Spring Cleaning Your Limiting Beliefs And Conditioning

We all have limiting beliefs that can hold us back, keep us stuck, or maybe even repeat throughout our day, and that we may be passing on to future generations.

How do we spring clean those limiting beliefs?

Join me in this talk on conditioning limiting beliefs, letting go, and finding the adventure in the entire process.

I go over the range of systems, people, and places that can condition us with limiting beliefs, to give you a sense of the spectrum, to open the book for you in order to turn the pages and find your own conditioning, then I talk about ways to begin to work with those beliefs.

Enjoy!

LOVE.
Jocelyn b.

Transcript

Welcome,

I'm Jocelyn.

This is a topic I talk about a lot in live events here on Insight Timer,

Our limiting beliefs and where they come from.

And as I'm recording this,

We are in the throes of spring,

And spring cleaning is something that a lot of people are talking about.

And there's lots of ways to spring clean,

From your environment,

The place you're in,

Your closet,

Your heart,

Your mind,

Your energy.

And I think about how do we spring clean,

Right?

How do we get rid of the clutter?

Or how do we begin to release those things?

And whenever I think about it,

And especially in terms of limiting beliefs,

I come back to how can we spring clean if we don't know what our limiting beliefs are,

Or any bit about their origin?

And there's a part of me that says,

Well,

Sometimes we don't need to know the origin.

Sometimes we can just have the intention and we can clear it.

We can spring clean it.

And I think that's true sometimes.

I think there are things in our lives,

Belief systems in our lives,

That we don't even need to know the origin,

Where they came from.

We just need to get to that place and say,

No,

I'm not doing it anymore.

Clear,

Get out,

Right?

And then there are other beliefs that are more entangled,

More ensnared within us.

And so much so that we don't even know when they pop up and they can take control of our decisions or our nervous system.

So on this topic of spring cleaning,

Knowing what you want to spring clean,

And sometimes for those trickier limiting belief patterns or things that stop us,

It helps to know the origins,

To get a sense of all the places it's knotted within the thread of our life.

And in order to understand some of that,

Some of the ways the weeds have grown,

Right?

It can really help to focus on how you have been conditioned.

And what does that mean,

How you have been conditioned?

And before I even get into that,

I want to say,

All of us have conditioning.

All of us.

There's not one of us that doesn't have conditioning.

Because conditioning can be large,

It can be systemic,

It can be within huge foundations of our society,

But it can also be within the family,

Within the community,

Can be handed down through generations and not even considered conditioning as it's handed down.

It can be considered,

Oh,

Well,

That's just them helping me,

Right?

So talking about spring cleaning,

What is conditioning?

How do you notice it?

How do you find it?

How do you research it in your life?

How do you get curious with it?

Conditioning is where we've been taught or led to believe or patterns in our life that have strengthened throughout time to create certain kinds of thinking or beliefs,

Right?

How do we get to the bottom of it?

So I'm going to start in this talk just talking about different ways that we are conditioned from the big ways to the small ways.

And as I do this,

I invite you to open up your heart and just listen and notice when something hits a string or hits a frequency that you're like,

Wow,

That could be,

Or maybe I connect with that,

I resonate with that,

Because not everything I say is going to resonate with you.

And I am by far not going to touch on all of the different ways that we can be conditioned,

But just to give you an example of the spectrum of conditioning.

So I'll start with some really large ways that we get conditioned.

Some of the larger ways that we can be conditioned is through the school system,

Right?

We're taught about rules,

What's right,

What's wrong,

What's good,

What's bad.

We're taught in the school systems to raise your hand when you have to go to the bathroom,

And then someone else gets to tell you if you can go or not,

Right?

That's a huge amount of conditioning when it comes to trusting your body and your body's needs and fulfilling them.

I like to take art classes as an example,

Usually,

Because I am a creative artist in many different ways,

Creative expressionist.

And when I look at what schools do to children as young as pre-K and K,

When it comes to art,

We're taught to color in the lines,

That a snowman is made with three cotton balls,

And a turkey's made with a handprint,

Right?

And when we skew from that in different directions,

And maybe sometimes I've seen children skew really far from that in beautiful and amazing ways,

A teacher might come back and fix it for them,

Right?

What kind of conditioning does that create?

Well,

It tells us there's a right and wrong in our expression.

And when we try to break from that mold in creativity,

That it can be turned around on us.

So there's lots of ways the school system can condition you.

Those are just very small ways,

But you can think about what kind of beliefs,

Limiting beliefs,

Did you get from your public school,

Private school education?

The medical system,

Western medicine in particular,

I always hear stories of people who go to their doctors,

And especially these days where a doctor's appointment is much different than it was years ago when I was growing up,

Where you're in and out,

Right?

And you go and you know something about your body,

You feel something wrong,

Or you feel a side effect from something you've been given,

Right?

And going in and telling the doctor,

And then being dismissed as if your feelings about your own body are not correct.

That can lead to all kinds of limited beliefs,

And your relationship to your body,

Where people are discouraged to do their own research in any medical capacity.

So that's another,

I'm just giving small examples,

But that's another larger system that we're conditioned into.

The government is a huge conditioning machine.

We're conditioned to have very strict rules about what is and isn't for us.

And I'm not saying that they're wrong or they're right,

But I am saying that we as human beings are all unique and individual.

And when you look at something like government,

Where there are always two sides to every story,

We begin to maybe not trust ourselves.

Religion can be a huge conditioning,

And that's not to say it's good or bad.

But I know for me,

I grew up with a grandmother who was very religious and Catholic,

And anytime I said something that went against her belief and her religious belief,

Or wore something that was against her belief or her religious belief,

She would say,

Shame on you.

And she would point her finger,

I don't know if anyone else knows what I'm talking about,

But she would point her finger at me,

And then her other finger would brush the shame off onto me.

There's a lot of shame,

Guilt,

Blame,

Resentment that comes from that world of religion.

And I know my grandmother was not looking to condition me to have limiting beliefs.

She was just trying to pass on what she felt was good for me.

In this way,

Religion can be a major system of conditioning.

So those are some larger places where you can gain and gather conditioning in your life.

There's more,

I'm just going over a few for you.

Just to get an idea of the spectrum,

You can be conditioned by your family,

By your family,

Made fun of,

Called names,

Told,

Don't cry,

Right?

And here's another big one,

There's a lot of conditioning between men and women.

So I would say,

At least growing up in the 90s for myself,

Boys don't cry,

Right?

Or girls help out around the house.

That can be conditioning,

But you can be conditioned by your family,

By things your parents said to you,

By things your aunts and uncles or grandparents said to you.

I always go back to,

My father used to say to me,

And not out of a mean way,

But the words,

What's wrong with you?

And hearing that all my life,

It always made me question,

Ooh,

Am I doing something bad?

Am I abnormal?

Am I not right?

Because wrong and right.

So what are the phrases that were uttered to you when you were a child?

Even if they were said,

Like,

I want to know what's wrong with you,

What's wrong with you,

Right?

Like,

Just tell me what's going on.

Even if they were said in a way that was meaningful,

Those words can hold other meaning for the children,

Right?

And talking about parents,

You have conditioning that came down from grandparents and great grandparents and your parents' experiences and your great grandparents' experiences.

I think about the fact that my parents were not comfortable with sadness,

Right?

And so when I felt sadness,

They would try to turn it off,

Not because they were trying to hurt me,

But because that was what they learned.

That was their conditioning.

So it was very uncomfortable if I felt sadness.

Even so far as to when my parents died,

They died seven days apart in 2021,

And my dad was brought in to see my mom right before she died.

And he said,

I can be angry,

But I can't be sad.

Actually,

It was those words that clued me in to a huge piece of conditioning that I can't express sadness in front of others,

Right?

We can be conditioned from friends,

From school groups.

Social media is a huge conditioning vehicle.

We don't always see the truth of somebody's life on social media.

Or I like to say if you're a parent,

Right?

If you've been in a mom's group or a dad's group,

And you say something that's not average for that group,

You can easily be shut down.

And what does that say?

What kind of conditioning that makes you all of a sudden maybe second guess,

Well,

Maybe I'm not a good parent.

Maybe I don't know.

Maybe I can't trust my own instincts as a parent.

Maybe I'm wrong to question the norm or the narrative.

So these ways of conditioning from ancestral conditioning that's been brought down through the generations all the way up to these huge systems that we take part in,

They all can condition us.

And they're not all going to condition us the same.

Our experiences within that are different.

We are all unique and individual.

They still are places we spend a lot of time in that are not necessarily empowering our individual journey.

And we all have different sensitivities.

So when you look at the world of conditioning and how you have been conditioned,

And I'm going to say it again,

We are all conditioned.

We all have conditioning.

We all have been taught things that have been reiterated throughout our lives.

And so eventually we just take that on,

Right?

Eventually it just becomes so natural.

We tell ourselves the story,

You know,

Somebody says something,

We get hurt.

We have that emotion and then our mind makes the story up to make it make sense,

Right?

We all have that in just different forms,

In different ways,

In different scenarios.

And those conditionings can be limiting beliefs that have taken over,

That hold us back,

That make us question ourselves,

That keep us in lack,

Right?

So for spring cleaning,

Spring clean yourself,

Right?

Spring clean your mind and your heart.

Look at your conditioning.

Look at how you have been conditioned.

How have you been conditioned to believe certain things that maybe aren't true,

That your mind made the story up so that it was okay to make sense of it,

Right?

You don't have to get mad at the people that,

Or the systems that created that conditioning.

Instead,

We can be empowered to heal it.

We can be empowered to go on the adventure,

To find where these limiting beliefs came from and when we find them,

We let it go.

Without judgment,

You know,

My dad would say,

What's wrong with you?

He was a human with a story,

With his own experiences.

He did his best when it came to me.

I'm not going to hold him in judgment,

Even though for years I thought there's something wrong with me,

That I was different and not in a good way,

Right?

I'm not going to hold judgment and blame at him.

I'm going to be empowered because now I know and now I can take action,

Right?

So we have all of this conditioning that we can go on the adventure to find,

To excavate,

To look at,

To crystallize,

To let go of,

To not further that conditioning in your own family,

With your own neighbors.

And that's like the first step.

That's the first step.

If you want to spring clean some of those belief systems that you have that you no longer want,

Or if you're not in a place where you feel your life is a reflection of what you want it to be,

And you just need to start finding what those limiting beliefs are because you don't know quite yet,

You can follow the breadcrumbs of conditioning,

Right?

And then you can begin to look for the origin if you need it.

Once you find those beliefs,

I would encourage you to write about it,

To open up your heart,

Let it out,

Dance it out,

Embody it,

Write it,

Draw it,

Express it,

Breathe through it,

Clear it with breath.

Become aware of what it feels like in your body,

That limiting belief,

The conditioning soil that that belief grew in,

Right?

Feel what it feels like in your body so that you understand the echoes of it when it begins to take hold in your body when you're trying to do something,

And all of a sudden that belief comes up,

Right?

Get a sense of the sensations that happen.

Maybe you get a knot in your stomach,

Or maybe you have a memory that pops up a lot,

Or maybe there's a word that triggers it and you hear that word,

Or maybe you see something,

Or maybe you get an emotion that comes through or chills up your skin.

Get to know the sensations of that limiting belief,

That seed of limiting belief that's in that soil of conditioning so that when you feel those things and you become aware,

You can begin to say,

No,

Not today.

Breathe through it,

Clear it,

And move on.

And by doing that,

Each time you do that,

You write a new Akashic record,

Right?

You write yourself a new Akashic record,

A new entry in that diary,

And you build throughout the spring,

The summer,

The fall,

The winter,

You grow into a place where you no longer need to be aware of it because it's your new normal.

So maybe spring cleaning isn't so much just for a few weeks in the spring,

Maybe spring cleaning is an unwrapping,

An unraveling,

So that you can see the nuggets of truth behind your limiting beliefs.

You can just see them for what they are and work with them throughout the year.

So that's just my bit of information I wanted to share today about spring cleaning,

Limiting beliefs,

Conditioning.

There's a lot,

And I've only mentioned a few ways.

There are so many ways that we get conditioned,

But I just wanted to open it up for you,

Like open the book and allow you to turn your own pages,

Right?

Just as a recap,

Religion,

School systems,

Governments,

Social media,

Neighbors,

Community,

Friends,

Family,

There's so many more.

But just knowing that that's like the landscape that you're looking at,

The environment outside of yourself and those messages that come in,

Maybe those messages that come in repeatedly over and over and over again.

Look at those.

See if they have a power over you right now,

And if they do,

Unplug it,

Unplug it.

Realize the sensations behind it.

Realize how you feel when you get in there.

What are the things that you can notice so that you get a sense of when it's beginning,

And you can then begin to clear it.

And the more you do that,

The more you become free in your life from that conditioning,

From those limiting beliefs.

So thank you so much for coming along with me today.

I'm Jocelyn Bates.

If you don't follow me,

Please do.

I have a bunch of tracks on yoga nidras,

Guided meditations,

Visualizations,

Inspirations.

I have courses on automatic writing,

Creative writing,

EFT,

Which is also another wonderful way to work with your limiting beliefs once you find them.

Yeah,

Yeah,

And I run live events all week long,

Usually.

So hopefully maybe I'll see you there.

I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day.

Namaste,

My friends.

Reviews

Hi Jocelyn, this is my first encounter with you and I really enjoyed this talk. I have explored this Topic myself yet I really enjoyed some of the other perspectives around conditioning that you brought into it. Thank you for creating it.💞🤗💞