Supportive Inner Beliefs

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: 

Here are a few examples of supportive beliefs

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.

Unconditional Forgiveness

This is a method for empowerment through increased awareness and through a release of energy. The release happens when letting go of anger and blame.

(a) It can be taught, to an individual or group, using a ‘small’ issue for practice, and for later use with bigger issues; either old or fresh. 

(b) If the person is ready, they can be immediately coached through an issue that they perceive as a direct obstacle or problem.

(c) It can also be used for self-forgiveness; the presence of a coach or friend is recommended.

Easy Songs

Easy songs can be used in a very wide range of ways for almost any facilitation need:
opening or closing a ceremony
forming bonds amongst a group
soothing hearts after conflict, tender sharing, or grief
empower participants, put them in touch with their power & energy
meditation or contemplation
and more!

The Power of Yet

The Power of Yet is a simple exercise of shifting the language we use to be more empowering. In this method, we identify a situation we’d like to change and add “yet” to a statement about it. When we say this statement to ourselves or to a partner, insights may arise and energy may move in our bodies. It’s amazing!

Setting your Intention

The purpose of Setting Your Intention is to clarify, both within oneself and within the group, what each person’s aim is.

Connection Meditation

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.

Medicine Walk

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!

Dreaming Circle

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?

Round of Gratefulness

The purpose of the Round of Gratefulness is to practise the attitude of gratefulness. This brings deeper peace, greater well-being and an enhanced capacity for joy and self-empowerment.

There are five guiding principles that can serve as touchstones to support the practice:

  1. Life is a gift
  2. Everything is a surprise
  3. The ordinary is extraordinary
  4. Appreciation is generative
  5. Love is transformative