subconscious mind | David M Masters

Understanding and Overcoming Limiting Beliefs

Limiting beliefs are a hidden but powerful force in our lives. They shape our perceptions, decisions, and actions, often without our conscious awareness. These subconscious roadblocks can prevent us from healing, achieving our goals, or living authentically. By understanding what limiting beliefs are and how they work, we can uncover the ways they may be sabotaging our progress and begin the transformative journey toward freedom and self-discovery.

Join me as we take a look at the nature of limiting beliefs, how they manifest, and two effective techniques to overcome them: Tap Cross Therapy and The Sweep. While uncovering these beliefs may feel challenging, approaching the process with curiosity and humor can make it a rewarding experience.

What Are Limiting Beliefs?

Limiting beliefs are subconscious thoughts or assumptions about ourselves, others, and the world that restrict our potential. These beliefs often originate in early childhood through experiences, societal messages, or the meanings we assign to situations. While they may feel true, they are often based on skewed interpretations rather than facts.

For example, a child who repeatedly experiences rejection may internalize the belief that they are unworthy of love. Over time, this belief can shape their adult relationships, leading to patterns of self-sabotage and unfulfilling connections.

Key Characteristics of Limiting Beliefs:

1. Subconscious: They operate beneath our conscious awareness.
2. Self-Reinforcing: They influence behavior in ways that perpetuate themselves.
3. Restrictive: They hinder growth, healing, and self-expression.

How Limiting Beliefs Block Healing

Many people find themselves stuck in a cycle of trying to heal or improve their lives, only to encounter repeated setbacks. This pattern is often driven by subconscious resistance.

Why Does Resistance Occur?

1. Perceived Benefits: At some level, the subconscious mind believes the current challenge provides protection or benefits.
2. Fear of Change: Healing may require stepping into the unknown, which the subconscious views as risky.
3. Conflicting Desires: A part of you wants to heal, while another part resists due to deeply ingrained beliefs.

For example, someone with a chronic illness may subconsciously associate healing with losing attention or care from loved ones. This inner conflict can prevent progress, even when conscious efforts are made.

The Impact of Limiting Beliefs on Behavior

Limiting beliefs act like filters, distorting how we see ourselves and the world. This distortion influences our thoughts, emotions, and actions, often leading to self-sabotage.

How Limiting Beliefs Create Patterns:

1. Skewed Perception: Beliefs act as a lens, filtering experiences to align with their narrative.
2. Reinforcement Loop: The subconscious seeks evidence to validate the belief, creating self-fulfilling prophecies.
3. Behavioral Constraints: Actions are shaped by these beliefs, often resulting in cycles of limitation.

Consider the belief, “I’m not creative.” Someone holding this belief might avoid opportunities to express creativity, reinforcing the idea and further embedding it in their identity.

Uncovering Limiting Beliefs

Discovering limiting beliefs requires introspection and honesty. It involves identifying patterns of thought and behavior that feel restrictive or self-sabotaging.

Questions to Help Identify Limiting Beliefs:

- Do I avoid certain opportunities because I believe I’ll fail?
- Is there a recurring thought that holds me back?
- When I think about healing or achieving my goals, do fears or doubts arise?

Two Techniques to Overcome Limiting Beliefs

Tap Cross Therapy
- Focus on the belief you want to release.
- Use your fingertips to tap gently on the four cross points of your body, then the four cross points of your face (forehead, chin, outside points of eyes).
- As you tap, affirm your intention to let go of the old belief and welcome new possibilities.
- Repeat. (See Release Emotional Trauma with Tap Cross Therapy)
The Sweep
- Imagine your limiting belief as a dusty, unwanted object in your mental space.
- Close your eyes, visualize a broom sweeping it away, and replace it with a new, empowering belief.
- Repeat affirmations that support the new belief, such as, “I am capable of healing.”

These techniques help reprogram the subconscious mind, creating space for healthier patterns and beliefs to take root.

A Lighthearted Approach to Serious Work

While uncovering and releasing limiting beliefs can feel daunting, infusing humor and curiosity can make the process more engaging. Think of yourself as a detective uncovering hidden clues about your inner world. Each discovery is a step closer to freedom and healing.

Time to Clear Limiting Beliefs

Limiting beliefs are like outdated software running in the background of your mind, subtly shaping your reality. By identifying and clearing these beliefs, you can align your subconscious with your conscious goals, paving the way for transformative change.

Healing begins when you challenge the narratives that no longer serve you. With tools like Tap Cross Therapy and The Sweep, you can take empowered steps toward releasing the mental blocks that have been holding you back.

Embrace this journey with patience, humor, and a willingness to explore the depths of your subconscious mind. As you clear limiting beliefs, you’ll unlock your full potential and discover a new, unbounded version of yourself.

Self Sabotage

You want it. You want it bad. You want it more than you’ve ever wanted it before. Your desire has brought you to look at it in the eye. Here you are face-to-face with that which you desire. It’s so close, you can sense it, see it, smell and taste it.

The planets are aligned, the moment is here. This is the right time and the right place to finally get that illusive thing you have longed for.

What do you do?

You might be surprised to discover that most (if not all) people will unwittingly do anything possible to prevent taking full advantage of the opportunity to have what they want. In fact, they may unconsciously disregard, disrespect and ultimately destroy the opportunity altogether.

Self-sabotage

If you’ve done this – and I know you have – you are a self-saboteur. How do I know you have done this? Because everyone has committed self-sabotage at some point in their life. I don’t know one person who has not sabotaged themselves at some point (well, maybe one, but I believe he is in denial – and that’s okay).

Why would I sabotage myself?

This is something that happens deep inside your self – the you that you are in the core of your being – that subconscious part of you that desires to protect you from all things that may lead to disappointment.

Your subconscious is your oldest protection mechanism. It perfectly recalls every moment when you were disappointed, experienced distress, pain, or got your feelings hurt. In those moments, this deepest part of you vowed to protect you from ever feeling like that again.

This part of your being is also the keeper of your deepest fears and lack of self-esteem or sense of unworthiness.

Experience + Fear – Self esteem = Self Sabotage

When these ingredients are combined and activated, the toxic result is Self-sabotage.

With the best of intentions, your subconscious will do everything possible to avoid – or even push away – that which you so sincerely desire to preserve your state of being.

Unlike you conscious mind which might be able to rationalize, with Tennyson’s, “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” your subconscious believes it is far better not to have had anything than to suffer the anxiety, disappointment, pain or sadness associated with loss.

Your subconscious is always ready to do battle with any tools available to prevent you from having what you truly desire – if there is a chance things might not ultimately work out, like you would have liked.

Your subconscious takes this so seriously that it believes it’s thwarting your possibility of happiness is self-preservation, a life-saving effort. It’s as if your life depends on avoiding this opportunity at all costs.

How Do I Stop Self-sabotage?

The answer to the question about, “What can I do about my tendency to self sabotage?” can be complex and when I work with someone on their propensity to sabotage themselves, it’s easy to see no two self saboteurs are alike. Nonetheless, the process always centers around the same base ingredients of the equation.

Experience, Fear and Self esteem

If you can recognize the experiences that are preventing you from moving forward, what your fears are and what they are based on and ways that you might lack self esteem or sense of unworthiness and resolve these underlying issues, then you can confidently destroy the self-sabotage defense mechanism, while retaining the wisdom associated with your life’s experience.

Short Cut to Freedom from Self Sabotage

You might think, “Oh, that sounds like a lot of work… Isn’t there something I can do now to avoid self sabotage?”

Yes, you can start with reprogramming your self-conscious by adding a layer of worthiness using your imagination and positive affirmations.

Create a Vision

Create a vision of yourself in your mind’s eye of you completely happy, having that which you desire, fully safe and secure in its fullest expression. The more elaborate the vision with all five senses fully engaged, the more effective it will be. Take five minutes in the morning (preferably the first five minutes of your awakenedness) and five minutes in the evening to take yourself to this place, imagining how great it will be.

Affirmations

Reciting positive affirmations is a good way to start reprogramming your self-conscious. Following are some ideas for affirmations that you can recite (more effective out loud, if possible and silently if more appropriate) which can effectively begin to become more believable or real the more you recite them:

I love and accept myself unconditionally.

I release any need for misery and suffering.

I let go of anything in my past that might be holding me back.

I have high self esteem and I respect myself.

I deserve all the best this life has to offer.

I think on these things: Love, Good health, Prosperity and Positive outcomes. As I do, more love, greater health, wealth and the best things in life come to me.

I love and respect every moment of my life and am so grateful for the blessing of living my best life as it continues to get even better.

And now that you know this, the next time your approached with an incredible opportunity?

Consider jumping into full immersion.

What if it doesn’t work out?

You will not have to be like so many whom I have visited in their last moment whose lives are full of regret for not taking action when they had the chance.

You might get your feelings hurt… and that’s okay… because

It might just be your greatest experience ever!

Confused? Subliminal Mind Control

Ever get confused while watching television, listening to the radio, reading books, articles, Googling data or just surfing the World Wide Web? Ever wonder why that is?

Consider this perpetual state of confusion and wide array of thoughts, philosophies and feelings as a method to keep you in a perpetual state of hypnotic trance. Your thoughts and perception of life, what is real and what is not, is determined by the thoughts planted in your subconscious in an effort to control what you believe, to cause dissention and polarization among the masses making you conclude that you are capable of independent thought.

Is it any surprise when you realize that you are confused because you are a victim of mind control and have been since birth, as were your parents and their parents before. You have inherited the disillusionment of our forefathers, which – in reality – is a sleight of hand shell game, where the people who are running the show convince us they have nothing up their sleeves.

The power of your subconscious mind controls every thought, or succession of thoughts, determining your emotions, perceiving and interpreting your experiences as you make your way though this life, trying to make sense of it all.

In my work with businesspeople, I see the efforts of promotional departments and advertisers involved in the most painstaking efforts of pouring over the miniscule details of particular campaigns to illicit a particular response from those who have access to the product, story or advertisement.

Color, placement, font styles, shapes, sounds, backgrounds, words, phrases, punctuation, voice inflection, stimulating thoughts and concepts perceived by both our conscious and unconscious minds that could be interpreted independently of each other… and we fall for it every time. This power is wielded by manufacturers, retailers, promoters, public relations and the media.

Do you think the most powerful forces might have access to even more mind control techniques than advertisers?

Subliminal messages and overt polarizing events establishing preconceived popular thought patterns, all carried out with premeditated forethought, careful scripting, acting and played out with pinpoint accuracy, to assure you are kept in a state of confusion and fear, questioning your own relevance or existence.
Your concept of reality may very well be a figment of your imagination as there is no limit to the power of the subconscious mind to take precedence over the conscious mind.

In an effort to make sense of it all, independent thought patterns are emerging and breaking free from the mind control machine as we begin to embrace our individuality no longer shackled by the disillusion that imprisoned the minds of previous generations.

It’s enough to make you feel like you want nothing more than to get away from all the mind control, to establish your own individual mind power in hopes of possibly making sense of all this crazy stuff that we are constantly barraged with.

Your constant confusion is due to the full frontal attack of subliminal messages we all are subject to 24 hours a day (yes, even while you sleep) and it’s not just subliminal advertising that you are falling prey to. No, your subconscious mind is a victim of hidden messages filtered by your subliminal perception to cause you to be content enough with your life so as not to question authority or search for any real meaning in this life.

Your unconscious mind may be exhausted from all the continual exploitation, so it’s easier not to fight it; just to give in and let the forces that control us take over, because it’s easier that way.

Or, you might be part of the awakening underground, who are beginning to make their own independent stand against the crazy world, determined to reclaim their own power of the mind, as they begin to think independently finding truth, when what is represented as the real world just doesn’t make sense.