could lift. I do not blame my father for the dire statements he said to me, because I know he did not pull them out of thin air; they were said to him when he was a child and they resided in the voice in his head.

My father had this routine that was terrifying to me. I would be assigned to help him. I was young, because this was pre checking account (at eight- third grade!). Somewhere during the afternoon, he would ask me to find him a hammer. This was an amazingly complex issue. My father would go to the store and buy 20 hammers, only to have the hired men squirrel them all away. The hammers would all magically disappear in the next five days. Each tractor we had on the farm had a toolbox that contained the possibility of a hammer, and there were seven tractors. Then we had a whole building called the machine shed, which is where the hammers were supposed to actually reside. Also, my mother had a hammer if I became desperate, which I had to be because her hammer was smaller and powder blue, not the big manly hammers my dad bought. In other words, he still knew I had failed.

If I was lucky enough to find a hired man (my dad had 2-3 usually) they would tell me where a hammer was (luckily, I must have been either desperate enough or cute enough for them to give up their stash). But I couldn’t always find a hired man. I couldn’t always even find my mother. So, I would have to return to my father and say I had failed. Then he would tell me the “general direction to look in” like the newest Oliver tractor or the corn crib. This never worked because it was always too general. Then I’d come back, and he would add, “Well, look at the first bench on the right side in the machine shed”.

That usually didn’t work either. So, I would have to come back AGAIN. This would go on for five or six times. By then, my dad would start saying, “If I had it to do over again, I would never have kids”. This would bring me near to tears, already desperately looking for a hammer and now my self-worth being totally demeaned. He did this multiple times, dozens I think, though they all blur together. So incredibly manipulative. It has stayed with me all my life.

It should be known; I have never had kids. I don’t blame that statement, but looking at it objectively now, he said it to me enough that it fit into a core belief. The statement of low self-worth had been said to my father, and he was repeating it to me. It was always so jarring to me because my father could also be very, very affectionate and I knew he cared about me. But then there was the hammer search. Many of these incongruent things were apparent to me as a child. and this was before I was six when those things get written onto your hard drive without you even knowing.

In The Secret Life of Water, it is shown that water forms cancerous looking crystals when it’s called stupid or ugly. But water will form beautiful crystals when exposed to words like love or joy. This is important because our bodies are 80% plus water. When we say these destructive core belief systems out loud, they affect our cells in much the same way. These statements must stop now. Words hurt as much as sticking and stones contrary to the old nursery rhyme. The impact of words on our lives last much much longer than physical abuse.

The beliefs, the curses, the fears, the sayings that we take in whole without even knowing, the songs that fill our lives in a dismal codependent sewage, the lack of hope in our belief systems, the choosing of material items over basic human decency. These need to be changed. We have to change these basic core beliefs and the soul contracts that create them. It is doable. We have reached a point where we can do that. But we first need to look at how this happens. Find the contracts, make them null and void, and replace them with something you actually want to believe. When you start doing this, you will start realizing how much these contracts affect your life.

Changing belief systems and soul contracts allow you to pass down self-worth, love and individuality, instead of spewing negativity out to the next generation. Another wonderful fact is that if you take a soul contract off yourself, it will come off your children and the others in your family of your generation.