This tool invites participants to explore and reflect on the power of storytelling in shaping how we see others – and ourselves. Through playful and reflective activities, participants identify the stereotypes they carry, discover the personal stories hidden behind generalisations, and practice ways of relating beyond labels. Rooted in empathy and creative expression, the method encourages participants to rehumanise others by uncovering and sharing stories that foster connection and inclusion.
With inner beliefs we refer to deeply held convictions that influence one’s perception, thinking, decisions and behaviour. They are personal assumptions or thought patterns about oneself, about how the world works, how people are, or how to assess a particular situation.
Inner Beliefs are an accumulated mix coming from experience, upbringing, interpretations and cultural influences throughout our lives. Not all of them are helpful and often we are not aware of them.
What are examples of supportive and hindering inner beliefs?
Here are a few examples of limiting, hindering beliefs:
- I’m not good enough.
- It’s hard to make money in my profession.
- Other people are unreliable.
Here are a few examples of supportive beliefs
- I am a darling of fortune
- If I set my mind to something seriously, I can do it.
- I am valuable.
You can think of inner beliefs like an imaginary map based on thoughts and feelings that helps you navigate through life. It shows where dangers supposedly lurk and where it is likely to be worthwhile to wander. It includes personal preferences and indicates how flat and easy or steep and stony a path is to get to the points of interest such as dreams and goals.
How can we work with Supportive Inner Beliefs?
Working with Supportive inner beliefs is a practice to review and redesign this inner map in order to pave ways to the promising destinations and to keep from going to places that are not beneficial. It is about looking at single sentences in order to understand one’s thought patterns and aligning them with goals and dreams.
The Path of the Four Elements
Participants should be able to connect individually to the four basic elements and to the emotions resulting from them.
The exercise can be implemented in several ways. However, it is important to take some conditions into account:
- participants should walk through each station alone
- before the trail, we can prepare the exercise by sitting in a circle, listening to soothing music, possibly supplemented with an art activity (painting, coloring, drawing)
- participants start individually on the path from the big circle and they return there
- while the individuals are at the station, the other members of the group can receive a short thought-provoking, inspiring text every few minutes in addition to the music
- when the individuals return to the group, we can ask them to write about their experience a short poem
The success of the exercise depends on the openness of the participants, so the trainer must strive to create this safe space for the group.
Guided Abundance Meditation
Guided abundance meditation is great for starting the day, opening our minds to other ways of thinking, and using the imagination to significantly shift our internal outlook.
The purpose of Setting Your Intention is to clarify, both within oneself and within the group, what each person’s aim is.
Connection meditation is great for starting the day, opening our minds to other ways of thinking, and using the imagination to shift our internal outlook.
In order to get clarity about a topic or to determine your spiritual location, you go out alone into nature and trace this topic there. In the mirror of your environment, guided by your intuition, you receive “medicine”, a gift of impressions and impulses.
The Medicine Walk is an ancient and a modern practice. We have always made medicine walks into nature or pilgrimages, because the space out there gives us the possibility to reconnect. To reconnect with levels within ourselves that are not accessible to us through the mind alone, the deep inner knowledge about nature and being. It is a magical experience. Magical because it is animated by many different encounters – with plants, trees, animals, stones, branches, images…. All the living beings out there invite you to get in touch with them. For example, an encounter with a squirrel. You can ask a question about something specific that is on your mind and see/listen to what happens, what comes up as an answer while observing the squirrel. You can also let yourself be drawn to interesting places. It’s a free space out there, follow your intuition.
If you feel a burning question in you – take it with you on your Medicine Walk!
The Dreaming Circle is one of the essential skills of Dragon Dreaming. It is the process by which, in a win-win way, the project of an individual becomes the project of a team. In the Dragon Dreaming pathway, this is the first stage. The next stages then are the planning, the doing and the celebrating, which are not in our focus in this description.
Working on a project that has been started by someone else always generates less personal motivation than working on a project collectively owned by a group. And yet every project is always started as the dream of an individual. But, all too often the dream is not shared. And yet as Carl Gustav Jung and Australian Aborigines knew, we rarely ask, “where do such dreams come from”. Failure to share our dreams in an appropriate way is one reason why 90% of all projects get blocked in the dreaming stage. It is easier to work on “our project” than to work on “his project”, and yet every project starts as an idea of one person. How can this apparent paradox be resolved?
Catherine Baldwin calls this first process “calling” or “casting the circle”. This is the first stage in converting an individual intention into a collective one for Dragon Dreaming, and is a process by which “project ownership” is transferred from the individual to the group. Rather than maintaining a sense of possession, the group becomes custodians of the collective dream of the project. But to do this it needs a “Dream Team”, an initial circle group that can be drawn from friends, family, colleagues, neighbours, acquaintances, or people you have identified because of their possession of special skills, who come together to share a dream.
The Inner Critic: Stopping Negative Self Talk
How is Stopping Negative Self Talk used?