"Breaking Through - when relative truth becomes visible

Understanding Limiting Beliefs and Their Impact

“There is nothing more confining than the prison we don’t know we are in. ”

— Shakespeare

There is nothing quite as convincing as a belief we don't know is a belief.

Once something has travelled with us for long enough, gathering experience and evidence along the way, it can stop feeling like an interpretation of reality and simply become reality. I'm not enough. There isn't enough. People like me don't do that. Money is difficult. Being seen isn't safe. Love requires me to give myself away. I couldn't possibly. That's just who I am.

Sometimes we don't even hear the words anymore. The belief has become part of the background hum, quietly participating in what we perceive, how we feel, the choices that appear available and the life we subsequently experience.

I think of these as relative truths.

They are not necessarily silly ideas we somehow picked up and now need to eliminate. Many of them made complete sense within the environments in which they formed. They may have arisen through experience, family, culture, relationships, things projected onto us, conclusions we made when we were young, or circumstances in which a particular way of seeing ourselves and the world helped us belong, protect ourselves or simply make sense of what was happening.

The relative truth can become woven into the organisation of the person until we are no longer simply thinking it. We are perceiving through it. This is why I've become less interested in the idea of “getting rid of limiting beliefs.” It is very easy to turn the belief into another thing that is wrong with us, another pesky piece of conditioning standing between us and the glorious expanded human we're supposed to become.

I'd rather get curious.

If something keeps appearing in our lives, a familiar relationship dynamic, a financial ceiling, a contraction around visibility, the inability to receive, a repeating emotional response, a place where we continually retreat despite consciously wanting to move forward, there is information there.

A question I use often in this work is:

What would I have to believe to be true for this experience or response to make complete sense?

It is a beautifully revealing question because it doesn't begin by assuming that our response is irrational. For a moment, we allow that there may be an internal logic to what is happening.

If being visible has become associated with rejection, of course some part of the organism may contract when visibility arrives. If receiving became tangled with obligation, consciously wanting abundance doesn't necessarily mean the whole instrument experiences receiving as safe or desirable. If love became associated with keeping everybody happy, saying no can carry far more energetic weight than the two letters would suggest.

Within that particular organisation of reality, the response makes sense. Once a belief begins to reveal itself, I like to play with the word true.

Is it true?

If the immediate answer is yes, and often it is, I become interested in the evidence. What experiences tell me this is true? Where have I seen it? How has life confirmed it?

Then I turn the lens slightly.

Have there ever been experiences in my life where this has not been true?

Even one?

Has there been a person, moment, relationship, opportunity or experience that doesn't quite fit inside the belief?

If there has, something interesting happens. We don't need to declare the belief false, but we can no longer hold it quite so easily as an absolute truth.

Then we can widen the lens again. Is this true for everyone? Does every human being experience this reality in the same way? If someone else can experience something differently, then what we are holding cannot be universally true.

It may still be very true for us. and that distinction is enormous.

Our lived experience doesn't suddenly become invalid because somebody else has had a different one. If someone has repeatedly experienced rejection, scarcity, abandonment, betrayal or not being heard, telling them “that's only a belief” completely misses the point. Those experiences happened. What we are exploring is the meaning that became organised around them and whether that meaning has subsequently become a lens through which future experiences are perceived.

Now we can ask something slightly different:

What would I have to believe for this to be relatively true for me? This is often where we begin travelling beneath the surface story. People always leave may reveal something closer to I'm not worth staying for. There's never enough money may open an entirely different conversation about safety, receiving, deserving, family history or what we learned was possible for people like us. I can't speak in front of people may have remarkably little to do with speaking and quite a lot to do with what being visible has come to mean within the instrument.

Once we discover the belief, we don't need to race off and replace it with a shinier one.

This is where some approaches to beliefs have never quite satisfied me. We can discover I am not enough, dutifully replace it with I am enough, repeat it every morning while brushing our teeth and still find that the body has apparently not received the memo. Because the organisation may not exist in words alone.

A belief can have a physical life, an emotional life, an energetic tone. It can participate in where attention goes and what we notice. It can influence the images we create, the possibilities we dismiss, the people we choose, what we expect from them and how we interpret their behaviour. This is where we put our skin in the game.

Rather than only asking what we believe, we can become curious about what believing it feels like.

Where does it live in the body? What happens to breath? Does something contract, rise, become heavy, numb, charged or restless? Is there an image? A memory? An impulse to move? Does the body want to pull backwards, push forwards, disappear, protect, speak, cry, run?

We don't have to decide immediately what any of it means. Sometimes the intelligence of the experience becomes clearer when we resist the urge to explain it too quickly. The body might reveal something the story hasn't.

An emotion can arrive that wasn't expected. An image appears. Breath changes. A sentence comes out of our mouth and suddenly we actually hear what we've been saying for years. Something previously fused into this is just who I am becomes visible as a pattern within the instrument, and that visibility changes our relationship with it.

This is where consciousness becomes very practical for me. We have this extraordinary capacity to become aware of what has been operating through us. Something that was once the lens through which we looked becomes something we are now capable of looking at, feeling and entering into relationship with. There is often momentum already moving within the pattern by the time we become aware of it.

This is where emotional maturation becomes particularly interesting.

Something happens and energy moves. We feel the charge, contraction, heat, fear, anger, agitation, grief or whatever form the experience is taking. Historically that momentum may have had a very familiar destination: withdraw, attack, please, freeze, hide, overperform, control, abandon the idea, silence ourselves. The momentum and its expression have become so familiar to one another that they can appear to be the same thing.

They aren't necessarily.

When we can connect to the momentum of the energy in its isness, without immediately suppressing it, naming it into a fixed story or allowing the old reflex to decide where it must go, another possibility becomes experientially available.

• We can move with it.

• We can breathe actively with it.

• We can give it sound.

• We can bring attention directly into its movement and allow attention to meet intention.

• We can discover what happens when the same energetic momentum is given another pathway through the instrument.

  This isn't about turning anger into love because love is spiritually superior, or convincing ourselves that fear is secretly joy. The raw experience deserves more respect than that. What we're developing is the emotional maturity and internal capacity to remain with the movement long enough to discover its intelligence.

Anger may contain power, clarity or the impulse for a boundary. Fear can contain an extraordinary amount of life and activation. A contraction around visibility may be carrying a younger intelligence that once understood hiding as protection. Grief can move through breath, sound or the body and reveal something that thinking about grief never touched.

The energy itself becomes material.

This is where the metaphor of alchemy becomes very tangible.

Steel to gold.

Not because steel was wrong.

Not because gold is “higher.”

The alchemy is in discovering that the raw material we thought could only express itself in one form contains other possibilities when awareness, movement, breath, attention and intention participate. This isn't something reserved for a particularly evolved few. It is an experiential availability of the human instrument. We already have the apparatus. We feel, perceive, move, breathe, imagine, direct attention, create meaning and express. The practice is developing a more conscious relationship with those capacities.

This is also why intellectual understanding remains important but isn't the whole story. We can understand a belief beautifully and still be living it. When understanding begins to move through sensation, emotion, energetic experience, behaviour and relationship, something else starts to happen.

It marinates and the development when it eventually appears in life.

Someone who has spent years understanding why they don't speak begins to use their voice without having to perform courage first. A person notices that the relationship dynamic that once swallowed them whole is happening again, but this time they remain connected to themselves inside it. An opportunity appears and the familiar contraction is still there, yet it no longer automatically means no. Creativity that has been held behind an old relative truth starts finding form.

This is where the experiential development becomes form. The old pattern may still exist. We don't need to ceremonially evict it from the psyche. But it is no longer the only reality available and it most definitely moves from a reflex to a choosing and hat changes what we can perceive.

Our beliefs participate in the images we project into life. If we are organised around an expectation of rejection, rejection may become particularly easy to see. If our internal architecture says there isn't enough, we may continually interpret the world through lack. What we hold as true influences what receives our attention, and what receives our attention influences how we respond. Our responses then participate in what happens next, and what happens next can conveniently become more evidence for what we believed in the first place.

Round and round we go. A relative truth can become a remarkably convincing reality when we've been helping to reproduce its evidence for years. This isn't blame. It is where response-ability begins to become exciting.

If awareness allows us to perceive the loop, then we have somewhere new to stand within it. We can recognise what has shaped us while also becoming curious about what else is available now and perhaps this is where my understanding of “breaking through” has changed.

I don't imagine us smashing through the walls of our conditioning anymore. There is something unnecessarily violent about trying to destroy architecture that may once have been constructed with considerable intelligence.Sometimes breaking through is much closer to seeing through and sensing new ways.

We see the relative truth. We discover what made it true for us. We recognise how it has organised itself through body, mind, emotion, nervous-system response, energetic movement and perception. We meet its momentum and somewhere within that meeting, the wall we thought was reality becomes something we can see. There is space around it. From there, something fresh has an opportunity to emerge rather than simply being prescribed by what happened yesterday.

This is where I experience our innate nature entering the conversation. Not as a perfect self hiding underneath all our messy conditioning, but as a deeper coherence carrying qualities of love, freedom, beauty, creativity, connection, curiosity and expression. As less of the instrument is occupied reproducing old relative truths, more of these qualities seem able to find form through the particular human being living the experience.

Our projection changes because the perceiver is changing. We see another possibility and, importantly, we can begin to experience another possibility. That distinction matters. Freedom isn't simply knowing that the wall isn't universally true. Freedom begins to become tangible when the organism discovers there is somewhere else it can move and once we've experienced that, even briefly, the old prison is never quite as invisible again.

Lean in, breath in

What if the subtle niggle isn't something to get rid of, but something worth getting curious about?

There is that moment when something hits. A comment. A look. A conversation that suddenly takes a turn. An opportunity you have been asking for finally arrives and, instead of throwing your arms in the air with excitement, something inside you contracts and whispers, Oh shit. The body has entered the conversation.

Sometimes long before we've consciously worked out what the conversation is about. A tightening in the chest, a shift in breath, a knot in the belly, heat moving through the skin, an urge to explain yourself, defend, retreat, blame, fix, shut down or get the hell out of there. The movement can be enormous, or it can be so subtle that we barely notice it before the mind has swept in with its interpretation of events.

This is bad. They shouldn't have said that. I can't do this. Here we go again and off we go. I find this little meeting place fascinating. The place where life meets the instrument and the instrument responds.

I call what arises here dissonance. Not because it is inherently wrong, negative or something we need to clear from our system, but because something has moved out of its familiar hum. There is friction. A rub. Something in the field of our body-mind has been activated and is communicating. The question for me has become less How quickly can I make this feeling go away? and more:

What if I lean in?

Not recklessly. Not overriding the intelligence of fear, ignoring boundaries or forcing myself into experiences that don't feel right. Leaning in isn't another cleverly disguised way of bullying ourselves into growth. It is simply an invitation to become curious.

Before the Story Gets Its Pants On

Our human organism is wonderfully quick. Something happens and biology, memory, emotion, nervous-system response, conditioning and whatever else is humming through the instrument can be in motion before our conscious mind has even located the car keys. Then along comes interpretation and interpretation matters. The mind is part of this extraordinary apparatus too. It helps us make meaning, discern, understand, imagine, remember and navigate our world, but sometimes the mind is interpreting the present through material gathered somewhere else.

• An old relationship.

• An early experience.

• Something we learned about ourselves.

• A family pattern.

• A previous rejection.

• A belief we've rehearsed so often it no longer feels like a belief; it simply feels like reality.

This is where the invitation to be curious about the territory before the label. Before this is anxiety. Before this is rejection. Before you have made me feel this. Before the anger rises because...

What is actually happening in the skin? Tightness? Heat? Pressure? Tingling? Movement? A pull backwards? A rising force? A heaviness? Something expanding? Something wanting to get very, very small?

Can I be with that movement for a moment before I brand it? There is value in naming our emotions, of course. Language can illuminate and help us communicate what is happening within us. But there is also a delicious intelligence in allowing ourselves to feel before we explain. Sometimes the story is accurate.Sometimes it isn't. Sometimes the sensation itself has more to tell us before the mind turns it into a three-act drama and this is where I breathe.

Not because breath is some magical eraser of uncomfortable human experience. I'm not particularly interested in using breath to make myself calm so I can get back to being a “good” regulated human. I breathe because breath brings me into relationship.

• Here.

• Skin.

• Sensation.

• Movement.

• What is actually happening?

Perhaps the breath changes something. Perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps the contraction becomes stronger for a moment. Perhaps tears arrive. Perhaps the body softens. Perhaps underneath what I thought was anger there is grief, and underneath the grief there is love, and underneath that there is something I don't have a bloody word for.

Good. We don't always need one.

Dissonance Has Its Own Intelligence

We've become rather fond of turning discomfort into something to overcome. Fear must be conquered. Blocks cleared. Negative beliefs replaced. Triggers healed. Resistance broken through, but what if dissonance is not necessarily the enemy of development? What if sometimes dissonance is development knocking at the door an old identity meets a new possibility and there is friction.

Desire meets protection. Love meets fear. Something wants to expand while another part of the organism has become exquisitely skilled at keeping life within familiar boundaries. Of course there is a rub. The body has history. The mind has history. Our emotional landscape has history. The nervous system has history and, through the energetic and spiritual lens through which we also could experience human life, there may be movements and resonances that don't fit neatly into any one explanatory box. We don't need to decide which dimension is the answer. We can be interested in their conversation. This is the multidimensional playground of being human.

Something can make complete sense intellectually and still bring the body to its knees. Something can shift in the body before the mind understands what has happened. A spiritual realisation can open an enormous field of perception and then Tuesday afternoon arrives and somebody says exactly the right thing to illuminate a reflex we thought we'd transcended three years ago. Welcome back to the skin.

This is where maturity marinates.

Understanding has to meet experience. Experience meets biology. Awareness meets conditioning. Relationship pokes at the bits we cannot see alone. The organism gathers new information, and sometimes—slowly, messily, beautifully—something reorganises.

The Tiny Gap Where Something New Can Happen

There is a delicious little moment, sometimes so bloody small we miss it, where something has landed, the body has responded and the mind is halfway through building its case for what just happened and somewhere in that mix, awareness can arrive.

Oh. Look at that. Something is moving in me. That is all. We don't need to immediately transform it.

The reaction may still come. We may still cry, speak, shake, leave, set a boundary, say no, say yes, ask for space, discover that the fear was extraordinarily intelligent or realise that an ancient reflex has just walked into a completely new situation wearing an old costume.

But now we are in relationship with the response rather than entirely being driven by it.

This is one of the places we can experience self-governance—not as self-control, but as developing such an intimate relationship with our own instrument that we begin to recognise what is moving through it and with recognition comes possibility. Not certainty but Possibility. Perhaps the old reflex still wins this round. That's okay too. Awareness has now met it. Something new has entered the field.

And It Doesn't Stop at Our Skin

This is where the inquiry becomes even more interesting, because nothing we express exists entirely in isolation.

If we meet dissonance differently, the expression we bring into relationship may also be different. Perhaps instead of immediately retaliating, we become curious. Perhaps instead of collapsing, we discover a boundary.

Perhaps instead of making another person responsible for everything moving through me, I can feel what belongs to me while still remaining clear about what belongs to them.

Perhaps a reflex that has travelled beautifully and efficiently through generations of our families meets awareness in the body and, this time, doesn't travel forward in quite the same form.

What happens then? A conversation changes. Someone else's body receives a different signal. A child witnesses another possibility. A relationship reorganises. A room has a different tone. This is where the subjective begins to touch the collective.

We are individual instruments, yes, but we are also continually entering one another's fields of experience. We influence and are influenced. Our states, choices, actions, language, touch, attention and reflexes become part of the environments other human beings inhabit.

Through a wider consciousness lens, Let’s remain curious about how far that influence travels. We don't need to pretend we know. The inquiry itself is enough to alter the quality of my participation.

Because if what I express contributes something to the field we share, even in the tiniest way, then getting curious about what moves through this skin becomes more than a private self-development exercise.

It becomes participation.

So, Lean In. Breathe In.

Maybe transformation doesn't always announce itself with fireworks and a life-changing revelation.Sometimes it is the subtle niggle. The breath you nearly didn't notice yourself holding. The flash of heat.The tightening jaw.The familiar story gathering momentum and that tiny flicker of awareness that catches it:

• Hello. There you are.

• Stay for a moment.

• Breathe.

• Feel before you fix.

• Listen before you label.

• Let the body have a word.

• Let the mind have one too.

• Let whatever energetic movement is present be part of the conversation and perhaps ask—not with an agenda to immediately change anything, but with genuine curiosity:

What is this showing me?

What is actually moving beneath the story?

Is this moment asking me to protect myself, express myself, soften, move, speak, wait, leave, stay—or simply feel?

And then perhaps the most interesting question of all:

What wants to move through me next?

Not what would the perfectly healed version of me do. Not what response earns me the highest consciousness badge. What becomes available here, in this actual body, in this actual moment, with the awareness I have now? Lean in.Breathe in. Get your skin in the game.

There may be far more intelligence moving through that subtle niggle than we first imagined.

Continue the exploration

Discover Worlds Within is an invitation to become curious about the extraordinary human sleeve — body, mind, emotions, nervous system, energy, spirit and consciousness — and the intelligence, conditioning and possibility moving through it.

Not simply to know more about yourself, but to experience yourself.

Explore Discover Worlds Within →

The Gifts of Self-Discovery in Relationships

What becomes possible when relationship becomes a place of discovery rather than judgement?

There is a quote I came across many years ago:

“We are all like books. Most people only see our cover. The minority read only the introduction, many people believe the critics. Few will know our content.”

It made me smile because there is something wonderfully human in it. We meet one another through covers.

Appearances. Behaviours. Personalities. Roles. Reactions. Stories.

The version of someone we think we know and yet beneath the cover of every human being exists an extraordinary inner world — history, emotion, conditioning, sensation, memory, desire, fear, imagination, energy, consciousness, spirit and ways of perceiving life that another person may never completely know.

Perhaps one of the great gifts of relationship is that another human being gives us an opportunity to discover more of that world within ourselves.

Relationship as a Mirror

Self-discovery can sound like a solitary pursuit. We imagine ourselves meditating on a mountain, journalling, contemplating life or disappearing on retreat to “find ourselves.”

And all of those experiences can offer beautiful opportunities for inquiry.

Then we come home and someone we love says the wrong thing in exactly the wrong tone, and suddenly there we are.

There is the practice.

Relationship has an extraordinary capacity to reveal us. What opens us. What contracts us. What we protect. What we long for. What we assume. What we fear. What we expect another person to provide. The places where we feel free and the places where an old reflex can take over before awareness has even entered the room. None of this needs to mean something has gone wrong. It is information.

The mirror is showing us something.

Two Inner Worlds Meet

Every relationship brings together more than two personalities. Two histories meet. Two nervous systems. Two sets of conditioning. Two emotional landscapes. Two bodies of lived experience. Two ways of perceiving and interpreting the world., through another lens, two energetic expressions of life. Each person is experiencing the relationship subjectively while simultaneously becoming part of the other's environment.

This is where relationship becomes multidimensional.

• There is me.

• There is you.

• And there is also what is being created between us.

  A relational field begins to form through our words, attention, expectations, touch, silences, reactions, presence, energy and choices.

  We influence it and are influenced by it. Sometimes what moves between two people is obvious. Sometimes it is subtle. A shift in someone's body. A change in tone. A withdrawal. An opening. Something sensed before a word has been spoken. Our human instruments are continually communicating.

  From Projection to Curiosity

  Without awareness, it can be remarkably easy to make another person responsible for what is moving inside us.

  You made me feel this. You should know what I need. If you changed, I could relax. Or perhaps we move in the opposite direction and make ourselves responsible for everything. Neither offers much freedom.

  Self-discovery introduces another possibility - curiosity.

  What is happening within me? What belongs to this moment, and what might be familiar from somewhere else? What is my body communicating? What story has my mind constructed? Is this an old protective response? What am I actually longing for? What am I afraid to reveal? Can I stay present long enough to discover what lies beneath my first reaction?

  This doesn't mean denying another person's behaviour or abandoning our boundaries.

  It means developing enough relationship with ourselves that we can begin to distinguish between what is happening, what we are experiencing, and what we choose to do with that experience.

  This is self-governance in relationship.

  Intimacy Begins Within

  We often think intimacy is something another person gives us. But perhaps our capacity to be intimate with another is intimately related to our capacity to meet ourselves. Can I feel what I feel without immediately escaping it? Can I communicate desire? Can I allow myself to be seen? Can I hear another person's experience without automatically making it a judgement of me? Can I remain connected to myself while also being available to you? Can I meet difference without requiring sameness? Can I allow love, pleasure, tenderness and play to be as worthy of my attention as difficulty?

  This last question matters.

  Relationship work can become so preoccupied with what is wrong that we forget to become curious about what allows human beings to thrive together.

  Connection.

  Safety.

  Freedom.

  Touch.

  Honesty.

  Laughter.

  Desire.

  Play.

  Creativity.

  Repair.

  Space.

  Shared experience.

  The willingness to keep discovering one another. These, too, deserve our attention.

  The Relationship Becomes a Field of Creation

  As awareness develops, relationship can become something more than a place where two histories continually react to one another.

  It can become a place of conscious creation. Not because every reaction disappears. Not because two people reach some perfected state of consciousness. But because increasingly there is awareness within the process. I can notice myself. I can become curious about you. We can recognise what is happening between us and from that awareness, another response may become available.

  Reaction can become response.
  Defence can become curiosity.
  Assumption can become communication.
  Protection can make room for connection.
  Inherited patterns can meet conscious choice.

  Something changes in the field between us and that matters beyond the relationship itself. The ways we love, listen, react, repair, parent, communicate and express ourselves ripple into families, friendships, communities and the environments we inhabit. From this perspective, the work of relationship is simultaneously personal, relational and collective.

  How we meet one another becomes part of the world we collectively create.

  Reading Beyond the Cover

  Perhaps we never completely finish reading another human being. Perhaps we aren't supposed to. There will always be another page. Another chapter. Something we misunderstood. Something newly revealed. Something that changes. Something neither of us expected and perhaps that's part of the beauty.

  True intimacy isn't knowing everything about another person. It is developing the capacity to remain curious enough to keep discovering. To read beyond the cover. To question the critics. To become aware of the stories we've written about one another. and to allow ourselves to be surprised by what is still unfolding.

  Relationship then becomes more than somewhere we go to have our needs met.

  It becomes one of the great environments in which we discover what it means to be human.

  And occasionally, reflected in the eyes of another, we may glimpse something of ourselves we had never before been able to see.

  Continue the exploration

  Conscious Relationship

  Intimate relationship can be one of our richest environments for human development — revealing our conditioning, emotional patterns, nervous-system responses, desires, protective strategies and capacity for love, intimacy, freedom and conscious creation.

  Explore Conscious Relationship →