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INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM EASTWOOD
HIGH ACHIEVEMENT
We've all heard incredible stories like that of a mother who picked a car up off a child, or firewalkers walking across hot coals without getting burned.
In each of these examples two things happened in the person's mind:
- Beliefs that indicate such results are impossible were suspended.
- For whatever reason, the person knew—had the quality of pure knowing—in the result intended.
It is not just extraordinary times, but also every day times that the power of beliefs can achieve extraordinary results.
There are literally thousands of beliefs you hold that affect your ability to achieve goals. You have a belief about everything; every event, private and public; every opportunity, and every situation possible in your life. This incredibly complex network of beliefs is your working material which you use to determine what you can or cannot achieve in life. Our beliefs either block or release our abilities, and determine what we can or cannot create in life.
Our beliefs pertaining to a situation—how we perceive a situation—affects how we will react to it and go through it. For example: if we perceive an assignment as being something difficult or beyond us, we are more likely to use avoidance tactics, feel intimidated, or struggle unwillingly through what we perceive and thus experience as difficult. Or, we can bring amazing power and talent to bear on the task, and perform in an incredible manner no one would have imagined possible.
Our beliefs about everyday projects, people and issues stem from deeper beliefs we hold, which are sometimes hidden. These deeper beliefs regulate our attitudes, abilities and overall performance in life. These are core beliefs. They, more than anything else, will determine if we will succeed or fail in life, if we will enjoy life or struggle, or if we will be powerful and amazing or just mundane. Core beliefs create the patterns in our lives which repeat endlessly until we change the core belief and the psychological and physical habits they have generated.
EASTWOOD: “Repeating patterns of negative events in your life are a manifestation of energy patterns within you that arise from beliefs you hold. If you attract disasters, addictions, abusive people, victimization, or whatever, then you have negative beliefs. These beliefs may not be obvious to you, they may be invisible. If you had thought positive long and hard enough to change the belief(s) responsible for the pattern, your life would have already changed for the better. The problem, therefore, is that the belief(s) responsible are still held consciously and/or unconsciously. It could be a strong or primary belief—what I call a core belief.”
CLIENT: “What is a core belief?”
EASTWOOD: “It is a strong conviction around which you organize your belief system, perception and life. It will generate thinking patterns, feelings and events congruent with it regardless of your efforts to change thinking or events through willpower alone.”
CLIENT: “I confess, too, that I can't always stay positive. Oftentimes I'll end up arguing with myself that my positive thoughts won't make enough of a difference, or I'll end up sliding back into an endless stream of negative thoughts no matter how hard I try to stay positive. Sometimes the negativity seems worse only because I tried to be positive, as if some part of me is punishing me for it. My problems then seem to be all I can think about.”
EASTWOOD: “I sympathize with you, but we all have strengths and weaknesses, and our spirits didn't bring us here with a plan to fail. The plan your soul made for you was to succeed. Your soul knows you can succeed at whatever challenge you choose in order to develop, and so do I. My advice is to read one of my articles on how to change negative thinking patterns. You must learn how to change a negative focus by substitution, and make your use of this technique an automatic habit pattern. Focus on what is working in your life, or on what you are naturally good at. We all have virtues.”
CLIENT: “I'm good with people and I like animals.”
EASTWOOD: “Good. Start with that and make a list. When you lapse into a negative state of mind, get your list out and review it. Focus on your virtues, achievements and best memories. Grow them like you would a garden. Water and nurture the positive, and pull out negatives like you would weeds. Secondly, I want you to develop your own affirmations to counteract and neutralize your negative patterns. Do you have reoccurring negative patterns?”
CLIENT: “People are always taking advantage of me only because I'm a nice guy; and I have a lot of bad luck. At the last minute something always comes along, or I do something stupid, that ends up sabotaging whatever I have accomplished.”
EASTWOOD: “The affirmation ‘People are good to me, and helpful and respectful to me under all circumstances,' will work for you. But you must believe it will and say it with conviction and confidence. Affirmations along the lines of, “I am good enough to succeed, and I am worthy of full success,' will also help you. Invent others and say them all often. Use one or two, fifty times a day for about two weeks, then pick two more and repeat the process.”
CLIENT: “But what does that do?”
EASTWOOD: “An invisible core belief or two are likely generating your problems. The affirmations neutralize and eventually override the energy pattern that grew out of and reinforces the invisible beliefs.”
CLIENT: “What's an invisible core belief?”
EASTWOOD: “It's a strong belief about yourself or life that's grown in your conscious or subconscious mind. To you it may seem like a fact that's too obvious to question—that's why it's invisible—you think of it being a fact rather than a belief. Such a conviction is very powerful. It is energy that generates or attracts your disasters that always seem to happen to you when you are on the verge of an important achievement. Those disasters then reinforce the casual core belief, and also produce new subsidiary beliefs that act as supports. As you live your life, belief systems always grow one way or another. Thorns will propagate themselves just as easily as tulips, and so it is with the mind. If you've been cultivating negative beliefs all your life, by old age you'll be in trouble.”
CLIENT: “I get the impression that beliefs are very important.”
EASTWOOD: “Yes, because your life is like a movie you are writing, producing and acting in, and your beliefs and thoughts create the content. If you go to a movie theater there's three components producing the movie: a light bulb, film in the projector, and the movie screen. The process of creating your life, like the movie, has three vital components. Events in your life are captured not on a flat screen but by timespace. The energy that produces them comes from the soul, not a light bulb. The events you experience are determined not by film, but by your beliefs, thoughts and emotions. To show a different movie in a movie theater you change the film. To change your life you change your beliefs, thoughts and emotions. It's that simple. This is because your life is a projection of your soul's energy patterned by your subjective activity and formed into events and objects. Events and objects are not really solid, they are composed of consciousness. Life is like a dream, and you are producing it with your thoughts. Change your beliefs and you change your reality.”
Negative core beliefs, doubts, conflicting beliefs, negative attitudes and/or limiting concepts about the self and the self's abilities, prevent us from contributing and playing the role we are capable of, and prevent the actualization of dreams.
On the brighter side, unimpeded, powerful constructive beliefs can allow us to achieve anything and create our dream.
CHANGING NEGATIVE BELIEFS
The good news is: beliefs are never stationary; they grow one way or another. Emotions and thoughts either reinforce or weaken them. There are many ways we can consciously and deliberately change our beliefs.
We can simply release negative beliefs, or we can transfer our attention to the positive and let them wither from lack of attention, or dissolve them in the light of newfound awareness.
Mindfulness—being increasingly aware of your thinking, mental associations, activities, values and judgments—will often clear the mind of inaccurate or negative beliefs. This is because false beliefs are like shadows in the mind: shine the light of conscious understanding on them and they will dissolve.