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Showing posts from February, 2015

The Bondage of Belief

 I like to share this story with people in order to illustrate the extent to which our pre-conditioned, destructive beliefs manifest themselves as habits in our lives. Many of our experiences as children leave mental footprints. Those footprints take the shape of assumptions or beliefs that we carry on into our adult lives. The acting out of these beliefs, which is often quite unconscious, shapes our relationships with others and our own sense of who we are. When I was about 7 or 8 years old, my parents got divorced. At that time, it was not quite as common to have estranged parents as it is nowadays. I didn't realize it but I had a strong sense that, somehow, I might have been responsible for the break-up. I recognize now the absurdity of such a belief but at the time I was quite unaware that I had assumed responsibility for an event that had absolutely nothing to do with me or my actions. My mother left my father (for a number of complex reasons far beyond the comp