What are your limiting beliefs?

I’ve been having lots of in-depth conversations with musicians lately. I’m extremely lucky to be surrounded by people who want to live their lives intentionally and are willing to talk about the ways we can work towards that goal.

There are some common threads among these conversations. One of them is that we oftentimes create stories about ourselves in our heads without realizing that we’re also creating a self-fulfilling prophecy at the same time. We tell ourselves we are good at this but not good at the other and then subconsciously act on those limiting beliefs.

But although we have these tendencies, we humans are also able to notice those stories and perhaps even put new ones in place. So instead of “I am not good at yoga”, we can say “I’m a yoga practitioner”, instead of “I’m weak”, “I’m strong”…

You can notice that when you tell yourself “I am strong”, it immediately affects your body and posture. Similarly with physical activity, we can change the outlook we have on ourselves when we engage in an activity like yoga. I am specifically talking about engaging the core and the grounding effects it can have on our psyche. When you engage your core, you’re literally telling your body: “I’ve got this !”.

For most of us, when we say “core”, we imagine the six-pack (which is actually an eight-pack) muscle in the middle of our abdomen. But that’s actually the upper layer of the core muscles. What I’m talking about is a specific deep core layer muscle that wraps around the whole of your mid-body, helps to stabilize your pelvis and lower back but also works alongside your pelvic floor to keep your organs in place. It’s called the transverse abdominis and I frequently add postures and exercises that engage it in my classes.