Shifting from Beliefs to Discernment as a Capacity

How tightly do we need to hold our beliefs? Or at all?

So often, we look at what we believe through the lens of right and wrong: Obviously we believe our beliefs are right, otherwise we'd no longer hold on to them. But there still may be an inner narrative. Am I right? Are they wrong? Is their understanding more true than mine?

But perhaps the more useful question is whether our beliefs are supporting us. Whether they help us live with greater joy, health, connection, and freedom.

(This is a little deeper exploration on beliefs from my previous one on April 30th)

Beliefs are provisional (accepted for the present time). We tend to treat our beliefs like property: right or wrong, sometimes defended at all costs. But I’m reminded that beliefs are more like clothes, some fit for a ‘season’, then one day they don’t. None of us have a complete view of anything. And, what we view / perceive as true shifts over time, even when the deeper thread of our understanding remains on a similar trajectory. We have all experienced this: something we once understood one way takes on entirely new meaning after we have lived a little more.

I think of awareness as a spiral or an expansion. We circle around familiar experiences and questions, but each time we encounter them, it's from a slightly different vantage point and hopefully a more expanded / inclusive one. Experience changes us, transforms us, if we have resources to integrate it. And as we find ways to integrate what we have lived through, our "innerstanding" continues to evolve.

A Spiral, Not a Line

My son Kyle’s life and passing are one example of this for me. August 20th marked 12 years since he passed.

The memoir I published about his life and passing last September, eleven years after he passed, is a very different book from the one I might have written immediately afterward (had I been able to write it then). Both books would have been “true.” But time, experience, healing, and everything that worked upon me during those eleven years were part of what the book became, evolved, transformed into. I was transformed in the process of those 11 years, which transformed my experience of life… perhaps changed the way Kyle’s life could touch those who read his memoir.

If I wrote that book today, it would likely be slightly different again. There would be new awareness within it. Especially now, having recently moved through my father’s passing, I feel myself shifting more, which would shift what I would have to offer if I was now writing Kyle's memoir.

The spiral widens, the centre shifts.

We Are Not Our Beliefs

I believe that beliefs are not actually something we are or even something we need to hold so tightly. We can observe ourselves holding our beliefs, how our beliefs influence our experience, rather than attaching to or being our beliefs And if we can observe a belief, then it tells us: we are not the belief itself. As it is with our body, our emotions, our thoughts, our experiences, etc.

We can also observe that a belief that supports us at one point in our lives may no longer support us later. Some beliefs may anchor us while we move through a particular experience. Most will eventually become limitations.

My dad has been teaching me something about this since his passing. During Family Constellation work a couple of weeks ago, I experienced him expressing a recognition of how “he was wrong” about some things (those were his words in the session). He is now free to recognize where his convictions were too rigid, without guilt or blame.

Whether we understand an experience like that spiritually, symbolically, energetically, or in some other way, it opened something important in me. It made me wonder again: How tightly am I holding my own beliefs? Do I need to hold them at all? Am I even fully conscious of the underlying beliefs I hold? Are they serving me, or are they limiting me? And how might I perceive them someday from an entirely different vantage point?

Perhaps beliefs serve as temporary structures, scaffolding, while we are moving through some life experiences, coming into remembering deeper aspects of what we already know.

And perhaps some of that knowing, or remembrance, doesn’t arrive until the moment when we are ready to receive it or able to do something with it.

Can Two Opposing Things Be True?

Maybe wisdom is not about deciding which ‘side’ of something is correct. Maybe it is about developing the capacity to hold complexity. Something I was shown years ago through conflict resolution work… how important it is to be able to hold opposing views as both being true.

Sometimes I can practice this, live into it.

Other (or even most) times I witness myself slipping unconsciously back into right-versus-wrong thinking.

It’s one thing to think of accepting opposing beliefs, to intellectually accept it, but it is not always easy to hold or live it in every situation we face. I work to be flexible in my perspective, but I’m aware that I hold some beliefs much more tightly than I’d like to. And often, underneath that tightness, there seems to be some form of protection. Scaffolding, that has presumably ‘kept me safe’ from making mistakes or getting into situations I don’t want to be in, and where attempts at letting them go has thrown me back into some form of the original belief.

A belief may become scaffolding that says, If I understand life this way, I’ll be less likely to make a mistake. I won’t end up in that kind of relationship again. I’ll recognize what isn’t good for me. I’ll be responsible with money. I can accept or make sense of who I am or what I stand for. I’ll know who or what to trust. I can witness the ‘narrative’ that shows up in 'conversations that brings the belief to light.

In that sense, the belief may not simply be something I think is true. Somewhere along the way, I may have assigned it the job of keeping me safe. Or it might be a way I’ve made sense of an experience that ‘can’t be made sense of’. And letting the belief go is like moving that integral block in Jenga and you fear that your very existence or identity as you know it will collapse. It seems this was in a large part why my dad held some core beliefs so rigidly.

This makes letting it go much more complicated.

I can loosen my grip intellectually and say, Maybe there are other ways of seeing this. Yet when life presents a situation that touches the deeper fear, it’s not so easy to let go. It’s often spontaneous and automatic.

Perhaps that isn’t failure. Perhaps it is simply showing me where the scaffolding is still carrying weight.

Relationships are an obvious place where this happens. We have an experience, draw conclusions from it, and those conclusions quietly become rules: ‘People who do this can’t be trusted’. ‘I need this in order to feel safe.’ ‘I should never allow that again.’ Some of those understandings may contain genuine wisdom. Others may be yesterday’s protection trying to govern today’s experience.

Money can carry similar beliefs: what it means to have enough, what is safe to spend, what must be saved, whether abundance can be trusted, whether receiving creates obligation, whether we have to work hard to deserve what comes to us.

Our beliefs may have originated in real experiences, but over time it can become a lens through which new situations are interpreted. The experience of rejection can be real without the belief “this is rejected” needing to become universally true.

There may be a pattern through your life that creates a foundation, or a trend of beliefs. It may play out in different scenarios but a similar thread. This thread that may be showing up somewhere in your life today, may be traceable to similar type of belief threads that began in your childhood. Certainly I can see it in mine. Working in the field I do - where it has not been easily accepted. It is shifting, but I have created certain beliefs (that I can hear in the stories I tell) - a lens I am perceiving through, held by a belief. The thread (belief I am not accepted or acceptable) begins even at the time of my birth, and I can see the threads into my parents and grandparents lives before me.

Giving Back What Isn't Ours

Some beliefs belong elsewhere - maybe our ancestors and what was passed down from them, intended to ‘keep us safe’. Scaffolding they still had in place and passed on as necessary.

While my dad was alive, I did what I could to work with some of our ancestral and family dynamics, but certain things never felt completely accessible. Since his passing, I have experienced the possibility of relating to him differently, without some of the limitations that existed between us while he was physically here.

For me, this recent work has opened a new relationship with my father. I never doubted that he loved me, or that I loved him. But there were very human limitations in our relationship that kept it from being as rich or supportive as I needed and wanted it to be. There were a few significant and powerful moments during the final year of his life that were transformative. And since his passing, I have been able to connect with him in ways that did not feel possible while he was alive.

That feels significant because our relationship with our parents can shape so much of our lives. such as: how we see ourselves, how safe we feel being ourselves, what we believe we deserve, and how we relate to others.

And, of course, our parents were shaped by their parents, who were shaped by theirs. These patterns travel through generations until, perhaps, someone becomes conscious enough of them and has the resources to choose something different.

Even when we rebel against parents, authority, or other forms of control, we may still unconsciously give parts of ourselves away.

We may still want approval.

We may still want someone to understand us.

We may still be organizing parts of our lives around another person’s acceptance, or lack of it.

My parents have been a practice field for this, and that practice continues with my mom.

I still notice moments when I want her to understand or accept certain aspects of who I am.

And then I hear the reminder:

Release it. Let it go. Remember what dad just showed me.

Can I become more anchored in myself rather than needing someone else to validate what I know?

Can I give back what is not mine to carry?

Can I release the need for another person to understand or agree?

Perhaps this, too, is part of shifting beliefs.

We do not have to throw away everything we once believed or declare that we were wrong. We can simply notice.

We can allow our beliefs to evolve as we do, hold them lightly enough that new understanding has somewhere to enter.

And perhaps the goal was never to arrive at a final set of beliefs at all. After all that may simply be another belief. Perhaps it is to remain open enough to keep observing. And as we inhale and then exhale... observe ourselves in coherence and then out of coherence, returning to coherence without judgement, shame or blame.

Shifting to Discernment

It isn’t really a movement from belief into having no framework at all. It’s more like a movement from belief as scaffolding toward discernment as capacity.

Although beliefs can serve as scaffolding for a time, the point is to walk the bridge, not live on it. When the view changes, we change our footing, again and again. A changing belief does not require me to make my former self wrong. It may simply mean that the structure that carried me this far is no longer the structure that will carry me forward. We can revise our understanding without rejecting or denying the person we were, the life we lived, or even the beliefs that once helped build us.

A rigid belief can become a substitute for self-trust. If I have enough rules about relationships, money, work, family, people, or life, perhaps I can prevent myself from ever making the “wrong” choice. The structure promises certainty.

This is especially so when the belief isn’t merely supporting a decision or behavior, it’s supporting the architecture of who I understand myself to be. At that point, changing the belief can feel less like changing your mind and more like pulling out the Jenga block that seems to be holding up the whole tower.

If this isn’t true, then what else have I built on it? What choices did I make because of it? What relationships did I enter or leave? What did I teach my children? What did I defend? What sacrifices did I make? Who was I while believing it? And suddenly the stakes feel enormous.

That may be why people can hold very tightly to beliefs even when part of them has begun to sense that something no longer fits. The resistance isn’t necessarily to a new idea. It may be resistance to the possibility that an entire identity, or an entire history, will have to be reinterpreted. Humanity is going through this significantly right now with all the ‘new discoveries’ about the history as we’ve been taught is tumbling like a stack of Jenga blocks.

Something can have been the understanding that organized your life at a particular stage without needing to remain your understanding forever. We can recognize that a belief was incomplete without declaring the person who held it foolish or mistaken in everything. From further along the spiral, we may see limitations in what we once believed. But the earlier place on the spiral was still real. It was still part of how we arrived here.

Especially when belief is linked to or holding up identity, discernment can initially feel dangerous because discernment leaves room for uncertainty. Identity often wants declarations: I am this kind of person. This is what people are like. This is what I stand for. This is how life works. This can be especially true in our work

Discernment is much more alive and says something less fixed: This is what I see from here. I notice what is happening here, what happens in me. I can draw on what I’ve experienced and integrated without assuming this moment must repeat the past. I trust myself to respond. Discernment doesn't promise certainty. It asks us to trust that we can meet what happens. We trust where we’ve integrated the experiences, where the ‘charge’ has been removed, that our perspective can be safely expanded.

That requires a different kind of identity, one rooted less in what I believe and more in my capacity to remain present, to notice, expand, integrate and choose.

Scaffolding is useful precisely because it is temporary. It supports something while it is being built. Eventually, however, the structure underneath has to be able to stand. So perhaps some beliefs are necessary scaffolding while we develop discernment.

A relationship experience might initially produce the belief, I will never let anyone like that into my life again. That may be protective and even necessary for a while. Over time, though, the deeper integration might become: I no longer need that absolute rule. I recognize these dynamics earlier. I know how they feel in my body. I know where my boundaries are. I trust myself to act.

The wisdom remains. The rigidity doesn't have to. As I shift toward discernment… the ability to remain open while paying attention and to carry forward the wisdom of my experiences… I no longer need them to become rules for the future.

Once discernment replaces the scaffolding, holding an opposing perspective becomes less threatening. I don't have to adopt another person's belief in order to consider it. I can let it enter my awareness, feel into it, expand from whatever it contains, and still trust myself. It’s listening without surrendering myself.