How to use Lists to Get to Know Yourself

Who here has never made a list? You? How about you?

I thought so. We’ve all made lists. Watch a child sometime. You’ll see the roots of list making behavior as the child sorts their crayons, stacks blocks by color, or lines up their stuffed animals. Its the form we use to categorize and order our world. Lists are an innate part of our mental life. They’ve been around in written form for millenia. I talked about the types of lists we keep and their uses in The Lure of Lists.

Lists are a Potent Tool

Lists aren’t just for things we want to remember, though. They can also be a powerful tool in our personal growth. In a previous post on meditative beliefwork I described a meditation in which you took a keyword or keyphrase, held it in thought, and waited for responses to that focus to enter your awareness. Each response you acknowledged, then waited for another response. Each phrase, each image that arises, represents a belief related to your central phrase. Together they show the constellations of beliefs we hold.

Use Lists To Become Aware Of Beliefs

Another approach to becoming aware of your beliefs is to sit down with a pen or pencil and piece of paper. Write at the top of it your subject. An example may be What I’m Afraid Of or What’s does money mean to me?. Then, without thinking, without stopping, start writing down everything of which you’re afraid.

The key is to write down without stopping, without worrying about what you write, and without judging what you write while you are writing. Just keep writing the next thing that comes to your mind. Don’t worry about complete sentences. Don’t be concerned about sounding silly. Don’t worry about repeating yourself.You will. You will write down things that seem out of place. You will sometimes find yourself stuck, especially the first few times you do this exercise. But keep at it. In her book Journal To The Self, Kathleen Adams recommends you keep writing until you have 100 items. It may take you 15 minutes. It may take you an hour. The key is to keep writing.

The reason to write so many items is to allow yourself to reach into the parts of your mind that you usually keep pushed back. The first part of the list comes from your surface awareness, the things you dwell on daily. The later part of the list comes as your surface awareness runs out of steam and the things you normally keep pushed to the background are able to make their way through to the surface.

Analyze Your List

After you’ve written your list, start looking for the themes. Don’t worry. They’ll be there. There may be two or three. There may be five or six. Categorize your items into the theme they belong in. Use a different mark for each them, or a different color pencil or crayon.

Aside - The crayons may even be good to write out your list with. There is nothing like recreating past experience to bring it to mind. Using crayons may help dredge up some of the things that have been with you since childhood that you thought you had pushed away or outgrown.

If you’ve written a 100 hundred items, it’s easy to break the categories into percentages. You’ll see where your predominant beliefs are.

As with meditative beliefwork, these lists allow you to home in on the core beliefs around which other beliefs constellate or from which other beliefs grow. If you find yourself looking at an item or theme and having a strong emotional reaction to it, you can be pretty sure you’ve hit on one of your core beliefs.

Some Ideas For Lists

A major point of doing these lists is to become conscious of the beliefs that you carry with you as you go about your day. These beliefs are shaping your attitudes, your emotions, your interactions with other people. Knowing what they are is the starting point of becoming free of their influence.

Here’s a list of starting points for beliefwork lists to get you started getting to know yourself.

• What’s wrong with the world.
• What’s right with the world
• Why my husband isn’t attracted to me
• Why people pick on me
• What I would do with a million dollars.
• Why Christians/Moslems/Jews/Hindus/Buddhist are evil
• Why Christians/Moslems/Jews/Hindus/Buddhist are good
• Why my back hurts
• My favorite movies
• The scariest things in the world
• Where are the best places to live
• What I would do in the ideal job
• The traits of my favorite person
• The traits of my least favorite person
• My traits
• Everything I own
• Things I remember from my childhood
• Places I’ve been
• What’s the meaning of love
• What’s the meaning of hate
• Why I like to eat
• Why I drink
• The best way to get ahead in the world
• The traits of the perfect husband
• The traits of the perfect wife

You take it from there. Good listing.

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