Awareness, Beliefs and Perceptions

Journey to Inner Wisdom

Welcome to A Journey to Inner Wisdom. I am Crystal Kotow-Sullivan and your host of this Podcast.

I am going to talk about the many facets of the Journey to Inner Wisdom. As with any journey, there are many ways to get to where we are going. In this journey, there are many tools available to guide us on the journey as well as people who will guide and mentor us.

I am going to talk about the ABCs of the Journey to inner Wisdom…Awareness, Beliefs, Curiosity NS XRATIVITY, Discernment and direction, the Enneagram AND ENERGY, Focus, Flow, and Flourish and Gratitude, generosity, and grace.

From time to time, I will invite guests to join the conversation and share their journeys and the tools and guides who journeyed with them. And you will hear about my own ongoing journey.

I hope you will join me on this adventure.

Episode 3

Awareness and Beliefs and perceptions

Welcome to episode 3 of a journey to inner wisdom. Thanks for listening...

In the last episode, I talked about awareness. Today I will talk about our beliefs and perceptions and at the same time, awareness will be underlying the conversation sometimes quietly and sometimes in a noisy kind of way. We will begin to see the connectedness that exists between everything!

Let’s start with the words themselves:

Belief - something that is accepted, considered to be true, or held as an opinion: something believed

Merriam-webster dictionary

Old English - confidence reposed in a person or thing late 12 century

Belief meant "trust in God," while faith meant "loyalty to a person based on promise or duty" (a sense preserved in keep one's faith, in good (or bad) faith, and in the common usage of faithful, faithless, which contain no notion of divinity). But faith, as cognate of Latin fides, took on the religious sense beginning in 14c. translations and belief had by 16c. become limited to "mental acceptance of something as true," from the religious use in the sense of "things held to be true as a matter of religious doctrine."

Perception - the way you think about or understand someone or something

Perceive c. 1300, perceiven, "become aware of, gain knowledge of," especially "to come to know by direct experience,

The meaning "intuitive or direct recognition of some innate quality" is from 1827.

Per – by means of Cep (kap) – grasp

Percept - an impression of an object obtained by use of the senses 1864 first used

Eckart Tolle

The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but thought about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral. It is as it is.

My perceptions create my belief system. I will call my belief system several different things today… private logic, unconscious beliefs, mistaken logic. My perception of what is happening in the world around me is a continuation of my imagination and my memories as well as the many ways that I am aware of my world. From this combination, I have created a belief system that tints everything I experience in my world. My perception leads me to certain conclusions about myself, the world, people relationships, work, love, sex, and money…everything. It is like wearing rose-colored glasses, everything is tinted. The rose color is created by our own unique belief system which can keep us trapped and unable to move forward.

Here is an explanation of private logic from Adlerian theory. “Private logic is another one of Adler's major constructs. Private logic provides a life pattern that begins in childhood and provides a compass by which to live. Because we are part of the larger social system and must learn to interact with that system, we develop our own set of rules to help us overcome our feelings of inferiority and achieve our goals. Private logic is unique to each person and sometimes is not logical. The goal in Adlerian therapy is to understand a person's private logic to help the person better understand where his beliefs get in the way of daily function, to lessen the faulty thinking of private logic, and to help people change its framework to see things in a more healthy way. Private logic is unique and feelings of superiority or fear of inferiority are meaningful only to the individual.”

(Seligman & Reichenberg, 2014).

I create my reality from my perception. That perception is a culmination of my early memories, my family of origin, the conclusions I came to as a child, and the messages I heard every day in my family. And the evidence I have gathered to support this perception that I hold as my truth. I have also gathered a tribe that supports my perspective. We are usually not aware of what our private belief system is. We created it as children and it is like the operating system on a computer…it is there but we don’t see it, we just use it.

How did we create this belief system? Well, as children we are pretty smart, we observe and inspect our little world and we figure out how to get our basic needs met, get attention, get quiet time…whatever it is we need. If you have been around small kids, you can figure out what they are up to most of the time. And in the process, we watch and observe our little world. We pick up the beliefs of our caretakers…parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, nanny, daycare workers…those we spend the most time with. Then from this unconscious belief system we attempt to get our needs met. Here is the rub…we keep this belief system into adulthood…and the belief system was formed by a child with limited experience in a limited world! So, for many people, their private logic works. When it doesn’t it is like finding yourself in Paris but you have a map of London. Where am I?

Let me tell you about my life and an example of one aspect of my private logic that I have unearthed over the years. I grew up as the oldest of 5 children on a farm. My dad was first generation Ukrainian-Russian and there was a general suspicion of other people in our family, which came from my babka as my dad was a kind, happy and friendly guy. My grandmother couldn’t read or write English so she was naturally wary because she could not understand all that was happening. She spoke some English but was certainly not fluent. The distrust was passed on. As a child, this atmosphere was integrated into my belief system. We shared a house with my babka until I was 8. I spent a lot of time with her. I was a favorite and I knew I was spoiled when I was with her.

As a young adult, I remember becoming aware that I found cashiers and salesclerks a bit cranky… (I had part-time jobs as both when I was in school and I was not cranky!). One day I became aware – actually after doing some pretty intense therapy and self-development work, that if I changed my perspective perhaps the salesclerks and cashiers would be different, and I might have a different experience when shopping. So, I experimented and over time, I did realize it was all about how I was showing up at the store and how I was at the checkout! Suddenly, I realized that an old belief had tinted the way I saw the world. And I get it, sometimes people have a bad day…I will give them that.

Only by entering into ...