We’ve talked about vibration, wholeness, and being in your center. Following this path brings us directly to the seat of our beliefs. We forget our wholeness through the illusion of separation. Separation in our individual fields of consciousness are cracks that look like the symptoms we have already discussed: self-worth, business, fear of failure, etc. It is said that these cracks in the self are the way light is able to shine through us.
What it reveals are the deeper beliefs underneath. I want to borrow the work of Gay Hendricks here to shine a little line on the core underlying issues that keep us all small. He calls them upper limits. Expansion is what happens as we learn and grow. As we expand, we are constantly coming up against edges that expose four core underlying beliefs that keep us from stepping more fully into our whole, powerful, and truth-speaking selves. They are formed when we are young and have an experience of being wrong or a burden to our family and community. Sometimes these events are so subtle we don’t even realize they have imprinted their pattern on our whole lives. When we are on the receiving end of this experience, it feels like a crime in our system, but they are crimes we didn’t actually commit. The goal in looking at these is to make some space between us and the experience; we want to know that this was an experience we had and not who we are.
1. The Crime of Being Flawed
The Wound: This can come from something as simple as getting a bad look when you were enjoying something as a child, to physical abuse, to betrayal by someone you trusted.
The Belief: This belief causes us to think that we will most definitely fail at what we do. It might also show up like anytime you get something you want, someone else gets hurt. Without being conscious of this belief, what it does in our life is keep us small. This way if we do fail, we fail small. It’s the feeling that comes up right after something good happens like you are waiting for the ball to drop. This is the belief that I simply am not good enough, so I self-sabotage to make sure I don’t get what I want because I don’t deserve it.
2. The Crime of Disloyalty
The Wound: Abandonment. This experience could also be something like not feeling seen or heard. You may have been doing something that you really love and told it is not appropriate or not allowed.
The Belief: This belief tells us that the more successful we become the more alone we become. It is usually informed by the feeling is we succeed then we are leaving friends and family behind. We choose to stay in suffering so we don’t have to face the fear of being alone. In reality, if we stay small and disconnected from our truth, then it is that much harder for the ones we love to heal too.
3. The Crime of Being a Burden
The Wound: This might be something like being sick as a child and require extra care from your family. Abuse is also related here and certainly poverty, for instance, your parents might constantly remind you that they wouldn’t have to work so hard to support you if you weren’t around. You can probably start to see how many of these wounds overlap too.
The Belief: I know most of us can feel this one. This belief looks like the more success I have, the bigger burdens I will experience. Similarly to being flawed, it often causes us to make sure something goes wrong right after something goes right. We might suddenly have to take care of a sick relative, we might become ill ourselves, we might make a great business deal and then get hit with a lawsuit. For sure the underlying experience is not being able to enjoy the success you have.
4. The Crime of Outshining
The Wound: Maybe you were great at sports but we were told to not talk about it because it would make a symboling feel bad. You were shown it is wrong to flaunt your gifts.
The Belief: If I share my gifts, others will be hurt. To cope with this, we keep ourselves small and our gifts concealed or we make sure it looks like we are suffering even despite our success. We tend to get as much if not more attention when we are suffering so this belief hinges on that.
I am sure you identify with at least a few of these. There are many cross-overs here and the beliefs can get jumbled up themselves. These beliefs are here to protect us. In our being, we are afraid if we get too big, too good, or too true we might get too far away from our tribe and that feels unsafe. So you bring in these limits to make sure that doesn’t happen. The illusion here is you are not the burden, you are not wrong, and you are not too big or too much. Staying in the fear of becoming who you are is a loop that you and your community feed off of and it keeps the collective from moving from suffering to wholeness. Ask yourself, “What am I believing about you as an excuse to not be who I am.”
So what you want to work on here is recognizing when you hit an upper limit issue. Easy ways to spot this is worrying, anxiety, waves of fear prior to expanding or succeeding, deflecting compliments, and getting sick just before or after a breakthrough.
And now we have come back to a key component of healing. Here, when we get to a place where we notice discomfort like anxiety or fear, instead of rushing to change it or cover up the feeling, just be with it. Listen to any messages that might be coming through here. What is doubt asking you to do? Healed isn’t that we don’t feel discomfort ever again, healed is when we recognize our discomfort without the reaction of attack or retreat.
Ways to Loosen the Edge: Consciously expand your energy. A great way to do this is to try to match the energy of someone you feel does have big energy and the capacity to receive in a big way. In that way you get to feel in your body what this vibration is actually like so when you get a chance at a breakthrough, there is less contraction or rejection in your system. If the fear in your belly isn’t from immediate physical danger, it is most likely the edge of expansion. Feeling into that means you are way closer to moving through limiting beliefs than you would be by reporting affirmations that your upper limits won’t let you actually believe.