I just returned from spending a wonderful week with my 8 month old granddaughter, Bella.  She is pure joy and a reminder of how we all came into this life on the leading edge of creation!

What a delight to observe how every experience is fresh and exciting for her!  She has no pre-conceived notions of how to react to her environment.  The urge to experience more, be more and expand is so palpable within her.  She has intense focus on what she wants, and lets nothing stand in her way.  She is wanting to walk at this point, and every day she will pull herself up and extend her little hands to any big person in her vicinity to help her practice.  Even the occasional fall and bump doesn’t slow her down for long.  Her wise parents don’t fret over the falls, but cheer on her efforts instead, so they are not getting in the way of her inner knowing that she can do this and she is safe.

She loves music and dances with it and smiles and laughs.  She knows how to deliberately cause the adults in her world to laugh and is quite a ham! It is impossible to feel anything but good around her!  Books, colors, textures, tastes, people, sounds—all of it a wonderful expansion  into which she delightedly moves.  She is developing preferences and thoroughly enjoying the process of exploring this physical life.  She is, in a word, free.  And only when we feel free can we feel joy.

  This is how life is meant to be.  This urge to move joyfully forward into our experience is the way it was planned for us.

So how do we loose this joyous freedom, which is our birthright? 

As we grow and the mind continues to develop it begins to look for patterns.  We associate events that are isolated experiences with other ideas that may not really belong together.  These are errors in perception.  Children are in a very receptive brain wave state and can make some very powerful decisions as they strive to understand their world, and a comment from another person can cause them to form beliefs that they operate from for the rest of their lives.

For example, a child may express an opinion for which she is chastised by someone she loves.  The belief that gets “downloaded” into the subconscious is that if you stand up for yourself, or express your opinion you risk the loss of love. That person may then never feel able to express an opinion with confidence or to stand up for what she believes in.

Cellular biologist Bruce Lipton noted in his book, “Spontaneous Evolution,”  that young children confronted with a new situation look at their parents’ faces to see how they are reacting.  They learn how to perceive from the people they trust.  He gives the example of a child seeing a snake in the yard.  One child’s mother screams, “Snake!!” and grabs him up, while another child’s mother may recognize the snake as a harmless garter snake and calmly point out the pretty colors and interesting behavior.  These two children grow up with very different perceptions of snakes.  Children pick up many messages from teachers, religious leaders, friends and society.  All of these shape the belief systems they hold as they come into adulthood.

So this leads us to the question of what to do about these old programs that are not serving us.  The subconscious mind is not out to get us.  It is simply operating out of perceptions that were downloaded into it.  It is really working to protect the person in the only way it knows.  So, just as you would not berate a computer program for not doing what you want and then expect it change, berating yourself for having thoughts or beliefs that don’t work for you in your life right now will not do anything to improve your situation.  In fact, it leads you into a negative downward spiral that only causes you to attract more of what you don’t want.

There are many ways of changing belief patterns.  Marci Shimoff, in her book, “Happy for No Reason,” suggests that if you are plagued by a persistent negative thought, lean into an equally true positive thought about the same situation.  She further states that, “When you are happy for no reason you bring happiness to you outer experiences rather than try to extract happiness from them.”  This is similar to a process Abraham-Hicks recommends called “Book of Positive Aspects” where you make lists of the positive aspects of a situation.  What can you find to really love about it? As you focus more on the things you appreciate, you gradually shift your emotional state to a higher vibration and your outer world responds accordingly.  As you focus on appreciating everything in your life since everything adds to your expansion, you find more things to appreciate.

For really persistent beliefs, there are other methods, such as EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) and Psych-K which have created profound and rapid shifts in belief for people.   It has also been discovered that our facial expressions actually affect our stress hormone secretion and our mood.  So–laughter really is the best medicine!  Find the humor in a situation, or just zone out into a good comedy.

I think again about how my granddaughter loves to laugh and make other people laugh.  This is how it’s supposed to be.  As we stop taking ourselves so seriously and understand that the basis of our lives is freedom and the purpose is joy, we come into alignment with who we really are.  And then our outer circumstances must change.  Jesus said to be as the little children.  I believe this is what he meant.