Hey! Welcome back to your daily mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about changing your beliefs. Now, beliefs impact really everything in our life, but especially difficult experiences. When a difficult experience arises in our life, the belief we have about what that means will condition all of the different emotions and thought patterns that follow. And it will often condition whether we're resilient through the experience, or whether we get pulled into a downward spiral.

So there's a helpful acronym that I think will help us start to explore the beliefs that we have around certain events. It's called the ABC model and it comes from cognitive behavioral therapy. So A, stands for Activating event. B, stands for Belief. And C, stands for Consequence.

So what's an activating event? Really anything that can happen to you? Difficult conversation you have, um, a thought that arises in your mind could be an activating event. Um, a car accident, loss of a loved one, a relationship breakup. All of these forces that arise in the world that we don't necessarily want to happen, but they do. And so maybe consider an activating event in your life or something that you're going through right now during a difficult time. Whatever that is, this is the activating event.

Now, the belief is, well, what we believe about that event? If it's a relationship breakup, the belief we might have is, I'm always going to be single. What's wrong with me? No one loves me. I'm unlovable. I'm not gonna find another relationship. This is my fault.

Those might be the beliefs that we associate just as one example or a few examples. The consequence though, is what happens from that belief. So again, using the example, we already have — the relationship breakup, activating event, the belief is no one will ever love me. The consequence of that, is going to be what? Probably a whole series of thoughts, about why no one will ever love me, all the things that are wrong with me, that will, that, that allow me to defend that belief. I'm feeling down, upset, depressed, not wanting to get off the couch and start dating again because why would I, no one will ever love me anyway.

So do you see how the belief about the event conditions everything that comes after that? And what condition is downward spiral and not being resilient. Here's the thing with the ABC model. We can't change the activating rep. That's going to happen. And we can't change the consequence because that's conditioned by the belief.

What we can work with is the belief itself. So continuing with this example that we've already introduced, if we change the belief to maybe, oh, you know what, everyone goes through breakups. I'm not the only person to go through this and different people are for different people. So maybe I needed to experience this person to understand more about myself and to understand what works for me and what doesn't work for me. And yet it's painful, but this is going to make me stronger and it's setting me up for whoever might come next in my life that will really be worth my time and who I really can commit my life to.

That's just an example of a belief, a long belief, but do you see how that different perspective would condition a whole different series of thoughts, emotions, and actions. So when it comes to navigating a difficult event in our life, we want to look at what the belief is, how that's impacting us, and then how can we start to change that belief to lead to more resilience, more positivity, and better actions. So we'll explore this more in our meditation. As always, thank you for your practice. I'll talk to you shortly and take care.