07/10/2023
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The Beliefs that Hold us Back
In the rural villages of Northern India, there is a tribe, where the communal rules supersede the constitution. And amongst the tribes, live a certain women, who LIVE IN with a man, and have children and don’t get any inheritance for themselves or their children and live in perpetual dependance on their man.
These women willingly get into this arrangement, based on a false belief they grew up with, from the time they took their first breath. The society they grew up in had conditioned them to believe that since they are poor, they can’t “buy” a marriage, and hence can’t have inheritance and that they are just lucky to even live-in with a man and have children of their own.
Someone had to change this practice, and the hero in this case happened to be a woman from outside this community, a social worker, Nikita. This is the story of a hero saving herself while she got trapped saving others.
Nikita was spending way too much time away from her family. Her husband saw her only for a few days every month. She couldn’t move her left hand fully and she had arthritis that was slowly ruining her joints and mobility. She couldn’t breathe without difficulty. And most of all, she felt pained by the condition of these women in that tribe.
Like most auto-immune, Nikita’s body was fighting her, some of her protector cells have started attacking her own body. And I knew in my heart, this has to be psychosomatic. Certain thoughts, beliefs and conclusions that Nikita has is continuing to mis-direct her body to attack her.
The conventional science makes us believe that thoughts happen in the mind, but for thousands of years, the world has known - that there is no mind and body split, that the things that happen in the mind are influenced by the body, that is why - having alcohol can change the way you think, or even coffee or tea. And sometimes, doing an exercise helps you think better, because the body and mind are like one unit, one influences the other. It also happens the other way, when you hold a good thought, you smile, and your body releases endorphins and your muscles are relaxed. And so much more.
But there is something more that happens, deeper than all of this. Our body is a decision-making SYSTEM. And it is computing over a trillion decisions every moment. And the latest scientific discoveries show how decisions are made every microsecond, even at the level of mito-chondria, they are tiny things inside the cell. So it's literally trillions of decisions, not figuratively, every second.
And from my work in the past, I believe that a lot of auto-immune conditions are a result of these decisions by the body.
When a person feels like they want to die or commit su***de, in their minds they have decided to die. And they may have changed their minds the next day and even completely forgotten about it. But the directive to their body remains longer and that continues to destroy their body, one cell at a time.
While this is true that certain emotionally intense moments from the past, had set in motion a series of responses in the body for some people leading to auto-immune, I knew for Nikita, it was a different story.
She wasn’t least bothered about her health condition, she just wanted to move more freely, a little more longer so that she can help the rural women and create more impact, and the look in her eyes, when we repeatedly brought the issue of her health, appeared like she deep down believed - she deserved this health.
It was very clear, we didn’t have to reset a decision from the past. Instead, we had to interrupt a pattern, a set of beliefs or conclusions she was forming on an on-going basis, continuously every day.
Have you sometimes met a person who seems to help the society, but deep inside was like this really bad person, Nikita thought she was like that.
The belief that these rural women had - about their ‘status’ was the most difficult to change, in the process of helping them. They have been conditioned to believe that it is what it is. Nikita was now in the same situation, she had conditioned herself to a belief that was not true about herself and it was killing her (literally).
Her hand went up in the air, and she exclaimed, “I want to be a better person”, when I asked the audience for what purpose they had shown up.
I had met her briefly for 2 minutes while I was coming in, and I knew I had to find time to help her while I also had to deliver the program to all the participants who had shown up. And when she raised her hand and said what she said, I knew this was the time to help her.
I immediately invited Nikita up to the stage. I knew I could help her overcome this crippling issue she was struggling with, once and for all, while I demonstrated Conversational Programming to the audience who have come to learn that.
The most dangerous assumptions and false conclusions that people make are the ones that are incorrect, yet based on some reality. When someone says, ”She doesn’t love me because she turns away when I look at her”, it may be a fact - that sometimes the other person might turn away when her partner looks at her, but the conclusion derived from that fact may be totally inaccurate. Within Neuro-Linguistic Programming, such connections that people make to conclude in this way are called ’Complex Equivalence’.
Nikita has a complex equivalence too, by which she came to the conclusion that she ‘needed’ to be a better person. People have tried for decades to convince her that she is not a bad person, this included her family. But no one got ‘her logic’. During the on-stage demonstration, I elicited her logic, and she felt there is so much to do for the community that she is helping. And while doing that, in her mind, she saw all the things that are not yet done, and when she saw that in her mind, she felt it was still undone because she was not a ‘good enough’ person. And she didn’t mean in terms of capability or capacity, she meant in character.
The irony was because she had a helping character, she managed to convert that positive trait into a self-character assassination.
I don’t have to take decades, like her friends and family have tried earlier. Now that we know that this is exactly how she does what she does, we can help her change the meaning of what it really means when ‘more is yet to be done’.
While most people were trying to have the conversation of - “Is she a good person or a bad person?”, We took the conversation to a different plane, in life, what are all the possible meanings - when you do some and there is more to be done still.
And slowly, led her to, unconsciously also, change her reference and meaning to these things, and suddenly her vision changed. From a picture that she kept seeing of her dying in old age, and still many things not yet done, she saw a group of young girls who are inspired by her work, mentored by her and doing more than what she thought was possible.
Now it isn’t that she has not tried to get more people to join her cause, but until now, it didn’t feel to her like it was going to happen naturally. That people will join her cause by their own accord, happily and joyfully.
This is a really important evolution, compared to anything we have helped her with until this moment. Because, the last time I had met her, we helped her reset her emotions, and get bolder with getting investments. And she managed to do all that. But her deep criticism about herself was not just hurting her health, but was also chasing talent away.
Now, the moment she changed and evolved from within, she started seeing a future intuitively, where people come to her.
At the beginning of the conversation, she kept using language like, “Kill that helpless feeling”. While it might just appear as if she is commenting on bringing the intensity down for certain feelings, at an unconscious level, they are organ language, the brain processes the words in so many different ways.
And part of my test to certainly know that a change has occurred at an unconscious level, is to watch her language in ways she doesn’t know I am observing. And it was heartening to see her organ language change, her unconscious markers change, her approach to the entire situation change.
She cried twice on stage, the first time about how she feels about herself. The second time from overwhelm - from the possibilities of what’s in store for her, in the near future.
The irony of Nikita’s situation was - she wasn’t different from the tribal women she was rescuing - Both people had limited their lives from a belief that was continuously enforced for decades.
The beliefs that are most dangerous are the ones that you don’t even know are just beliefs and are holding you back. And this is just one example of how in Nikita’s pursuit to help these tribal women, she met me and her ambition for helping them, in turn, got herself to break free from her own limiting belief.
Maybe, everytime you help someone break free from their chains, your own invisible chains will shatter too. I wish this is true for you, as well, for the rest of your life.
Disclaimer: Any health-related references mentioned in this article are not to be taken as medical advice or be substituted for advice provided by a doctor or medical health practitioner.
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