Rotten Tomatoes

Recently I had one of those little experiences, something anecdotal, but it serves to help me re-examine my mode of operation through life.

I came home to the apartment I share with my partner after a recent trip out of town. I noticed he had put a big bag of tomatoes from our CSA share into the refrigerator. My immediate reaction: "Oh, the horror! The vulgarity! Are there really people so uncultured that they still refrigerate tomatoes?" My immediate reaction of default foodie-farmer snobbery only lasted an instant. I really try to keep this sort of judgement in check.

Then I thought, oh well, whatever, at least he picked up the CSA share while I was gone.

For the week that followed, I was able to use the tomatoes though, making myself lunches of sauteed onions and garlic, with lentils, and stewed tomatoes and curry. Sometimes I added chicken or kale. I find that when you cook tomatoes, it really doesn't matter if they were once refrigerated. They still taste great. Furthermore, I realized my own foolishness when the fresh tomatoes from the next share that I left on the table started to quickly go bad and had to be thrown away, all the while I was still able to enjoy my lunches of stewed tomatoes from the ones my partner had refrigerated. My attitude about the refrigerated tomatoes had shifted from judgement and disgust, to passive acceptance, to gratitude (for a partner that had saved my tomatoes) to wonder. I wondered how many other little habits or beliefs I had picked up, that had become religious beliefs, in the building of some identity I held to, that had actually stifled my creativity or problem-solving abilities.

Do you have a limiting belief or dogma that keeps you from moving forward?

Do you have any values or principles that have made your life too rigid?

I'm not really talking about your overall value system here. I'm talking about little limiting quirks that have become habits that hold you back from your big picture goal.  The little thoughts, minutia, that can hold you back from achieving your big things, from having your broader influence or from just making your life easier.

Example - "I don't refrigerate tomatoes because temperatures lower than 55 Fahrenheit burst the cell walls causing the tomato to lose flavor and become mealy" had come to interfere with my greater value of not wasting food to be both resource conscious and thrifty, when really, I enjoy stewed tomatoes anyway... not to mention the possibility of interfering with domestic bliss!

Maybe we begin to adopt these little habits, as a way to strengthen our ego or identity when we are still forming who we are in the world. We form these beliefs out of not feeling we have much influence or control, or for wanting to appear to belong to specific group of people.  But do they really matter in the long run? Or do they just start to make life hard for us?

Can you think of any examples of limiting beliefs that might hold you back from achieving your career goals, health, satisfying relationships, or financial success?