Beliefs are fascinating, I believe! So what is a belief? Well the amazing Wikipedia describes it as "A psychological state in which an someone holds a proposition or premise to be true". We are constantly evolving the way we view the world, narrowing down explanations bit by bit, but it seems that we all live in 'states' - states of mind, which are formed by beliefs. If you believe you are happy (which can happen naturally - you don't need to realise that you're believing you're happy to be happy), you are in a state of happiness. These are only words, which don't really pinpoint the truth of a state, but they do an okay job at explaining where-abouts we're coming from. You don't just live in one state, but many simultaneously - you just may be sensing one greater than the other at any given moment. So over life, you form many (probably)-millions of beliefs, some ranging from core beliefs (a belief that physically changes the way you behave) which play a much larger role in your state, to dispositional beliefs, which rely on much smaller beliefs such as you believe that a banana is yellow in colour. A dispositional belief is a belief that hasn't ever been considered but you rely on other beliefs to come up with a new belief - these ultimately would be your future unconsciously-formed beliefs that change your behaviour without realising it. So if I asked you, do you believe bananas can talk? You would consider many other beliefs to answer it. So where am I going with this? Well, if a good proportion of our state of mind depends on beliefs, then have you ever thought about questioning those subconscious beliefs you definitely have, to see whether they are serving you positively?

I've been playing and analysing my own personal beliefs recently and it's quite amazing how subtle yet firmly embedded my beliefs are. Throughout my childhood and into my late teens I've always been one to stand back and watch events and interactions from a distance, forming my own beliefs unconsciously along the way, not realising that I was changing my own reality I'd be living in as time goes by. This gave me less experience of interacting with the beliefs I had been forming, but on the bright side, I think it's bettered my ability to witness the truth when I hear it. Being truly aware is only something that you can achieve when you've become acutely conscious of your consciousness, at many levels.

So how do you know what beliefs you hold? Try the following, there are different variations you could create for yourself, but these are strongly effective:

1. Starting with core beliefs, as these are the ones that will most likely arise first. Question why you don't like someone or doing something, or why you may get anxious about something. Think of a recurring negative emotion that you frequently have. For example, interviews. You don't like them because..? Most people will say they don't like them because they don't like them. Go a bit further, deeper. After each answer to each question, ask yourself 'Well why?', 'What am I afraid might happen?'.

2. When you think you've got to the deepest answer, go over some of the answers you gave and ask yourself if believing these thoughts are good for you in some way.

Now that you have a better reality of statements which convey your belief more truthfully, you'll want to do the following every time:

3. Ask yourself who would you be without those thoughts? Will it stop negative emotions and calm you down? - Make you happy? This is to allow you to believe that it is worthwhile to believe in a new alternative.

4. Ask yourself what a better belief would be. Just filter through a few alternative views and once you've held your new view in your head, ask yourself how the situation would change next time. Before committing to the view, it can helpful to turn the belief around to see different, but sometimes more truthful beliefs and perspectives that you may have. For example, a base line belief might be 'He always gets angry at me', try 'I aways get angry with myself', or 'I always get angry with him'. See which of the statements you come up with are the most truthful. Check by saying, 'Am I in 100% no doubt that this is true?'.

Hopefully you get the idea of how this delves into your beliefs, because to start with it can be easier to have someone question you instead of doing it yourself. The more you question your thoughts/beliefs to the point of coming up with an alternative more truthful belief for you to effectively rewire with, the more acutely aware you'll become of pinpointing a belief as soon as thought arises. There are many ways to improve your awareness, and this is one of them. You can always choose your own path involving certain techniques. Becoming aware of your beliefs is a great way to see your current reality from a distance. Although our mind is at the centre of our existence and our awareness, in which beliefs play a massive role in determining ultimately how happy we are, you don't need to go down that route because choosing other routes can and most likely will start overwriting your negative beliefs through positive exposure. So in all the articles I write, explore one further if you resonate with what I'm saying. It's a real pleasure writing these articles. It's amazing how we can go through our lives without seeing and understanding the foundations which we live our lives on! I haven't read any specific books on this topic I can recommend, although a few books I've read intimate these in different ways, just not directly and openly. It's a fairly straight-arrow Neuro-linguistic Programming technique, but it's very straight-edged in it's approach, so if you research it, just make sure it's not the only thing you ever study for your personal awareness development.

Please do email in if there's anything I've said you perhaps view from a different perspective, I'm very open and enjoy viewing every side of the dice. I will never allow my beliefs to stay unchallenged - I believe it's just a limiting [personal evolutionary] belief!

What is a realisation? Quite simply it could be realising that you forgot to clean your room when you told yourself you would, or you realised that actually you don't breathe fluidly and relaxed all the time! The realisations I'm referring to are also called the 'aha's!', where something 'clicks' in your head and you see how something works, when before you didn't quite get it; you realise that that is what that guy meant by so and so when he told me a few months ago. Your realisations can be strengthened through growing knowledge, and even more importantly, experience. Realisations are effectively bigger shifts in the way you live your life, more specifically your thought processes, to a more evolved way of living. Evolution of humans, not in the broad sense of life, but in the evolution of thought throughout life is very clear to see. For example, a widely known concept is that the older you get, the wiser you get - it's effectively a lifelong learning of very gentle aha's and realisations that led that person to that wise state. Being consciously aware every day of many things that I have and will write about will speed that up; but it's not just me writing about it, there are hundreds if not thousands of other writers who all write about their experience of human thought evolution. I will cover this topic soon, as I find it fascinating; it was one of the first few subconscious views of life that made me realise that I'm not giving life its all and which led me down this evolutionary path of awareness development. So going back, when I refer to the way we live our lives, I mean in our actions. One action may be when you realised that when you breathe slowly it calms you down. It's a very small realisation, but the stronger your realisation was about it, the more likely you are to breathe slowly when you are stressed next time - realisations break habits. Imagine this on a bigger scale! Where it leads is a very peaceful way of living, and depending on how far you've developed your awareness, you'll be able to feel it. I'm heading there and it's an awesomely sound path.

I've experienced many realisations, probably smaller than massive at the moment, but as time goes by, they are getting stronger and bigger. An example being that the other day after reading the book called 'The Secret' by Rhonda Byrne - taking what it had to say on the surface I found extremely true, and that is that our thoughts contribute to a great deal of what emotions we go through, and how we perceive our lives - until I become aware of something more true and profound. Now reading that probably won't give you a realisation because every person goes through realisations at different times and through learning/experiencing differently. Our minds are like huge brainstorms taking place continuously, and when a big stem makes a connection to another stem, bang!, you have a realisation. Anyway, going back to the realisation I had, I felt a strong sense of internal power being given to me, giving me confidence, awareness and peacefulness, just to name a few positives. I've found that the weaker the aha was, the more reminders I had to give myself to remember to do certain things or think a certain way, and the bigger it was the less I needed to say to myself 'Oh you forgot to watch your thoughts in that situation', or something along the lines.

The best way to go about coming to realisations is through living in line with the following:

• Be open; open to new ways of thinking.
• Read related and complimenting material to your chosen path into awareness.
• Go out and experience what you've read about - through daily interactions or organised workshops.
• Be outside your comfort zone as much as possible throughout a day and make sure that at the end of the day you reflect on how you felt through all situations, but without any external distractions, i.e. music or TV. Don't be outside your comfort zone too much, fluctuating between being in it and out is just as important to allow the realisations to hit you.
• Watch and study more developed individuals - actions speak louder than words in this case. Study a bit of body language and you'll hopefully see how more evolved they act and react to anything thrown their way. I've found that people who seldom show negative emotions and are never rushed, generally see awareness with more clarity. I will cover this another time.

There are I'm sure, other ways of coming to these realisations, but these are the ones that I've found have worked for me and have seen.

A reminder about awareness development - always learn from someone who you find a connection with, or that you can associate with in some way. If you don't connect or find an association with me or what I write, if there's one thing you could take away, it's to find someone else who you resonate with. What I write about could be written about in a slightly different way, but have more of an impact for you. Learning through association is the fastest way to learn initially, as that's where you allow yourself to be more open, and being open is very important! Never dismiss anything, but never fully believe in it either. Beliefs can be good to a certain extent, but if followed to rigidly, you limit your evolution.

I've got a feeling I've used too many commas in this article! - hopefully my writing will get easier to read the more I write. I'll be back in around 2 weeks to write another article.

Breathing; a topic not many people are very aware of. Breathing happens naturally; the intelligence within the body, one breath after the other keeps us alive without even having to think about it - so why bother? If you pay attention to the breath you'll eventually see that our thoughts/emotions determine the style of our breathing. For example, you get scared, and your breathing, without you even knowing has changed. Another common example is holding our breathe to feel sensations. More subtly when you feel stress or fear, your breathing can so easily change - it gets held for an extra second or it becomes shallow, but only if you are not aware of it. The quality of your breathing determines a great deal the quality your life. It can determine your energy levels by varying the levels of oxygen supplied to the body and as we've already seen it changes your emotions and therefore your overall health quite considerably. Thoughts and breathing are very much interlinked. If we are relaxed, there are not many thoughts being processed, and our breathing is much more likely to benefit from deeper and longer inhalation and exhalations. If we have a lot on our mind, reminding ourselves to breathe longer and deeper will almost instantly calm ourselves down, as it tricks our body and thoughts into thinking we're relaxed, as well as diverting your current thoughts from stressful ones to inner self ones. So our thoughts control our emotions, and our breathing can assist us in changing our thoughts. It's a beautiful process, it really is. The more understanding and awareness of your own breathing, the more power you give to yourself - it's incredible! I remember asking my friend how he breathes while he trades (on the Betfair horse racing markets), he quite simply said "I don't know". I'm sure if you asked yourself, has my breathing fluctuated much today throughout any given situation, you probably wouldn't know. The lack of awareness is scary considering the effects and information our breathing has about our current mental state and overall health.

Becoming aware of your breath after a few days will almost immediately make you aware of how you are breathing. Is your breath shallow? Do you breathe into your chest, or into your stomach? Is your breath even on the inhalation and the exhalation? Subconscious conditioning over the years of growing up without awareness can mould your breath into a far less than perfect breath through these years of negative habitual thinking and negative emotions. Once you become aware of how you breathe, you can begin to learn the correct way to breathe, which isn't a detailed one-way method, but simply just slow, even, deep and mostly into your stomach rather than in your chest. Breathing was one of the first things that I noticed was just not quite right with me when I was 18 after having come back from 5 months of travelling. I remember asking my dad how he breathes. He also said "I don't know, I just breathe!". This was not the answer I was looking for because I wanted someone to compare against who knew. Nobody seemed to know how they breathe! I eventually bought a book on breathing and googled the subject before finding out that my breathing in fact was completely wrong. I thought, how did that happen when breathing happens without us even needing to think about it? I found out that I had a shallow breathe, and always breathed into my chest, never lower down into my stomach, where most of the alveoli exchanges gas with the blood. If your breath, like mine was, is not the way it should be, it will take some time to breathe habitually the way you should do. It will take lots of conscious breathing to firmly develop the habit. Prolonged awareness of breath will eventually lean you towards a natural breath.

After a certain level of awareness of the breath has been achieved, you'll eventually see that if you control your breathing throughout an (emotional) experience, you can actually do a much better job of controlling these emotions. Give it a go - as soon as you become aware that you are entering a situation where your emotions change (and have already pinpointed that the particular situation usually changes your breathing style), just watch your breath and keep it nice and steady - just as you would if you were relaxed. It works by redirecting your attention away from thinking to create space; this space is consciousness, and it allows you to think much clearer than before. Play with this and you'll see what a difference it can make - just imagine the possibilities after depth of experience and practice.

If you would like to learn more about breathing, I can recommend a few books that I've read myself that will bring awareness to your breath. The first one is Better Breathing, by Carola Speads. This book is superb for learning about the breath and what it's got to offer. The second book is called The Breathing Book; Good Health and Vitality Through Essential Breath Work, by Donna Farhi. This book is extremely good at teaching you a wide variety of breathing exercises that will let you explore the many different ways to play with your breath. Breathing techniques are a very good way to develop an awareness of the boundaries of your breath through a variation of exercises. The more open you are to learning about your breath, the better equipped you will be to march into any situation life throws at you. Breathing is a rock solid foundation to start with in awareness development. Pranayama is also a word you will become familiar with if you choose to explore this area; it ties in with yoga, generally meaning breath control.

I will certainly come back to breathing in a future posting. It has a true importance and relevance to self-awareness. Breathing is hugely linked to being present, which is what Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now quite truthfully explains as pure being. I will leave you with a quote from his book: 'Be aware of your breathing as often as you are able, whenever you remember. Do that for one year, and it will be more powerfully transformative than attending all of these [self-improvement seminars and workshop] courses. And it's free'.