Empowerment Bypass
If you come upon a traffic jam, you may check your phone and highway app to locate a faster way around the gridlock. You see a new route that looks longer but hopefully, you will make better time. You would rather take…
If you come upon a traffic jam, you may check your phone and highway app to locate a faster way around the gridlock. You see a new route that looks longer but hopefully, you will make better time. You would rather take this bypass and keep moving than sit in a frustrating logjam.
There is another kind of bypass known as “spiritual bypass.” This is commonly described as using spiritual practices to rise above or deny unpleasant feelings. It is saying one thing on the surface when, deep down, you really believe something else.
Empowerment bypass is similar. You may have done a lot of individual work and learned all kinds of personal empowerment tools. You were trained to always look cheerful and see the silver lining, no matter the challenge. The message delivered in the popular empowerment training programs you attended was to bypass your limiting beliefs and to always think positive.
While this approach is soothing and even effective when things are going well, what happens when challenges hit, especially big ones like losing your job, a significant illness, or a divorce? If you’re living in an empowerment bypass, old disempowering habits can return like a bad penny. And the more intense the difficult situation the more likely they will consume your attention.
In our blog Transforming Your Negative Inner Dialogue, a reference was made to a type of self-talk where your inner dialogue begins to work for you rather than against you. It doesn’t mean, though, that you deny all the previous negative conversations you’ve had with yourself. Quite the contrary.Personal empowerment is a process of admitting false beliefs about yourself and then following those admissions with affirmations. Over time your limiting beliefs begin to soften, and you can claim your true identity as a Creator. This is the benefit of naming reoccurring limited thoughts that almost everyone has from time to time.
A heightened awareness of limiting beliefs can be uncomfortable to admit but covering them up with positive platitudes limits your capacity to be with complex feelings and circumstances. Positive affirmations without the recognition and release of old habits become merely wishful thinking.
Several years ago, a cousin of Donna’s learned about the law of attraction and thinking positively. She told Donna, “I am reciting positive affirmations several times a day and I know it will work for me. I recite over and over, “I am a millionaire. I am a millionaire.” A few years later, Donna saw her cousin at a family reunion. She said she no longer believes in positive affirmations. “They don’t work,” she said. “No matter how hard I work, I will never have enough.”Rather than resist your limiting beliefs, name them, and accept that you have those thoughts. Avoiding them, or pushing them into your subconscious, only gives them more power. But when you acknowledge them, you can stop fighting with yourself. No longer in a silent inner battle, you are freed up to focus on what is calling you forward.
In the case of Donna’s cousin, she might begin with an affirmation that might sound like this: “I acknowledge my thoughts about scarcity and feeling like I am not enough. That is not who I am. I have faith in my Creator essence and capabilities, and I take responsibility for what I want to create.”The empowered affirmation always follows the negating of what is not true about you.
Here’s the key: Naming and acknowledging your limiting beliefs helps release the hold they have had on you and frees you to claim your Creator essence.
Transforming disempowering beliefs is truly a journey and it takes practice and commitment to embrace who you are as a Creator. Every time you practice releasing limiting thoughts, and then affirm the truth about who you are as a Creator, you are claiming your personal empowerment identity.