When you are packing for a trip that requires you to fly somewhere, you wouldn’t put anything hazardous in your luggage that could get you detained or arrested at the airport. You are also mindful of how much your luggage weighs, so you don’t pay the fees for excess weight.

While this makes total sense in relation to flying on a plane, what about your journey through life? How often do you take that much care or responsibility for identifying and removing limiting beliefs that are stuffed into your emotional baggage?

To answer these questions, we are going to explore “Unpacking Your Limiting Beliefs” in this article, which is the second of a three-part series on letting go of limiting beliefs and how to adopt new ones.

Looking In Your Emotional Baggage

Unpacking your emotional baggage initiates a much overdue process of reclaiming control of your life’s narrative. It is one of the most important processes of getting rid of limiting beliefs and making room in your life for new, more empowering beliefs.

Limiting beliefs are the hardest to change because they are thoughts and perceptions that represent the most fundamental beliefs you have about yourself. Targeting the soft underbelly of who you are, limiting beliefs convince you that you do not have enough of what it takes to be loved, successful, happy, or fulfilled.

You likely have identified limiting beliefs you want to get rid of, but do you know where they hide? Limiting beliefs are entrenched in the deepest and most inaccessible part of your mind and soul. They are locked away in your emotional baggage making it difficult to get rid of unless you know where to look.

Although the term ‘emotional baggage’ is recognizable, the process of opening the metaphorical suitcase where your limiting beliefs are stuffed is not something most people want to do – let alone even know how to do.

The Key That Unlocks Emotional Baggage

To adopt new beliefs, and make the most of your life right now, it is essential you are willing to look into your emotional baggage and remove what no longer serves you.

One of the first things you will see when you look inside your baggage is a lot of the contents don’t belong to you.

There are ideas, beliefs, myths, and rules about how life supposedly works that were imprinted on you at earlier stages of your life. While a lot of this baggage stems from outside conditioning, most of which you didn’t ask for, you must own it as yours in order to let it all go.

This requires taking responsibility for what you do not want as much as taking responsibility for making space in your life for what you do desire.

The key, therefore, to unlocking your emotional baggage is self-love.

Looking inward to unpack your emotional baggage is about loving yourself enough to create a new story around new beliefs that support you in living your best life in the now of nows.

Visualize Your Limiting Beliefs Vanishing

To get things started with unpacking and letting go of what is inside your emotional baggage, begin by gifting yourself a quiet space and taking time each day to do some inner reflection.

At first, it may be difficult because your inner critic will do its best to distract you with what it feels is a better use of your time. Even if you do attempt to do some inner reflection, your inner critic will still try and redirect your attention elsewhere.

The more you practice inner reflection the easier it will get and the further inward you will travel. To help with this, here are two simple and fun, but powerful visualization exercises I have used to great success.

The first one calls on you to use your childlike imagination to visualize each limiting belief that needs to be discarded. See yourself being the grand magician, placing a scarf over the unwanted items from your emotional baggage, then, with a great flourish, lifting the scarf to reveal that the limiting beliefs have disappeared.

Another technique for ridding yourself of excess weight of your emotional baggage, is seeing yourself hauling the bags of discarded contents to the curb and watching with gratitude as the trashmen collect them and throw them into the dump truck.

With a feeling of relief and a smile of accomplishment across your face, watch as the dump truck disappears down the street.

Getting rid of your limiting beliefs gets easier over time because the solution to what is troubling you, even if it appears to be external, exists inside you. Once you turn your awareness inward it is only a matter of time before the root cause of life challenges reveal themselves. This level of self-inquiry will provide an opportunity to unpack your emotional baggage and reset your inner compass.

Have you looked into your own emotional baggage? What was the experience like? What contents have you noticed that no longer serve you?