In your meditation, inner work or spiritual practice, you may have heard:

• You have to believe the process is going to work
• You have to believe you will heal
• Your belief will create the reality
• Fear and it will appear

I think it is safe to say that belief is powerful, and that it plays a huge role in how we experience reality.

However, this ‘you must believe it will work’ can create a LOT of pressure.

First of all, feeling stress about what you believe or don’t believe is not going to help the process. It’s not going to facilitate emotional healing, getting into a more relaxed and open state, or pretty much anything you are trying to accomplish here.

The truth is, you can’t MAKE yourself believe something – certainly not instantly. What if you don’t believe it? Are you destined to fail?

It’s a bit of a harsh assessment.

Is it actually true?

Rather than looking at this hypothetically, take a moment to examine your own life.

Have you deeply feared things that never happened?

Have you ever been in a stressful situation, where half the time or more, you felt sure this was the end of the world? That it wasn’t going to work out? Then eventually, it resolved in whatever way it did and became a part of your past?

Have you been extremely skeptical of a process that ended up working well anyway?

Have you been convinced that a health situation was going to spiral downward or seemingly was not going to get better, and then it did? Even if you didn’t have that positive mental attitude, or do everything correctly?

Also, have you ever met someone who was completely convinced about something – they seemed to believe it with all their heart, and it absolutely did not go the way they expected?

Allow yourself to relax in the evidence that life is not SO black and white, that you absolutely have to believe in yourself and the process in order for things to work out. Reality is not that harsh.

You can work on your beliefs, and that’s great, but making it an all-or-nothing stress filled game is not super helpful.

Fear and Doubt are Natural

Every human being experiences fear and doubt in their process.

Maybe a few enlightened masters or rare souls could say “I never once doubted what was happening,” but even then, it would be hard to assess, and pointless to compare.

I suggest you just allow the fear and doubt to be the natural feelings they are.

They can be worked with.

You can provide support to them, listen to them, question them, propose ways to make them feel more safe or open. If this is not accessible, you can work with someone who can provide space for this.

It is not going to help to say “well I don’t believe it, so now it’s definitely not going to work.”

You can’t prove this. It accomplishes nothing except giving the mind a very convenient place to catastrophize, or slip into total apathy.

Collect evidence.

I propose relaxing this idea of believing or not believing anything right now.

What you can do, is collect evidence for yourself.

Take a process such as EFT, Inner Reconciliation or anything else that gives you something you can follow. You can see several different processes on different topics at my YouTube channel.

See if it makes any positive shift, even slight, in a way you can directly experience. You may need to dedicate some time to it in order to see that, but you’ll have an intuitive sense pretty early if there is some value for you.

Allow little pieces of evidence to come in.

If I feel a little better, maybe I can feel even better than that.

Maybe there is something to this. Maybe shifting my emotional and energy state will affect my results.

Maybe these changes can affect the body. Maybe healing is possible.

You’re OK

It’s ok to doubt and feel fear. This is natural.

Be kind to yourself.

Work with the natural flow.

You’re OK even when you believe you aren’t.

Work on your beliefs with curiosity and self-compassion and see what it brings you. Just don’t assume that you are doomed if you ‘don’t believe it.’

All the best!