Beloof

About Beloof.com

Welcome to my blog, beloof.com. and my new podcast, “I Know What Rob Would Say.”

I hope you will join us as a new community to explore the concept of the beloof, but more importantly, to examine your own personal beloofs and have discussions to help you understand the birth of your beloof. Through the discussion, we can share suggestions for reframing your beloofs. I am inviting individuals who have done work on their beloofs, and colleagues and professionals to add their two-cents worth in helping to examine and reframe the beloofs that are presented.

But first, let me share how the concept of the “beloof” came about, and the definition of beloof. This is how I described it in the introduction of my new book, Of Endings and Beginnings, A Memoir of Discovery and Transformation:

beloof: A mistaken personal belief, usually about oneself, that was created during a time of trauma, resulting in self-limiting behavior.

Example: When I was three, and my brothers made me go on a scary ferris wheel ride, I formed a beloof that I couldn’t trust those closest to me.

I published the word and definition in The Urban Dictionary. Click HERE to see the listing.

Several years ago, I was sitting in one of the healing circles of our Personal Transformation Intensive weekend retreats, teaching about trauma and its effects on our lives. As I was speaking, I heard a word come out of my mouth that I had never spoken or heard before. I said the word beloof, when I had fully intended to say erroneous belief. 

I was trying to explain that even before we can talk, we are fully engaged in forming thoughtful concepts about our world and how we should interact with it. Back in the 1990’s, research conducted by a Johns Hopkins University psychologist, discovered that at 32 weeks of gestation–two months before a baby is considered fully prepared for the world, or “at term”, a fetus is behaving almost exactly as a newborn. The research showed that even a premature baby is aware, feels, responds, and adapts to its environment. Another well known study showed that while being observed by sonogram, a developing fetus flinched and drew back when angry words were shouted at the mother.

In my teaching, I am trying to explain that when babies flinch, they are simultaneously forming  non-verbal, conceptual beliefs about their world. Perhaps they decide, “I am not safe”.  Perhaps they begin to believe, “My mother is not safe; perhaps she will not be able to take care of me”. 

Based on these non-verbal conceptual beliefs, babies immediately form non-verbal, conceptual decisions about how they should respond to the potentially erroneous beliefs they are forming. Perhaps they decide, “I need to stay in the background to survive.”  Perhaps, “I need to protect my mother and think of her needs before mine.” Perhaps, “My father is mean and dangerous—I need to be quiet.” Since these beliefs and decisions occur on a pre-verbal, conceptual level, they reside in the subconscious of our being, and are contained in the cellular experience of those desperate flinches seen in the sonogram. 

These erroneous beliefs and decisions (beloofs) created during times of trauma continue to lie deep within our subconscious being and influence, perhaps even control, our daily decisions about how we behave in the world. I use the term subconscious being rather than subconscious mind purposely, since each cell of the body has recently been identified as being the repository of memory; not the abstract concept of the mind, which most of us believe is contained in the brain (read “The Biology of Belief” by Bruce Lipton if your interested). Hence the notion of body memory. 

Think of how your body reacts when you are startled by an event. You get a phone call informing you that your father just had a heart attack. Perhaps you burst into tears. Maybe you punch a wall. Perhaps you become cold and numb. These are all body reactions emanating from your cells, not your mind. Your cells produce these reactions from their own memory system based on the beliefs you have formed. They emanate from your deep subconscious being.

But let’s get back to my story about sitting in the circle that day, hearing the word beloof come out of my mouth. I turned to my teaching partner and said, “Where the hell did that come from?” Immediately I realized I created a new and unique word. It was not a mistake or faux pas, I invented a completely new word!  Pretty cool. I was tired of using erroneous belief; I had a completely new concept – the beloof!

When you see the word beloof in the context of this blog, remember the definition I wrote at the beginning of this introduction: “a mistaken personal belief, usually about oneself, that was created during a time of trauma, resulting in self-limiting behavior.”  This definition also includes the beloofs we bring with us into this lifetime from past lives; we can discuss that too.

The concept of the beloof is perhaps the most important concept I wish to teach.  Because if we can discover and examine my deeply-held subconscious beloofs, and modify them at the cellular level, I can shed the effects of the historic traumas in my current life and the lives I’ve lived before, create new beliefs, and make new decisions that move me forward to experience all of my dreams and my destiny.