This comes from Pastor Ron Casto, www.mindrenewal.org. Go take a look and see. Wonderful stuff.
MIND RENEWAL THERAPY
INTRODUCTION
Spiritual Wholeness Through Emotional Renewal
A large component to our physical and emotional health stems from the way brains and our
minds function. What we believe and how we think, directly effects how we feel, and is the
determining factor that ultimately shapes our lives. People respond to life experiences, due to their Core Belief system. One of the foundational Scriptures for Mind Renewal Therapy (MRT), is Proverbs 23:7, “For as a man thinks in his heart, so is he.”
If I have an experience in my life and it triggers a Maladaptive (negative) Core Belief, I will
respond negatively whether the belief is true or false. Again our individuals actions and our lifestyles are a result of our Core Belief system. To fully understand what our Core Beliefs are, it is fundamentally important, to clarify what we are feeling. What we are feeling by and large, correlates exactly with what we are believing. By asking ourselves, why do I feel this way?, it will often instantly produce the answer of what I am believing at that moment, whether it is based on factual truth or not. In fact, from an emotional perspective, we feel the way we do, based on our Core beliefs that have been activated.
So how do we change our Core Beliefs? That is the question that will be addressed in the remainder of this book. People often try to change their beliefs by changing their self talk and speaking and repeating to themselves the truths they want to believe. Over a long period of time, this may beneficial, however it is limited and is only a small component of what MRT is. We learn through experience and we generally change our Core Beliefs through the experiential process. The process of speaking Truth to ourselves that we want to believe, tends to fall short in times of crisis and stress, and it can require a lot of effort to maintain. When this technique fails, our brains revert back to providing a negative interpretations about what is going on. This is because our brains draw on past experience to make sense of the current circumstances.
If in the past experience, the brain is drawing from our memory reservoir, to make sense of a current experience, and you formed negative interpretations (Maladaptive Core Beliefs) of what happened, you will be likely to interpret the current experience the same as the past one. In a sense a historical experience is being “triggered” and the belief(s) and feeling(s) from that historical experience are flooding out and ultimately shaping our current circumstance. This is a very abbreviated explanation of how God designed our brains to work, but must be understood to effectively use Mind Renewal Therapy.
