Do you ever feel out of control in your own life? Like your belief patterns are working against you? Or like someone else stuck a bunch of muck into your brain and now you’re spending all of your time shoveling it out?  Well someone did and if you are halfway awake, you are spending much of your energy now on changing old patterns.

The good news is that the patterns are not really yours in the first place and that you can let go of them by using the same technology that put them there in the first place.  But first a little science lesson.

Ask yourself, “What is the earliest negative experience that I can remember?” Unless you had a major trauma in your life, you will think of something that happened when you were around 5 years old.  This is no coincidence – it is biology.

Until we are about five, we are learning information about how to think, what to believe and how to structure the world via habitual programming.  At first, we humans only have access to the older, less sophisticated part of our brain, which learns only through repetition.  This means then that everything that our parents or our early tribes teach us is literally being programmed into the only part of our brain that is accessible at that time. There is no filter to choose what beliefs that we want to take and which we want to discard.

At about five, our pre-frontal cortex, the more evolved, creative part of our brain starts to come online. “Suddenly” we begin to discern that we are separate from everyone else – mentally.  We now begin to have our own beliefs about right and wrong and about who were are, individually.  And the wake up is rarely without some pretty significant bumps. Hence the early negative memory. Our truth is confronting what we had always been told was true – and the two are not lining up.

Add to that the fact that just about this same time, most of us head off to face a much bigger, much more complicated whole new world – the school system, with new rules, new people (that we need approval from) and new opportunities.  These new realities provide a chance to question what we believe and/or “prove” that our original “family of origin beliefs” are even true at all. It is a pretty big deal, at any age, to learn that your whole belief system is not perfect, but as a little kid, it is often more than we can process.  So we usually make ourselves wrong and then begin a lifelong journey of sorting the truth out.  Unfortunately we create a lot of mess and pain along the way and usually continue to defend these original belief systems – either consciously or unconsciously. To challenge them is somehow disloyal to our family or might threaten our ever present need to belong.

The first step in freeing ourselves from negative patterns can be to identify the pattern.  This is great, when it happens.

But lasting changes will only happen when we realize that we need to re-program the brain with the new belief, the one that is actually true for us.  We cannot simply have an ah-ha in the clever pre-frontal cortex; we literally have to create a new habit, through practice and repetition in the older part of the brain where it resides. That means that we need to practice and repeat, over and over – the new thought pattern.  So don’t beat yourself up when you don’t show up perfectly even after you have learned great new insights.  Switch gears from criticism and turn your attention to noticing when you are showing up in the old paradigm, when the tape is running the show and then asking yourself what you would prefer instead. Then practice that new belief by thinking it over and over until it becomes a new rut in your brain – one that you have actually chosen.