Unlearning – The Way to Dig Out a Lifetime of Opposing Beliefs
People will sum you up in a heartbeat. They will look at your physical appearance and make judgments. They’ll ask what your value is by questioning, “So, what do you do for a living?” They’ll check out what car you drive or the house you live in. From our current social training and conditioning this all makes a big impression on who you are and what you’re worth.
For some reason (probably because my Mom was a hippie, thank you Mom!), I didn’t fully get the depth of this social conditioning until my husband and I did a massive remodel of our home and we started having our daughter’s friends come over. Seeing how they and their parents would react to the girls and I before they saw our home, compared to afterwards, was eye opening and made me feel really uncomfortable. I am a very down to earth type of person and our home basically became a mini-mansion, by far the largest house in our lovely middle class neighborhood. My husband relished in it. You could see he loved the oohs and ahhs of people’s reactions and this made him feel a sense of pride and greater self-worth. He was more than comfortable in their reaction, whereas for me, I wanted to crawl under a rock. I was so triggered that I would purposely have people meet me outside of my home so I didn’t have to deal with the shift in opinions that would occur when they came over. That shift, more often than not, was people disempowering themselves, making themselves less than and treating me like I was more than, all because of a monetary object. It sucked. The opposite would also happen when I’d have people who are affluent come over and their perception of me changed into having more value and therefore shifting me into their state of worth which they perceived to be higher.
This kind of judgment is never fun for anyone, however I was in full reaction and I knew there was internal stuff to heal here. I realized I had deeply confused thoughts as well as conflicting and sometimes opposing beliefs on what my lifestyle said about me as a person. I needed to dig deep and see why I was so uncomfortable. Here is a glimpse into what I found.
First and foremost, I was scared that I would step into the energy of entitlement. The type where you are more than comfortable with people waiting on you and serving you. The type where you have irrational expectations, often bordering on disrespect, for those coming to do work on your home. The type where you think you’re more important because you’re the customer and where you look down on service workers like maids, gardeners, handymen, trash collectors, etc. I realized how big this was for me when I had phrases come up in my head like, “don’t wanna be no uppity bitch”. I had to dig really deep to remember where that came from!
Those words came from a childhood memory of an inner city elementary school where my sister and I were two out of a handful of white people. It was there where my subconscious picked up programming about people who had money, people who were not going to our school. I assimilated from being at that school this deeply ingrained feeling of being trapped by the system. I felt that piece that said, “no matter how hard you try, you’ll always be two steps behind, you’ll never get out of this way of life”. Yes, this school taught me lack, and because it was easier to make people who weren’t in this situation the bad guys, and because I wanted to be accepted so badly by the other kids, I picked up these belief systems for myself as well. I was surprised to find all this in me. The reason this was so deeply hidden within was because we didn’t stay at that school long (we didn’t stay at any place for more than a few months), and so those beliefs went into a deeper level subconscious programming, a deep storage if you will. I didn’t remember any of it until this stuff started coming up, and boy did I need to dig for it.
My programming around affluent people was easier to find for myself as the experiences happened as a young adult while working in the sales and marketing department for an upscale hotel. Everyone working there learned to bend over backwards to make the customer happy and I saw first hand how entitled wealthy people could be. Ironically, even though we weren’t paid well, we would win high end, fancy rewards, like dinner and drinks on a yacht, based off of our sales performance. Unbelievably, in this crazy reality I could barely pay my rent at times.
My childhood conditioning around how to treat people came from my Dad, who taught us to treat others the way we wanted to be treated. I believe this is true service from the heart. However, his own need to be recognized programmed into my subconscious that being around upper class people was something to aim for as well.
My sales job taught me service from a state of fear regarding losing a customer or my job and therefore often being disrespected and disempowered by wealthy people who often had entitlement issues, all the while being rewarded with affluent things. My subconscious elementary inner city programming was, avoid wealthy people at all costs, they are the enemy. And then there was Dad’s philosophy, treat everyone the same, yet wouldn’t it be really great if you became upper class too. These were three opposing belief systems lying dormant inside my subconscious. And now I was finding myself living in a mini-mansion being perceived as wealthy and even worse, more worthy.. Somehow I had become part of the “uppity bitch club” and was completely disassociated from myself because I had these opposing beliefs running. No wonder I wanted to crawl under a rock!
To clear all of these unhealthy programs and opposing belief systems out of my cellular memory, I went into deep practices of timeline healing to bring things up and into awareness. The above points of reference show you some of that process. Then I did a massive wash out in my way of thinking to create a clean slate to paint a new picture upon.
How can you do this for yourself? Find something in your life that isn’t working for you and ask yourself, “When was this originally created for/by me? Is this really what I believe and how I want to move in my life?” Then, all you have to do is, close your eyes, sit centered and still, and then state to yourself, “Show me what situation occurred that gave me this perception and changed it into a belief; a program that I now think is real.” Allow your mind’s eye to move back in time like you are watching a movie and see what is happening to you and how you are reacting. From that point you can step into that event as an empowered adult, the person you are now, and correct the situation, the belief, from a space of loving kindness for all the beings involved. This wipes the slate clean so that you can then create a reality of acceptance that is beautiful.
It is my heartfelt wish that this serves you to go deep, to heal, to love yourself and to accept yourself fully. You are so worth it!
