By African American Author Denise Turney

Examine your beliefs to live your best life. Beliefs benefit or hinder. In this world, what beliefs don’t do is go away. In fact, wise thoughts may be the greatest investments you can make. Plainly stated, beliefs are thoughts that have been repeated so often you perceive the thoughts to be true, as if they are fact, as if they cannot be examined or changed.

Notice Beliefs that Hinder Your Ability to Live Your Best Life

Of course, it’s your own beliefs that impact you most. As simple as this sounds, it’s not always easy to accept. It’s so much easier to blame feeling stuck, confused or frustrated on another person’s choices, another person’s beliefs.

Based on personal experience, one way out of this trap is to start paying attention to what’s happening around you. This isn’t a tactic to recall every unwanted experience that you have. Instead, it’s an exercise to see how your thoughts, especially your beliefs, link up to your experiences.

And it may take months before you start to see the links. You may not want to hear this. But it could be even longer before you accept the experiences that your thoughts, your beliefs, are making. Please be patient with yourself. It can take a while to get off track, and sometimes just as long to get back on track.

Patience, Acceptance and Awareness Pay Off

So, be patient with yourself. The process is worth it.

Before you start paying attention to what’s happening and how it links to your beliefs, it’s important to know that you don’t have to believe your thoughts create your reality for your thoughts to work, creating desired and undesired experiences for you. In fact, you may have invested in beliefs that you are incomplete, incompetent or, in some other way lacking, without realizing it.

Those beliefs are working beneath the surface. They are creating experiences for you. That’s why it’s important to pay attention so, you can spot thoughts that need changing.

Searching for someone else to blame won’t change your thoughts. Your parents, grandparents, teachers and neighbors may have called you names and told you what you were and were not capable of. But if someone called you a dog that doesn’t mean that you’d bark.

Live Your Best Life Root Experiences

Why? You know you’re not a dog. And you’ve never believed or thought you were a dog. So, you don’t behave like a dog.

Which again shows that your thoughts and beliefs are churning out experiences for you. Those erroneous beliefs can make blocks of doubt, fear and resistance in your thought system. Before you know it, you’ve convinced yourself that you cannot do or have certain experiences. You’ve created inner resistance.

But, once you commit to change, you’ll start spotting the thought/experience links. And you’ll start accepting thoughts you need to stop and replace. After a while, you may see that the world is like an enormous classroom. Trust the process.

Trust The Process

As it regards trusting the process, Mulukan may know this as well as anyone and perhaps better than most. After all, Mulukan was born into a level of poverty that most will never deal with. By the world’s standards, Mulukan really should give up. But she keeps going.

And so should you. Stay open. Pay attention. Try different approaches. Follow inner promptings. Trust the process. And, trust that you really can and will examine erroneous beliefs until you see that they are illusions, until you decide to let them go into the nothingness that they came from. Illusions gone, all that remains is reality, all that remains is truth. And yours is an amazing truth – you’ll see.

You can read about Mulukan’s story in the book Long Walk Up.