7 Spiritual Beliefs You Are Better Off Without
Sometimes we get programmed with spiritual beliefs that do us more harm than good. Here are some that are worth getting rid of.
Spiritual Beliefs You Might Do Without
When I was a little girl, my big brother Billy taught me a lot about life. His teaching was quite accidental, really a side effect of his bad-boy style of life. Billy was wise and charismatic and became addicted to drugs in his teens. I adored my big brother but was always afraid something terrible was going to happen to him. To distance myself from my anxiety, I began practicing the art of detachment. I was in fourth grade.
Many years later, Billy became my teacher again, this time on purpose. Soon after he died, to my stunned amazement, Billy began talking to me from his new dimension. He shared with me the secrets of the cosmos, which I in turn share in my book, The Afterlife of Billy Fingers: How My Bad-Boy Brother Proved To Me There’s Life After Death.
One of the things Billy talked with me about is beliefs. He said…
“Beliefs are big on earth. People collect them. Some of these beliefs are helpful but others just keep you running around trying to follow rules that others have laid down. They don’t have a lot of personal meaning. It’s a good idea to sort through your beliefs now and then and throw out the ones that don’t serve you.”
Here are some spiritual beliefs Billy says you might be better off without.
7 Spiritual Beliefs You Are Better Off Without
Spiritual Beliefs 1. THOUGHTS BECOME THINGS
Thoughts do not necessarily become things. When you meditate, you watch as all kinds of thoughts drift across your mind. If they magically became things, your meditation room would be jammed with stuff in a couple of hours. Thoughts can make you feel happy or sad. Thoughts can be interesting and insightful or just garbage in and garbage out. Thoughts are fluid. All of us have all kinds of thoughts and many of them never stay very long or amount to anything. Thoughts don’t automatically become things. That usually takes effort on your part.
Spiritual Beliefs 2. IT MUST BE MY KARMA
If life is difficult at a particular moment and there is no obvious reason why, you start to wonder if you did something wrong in a past life and you’re paying for it now. Our linear minds try to make sense of the Universe and satisfy our desire for fairness. Is it really easier to believe you’re being punished for some past transgression than to admit that you just don’t understand why this stuff is happening to you? Pain is part of the human experience, as natural as breath, or eyesight, or blood moving through your veins. Sure there’s pain in life but not necessarily because you’ve done something to deserve it, in this life or the last.
Spiritual Beliefs 3. MY PROBLEMS ARE THE RESULT OF MY NEGATIVE THINKING
A common “New Age” belief is that if you are ill, having a hard time with your love life, don’t have a love life, can’t make ends meet, or whatever, you must have somehow created the situation with your hidden, inner negativity. Isn’t it childish to believe that you control all the forces and all the people in the Universe? All kinds of situations we’ve never imagined pop up in our personal worlds. Isn’t it the ego that believes being spiritually advanced means you are in complete control of reality? Did starving children bring about their plight because of their negativity? This kind of thinking encourages a lack of compassion for others and ourselves.
Spiritual Beliefs 4. I AM NOT SPIRITUAL IF I FEEL ANGRY, ENVIOUS OR AFRAID
As Earth moves around the Sun, there’s nothing but shadow for a good part of the time. The mystery of life on earth cannot exist without the shadow element. You cannot have the sea without storms, the earth without quakes, the wind without tornados. When the light rises, the darkness comes with it. Where there is light, there is shadow. The earth experience features all kinds of emotions; some are lighter, some darker, and that’s okay. That’s as it should be. Don’t overlook the richness contained in your darker emotions. Let the moments fill you, the ones you judge as “bad” as well as “good”.
Spiritual Beliefs 5. I CAN DETERMINE A PERSON’S SPIRITUAL LEVEL BY THEIR LIFE CIRCUMSTANCES
You can never judge the spiritual value of anyone’s life or measure their state of grace by the way things appear to be on the surface. Figuring out who is happier, richer, better looking, or more together is just a human way of trying to measure the immeasurable. This measuring is usually just an excuse to do some comparison-shopping. We occupy our minds with whose life, job, relationship, you name it, is better or worse than ours. Whether you come out with more or with less, the comparison game is a big lie because you can never know the truth about someone else’s experience. You can try to put yourself in their shoes but it will never be the real thing, the true thing, the soul thing.
Spiritual Beliefs 6. I NEED TO SOLVE MY PROBLEMS BEFORE I CAN BE HAPPY
People spend lots of time on things that make them unhappy, focus too much on their problems. This is not a recipe for happiness. Pleasure increases your joy. To cultivate pleasure try paying more attention to what you like. These don’t have to be big things. Savor the taste of your morning coffee, listen to music, spend time looking at the night sky. Paying attention to what you like is a spiritual practice that will make you happier pretty quickly. Your world is probably filled with things that give you pleasure; you just haven’t been paying enough attention. When you are happier, you are more creative and relaxed about your problems. You begin to feel that yesterday may have been difficult, but tomorrow could be better. When you have more pleasure, you understand that mistakes are okay. There’s always another chance to try something different.
Spiritual Beliefs 7. I NEED TO FIND MY LIFE’S TRUE PURPOSE
Okay, sometimes. And sometimes you are blessed to experience the “purposeless purpose” of creation; a place where the noise and static of the world are gone and you connect with the innocence and awe at the heart of life itself. The everyday becomes the miraculous; the ordinary, extraordinary. You feel the miracle of creation in the trees, the flowers, the sky and the beating heart that gives you life. You awaken to the grandeur of waking up or falling asleep or taking a breath or laughing, crying, singing, dancing and making love. These moments carry the fleeting glory, the purposeless purpose of creation, and take you inside the essence of being alive.
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You will also enjoy Annie Kagan: Insights of the Afterlife and 9 Things You Realize After You Die
About the Author
When she was sixteen, Annie Kagan was signed by a producer from Columbia Records. After 10 years of performing her songs in New York City clubs, Annie returned to college and became a chiropractor with a private practice in Manhattan. When her brother Billy died unexpectedly and began speaking to her from the afterlife, her future took a surprising turn. She recorded her conversations with Billy from the other side and published them in her debut book The Afterlife of Billy Fingers. afterlifeofbillyfingers.com
When she was sixteen, Annie Kagan was signed by a producer from Columbia Records. After 10 years of performing her songs in New York City clubs, Annie returned to college and became a chiropractor with a private practice in Manhattan. Following a chance meeting with a spiritual teacher from the East, she began an intense meditation practice that eventually led her to leave her career as a doctor and her hectic city life in search of serenity. She moved to a small house by the bay on the tip of Long Island and returned to songwriting, collaborating with Grammy and Emmy award-winning producer Brian Keane. When her brother Billy died unexpectedly and began speaking to her from the afterlife, her future took a surprising turn. She recorded her conversations with Billy from the other side and published them in her debut book The Afterlife of Billy Fingers.
Annie your sound enlightenment resonates with me. I for one, find it more narrow minded then open minded to be questioned and judged when something goes wrong in my life that I had control over it. Complete control? That is impossible. I think everything you say here is accurate and correct and life is what it is, we are not meant to figure it all out while we are here. We can just be our best, do what feels in alignment with our heart and be kind to all living creatures. Thank you and to Billy for the insight! ??
You and Billy continue to affect my point of view = life changing
All this information has made an impact on me. I feel blessed to have across your page, feel so enlightened right now and free on some counts that I have been carrying all my life………….. Thanks Annie
There’s also, “My problems do not serve me so I simply let go and move on, cut them out and let the love and light in… Distancing myself from my problems and focussing on abundance and other things will make my problems go away… If all else fails I can just start anew somewhere else, far away I know that’s possible as I have done it 6 times in the last 10 years so that’s no problem in fact, what problems could I possibly have anyway.. ?! It’s all positively positive starting again today!!”
Every time I begin to experience myself attached to a belief, my inner red flag is raised, and I realize that it’s time to let go of/release said belief, and allow myself to freely experience life as it is, not as I want it to be.nIt’s living life on its terms, not mine. This stance even extends to life’s questions. I have followed the philosopher Rilke’s urgings, rather than to seek after answers, LIVE into the answer, i.e., allowing myself to experience the answer, just by freely living my life. This awareness, has helped me to live a more easeful, in the flow of life, experience, rather than pushing against life, in the name of vainly seeking after answers.
I really needed to read this article. Heartfelt thanks Annie Kagan.
Here is another belief we need to discard: God is in charge; everything happens for a reason. That is not true and most people will realize that there are many times in everyone’s life where God was not in charge, and times when things happened for no reason at all, like illness. This belief originated in the Old Testament where the early Hebrew people believed that God punished them for not living up to the Law. However, today’s Jewish theologians no longer believe it. Read Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People for more on this.