Understanding the intention of our unconscious mind
When thinking of making changes in our lives we need to understand that our unconscious or often called sub-conscious mind is trying to work for us and use it to our advantage.
“Whatever we plant in our subconscious mind and nourish with repetition and emotion, will one day become a reality.”
Earl Nightingale – motivational writer and author.
You could get the impression that the sub-conscious mind is our enemy. This is because it often seems to stop us from doing what we really want to do but, rest assured, it doesn’t mean to be difficult. In fact it’s usually trying to help us and protect us.
Look at the things it does just to keep us alive (breathing, pumping our blood, keeping our heart beating, eliminating toxins and waste, healing us when we cut, break or hurt ourselves…) and it does this 24 hours a day and without us having to give it a second thought unless, of course, we have a particular problem like asthma, heart disease or something else that means we have to pay particular attention to that function.
The problem is that our sub-conscious mind has stored so much information since we were born. For example, let’s say you decide you want to lose weight. You feel uncomfortable, don’t like how you look, can’t find clothing that suits you and recognise you’d be much healthier without those extra pounds.
You feel motivated BUT… there’s a voice nagging away at you saying that fat people are jolly and friendly, and thin people are mean and horrid. During your lifetime this has become one of your beliefs. You remember your parents (both big people) saying this to you over and over again and you believed it.
Now you have a conflict. Do you do what’s going to make you feel happy about your weight and looks, or will beliefs over-ride, given that you certainly don’t want to be seen as mean and horrid? Your sub-conscious has brought something to the surface that is unhelpful to you – not to mention untrue – so you have to decide!
At this stage it’s hard to believe that the sub-conscious mind is trying to protect us!
But there is an answer! However, before I reveal it to you I’d like to tell you how you came to believe what you believe.
You picked up the message (that fat people are jolly and friendly, and thin people are mean and horrid) because it was something you repeatedly heard.
In some instances it’s other people, but in others you are the person who has been repeating the message to yourself (perhaps you believe that you’re not clever) possibly from one experience you had. Maybe something you did flopped or perhaps you came near the bottom in class. So that’s the message you kept repeating to yourself and it’s still with you now.
Your sub-conscious mind stores this and – because it’s non-critical it doesn’t judge you or the message, neither does it analyse it to see if it’s true or not! It just does what it’s asked to do. For example, if you believe that you could never learn to speak a foreign language, your sub-conscious will do everything it can to ensure that your belief comes true. If you believe that you could, your sub-conscious will support that.
It responds whether your thoughts are positive or negative, helpful or harmful, hateful or loving. It becomes an unquestioning servant to us! Knowing this I think is a good reason for practising some awareness and control over the thoughts and feelings you have, don’t you?
So here’s where it gets interesting!
If we want to change our beliefs, what we need to do is to change the message in our sub-conscious mind which is, in fact, trying to work for us!
That may sound like an impossible thing to do, but learning how to effectively communicate with your sub-conscious mind is essential if you want to re-programme yourself to become a more conscious creator of the things you want.
Just as your sub-conscious was programmed by repetition with negative messages, so you can use repetition to begin changing your beliefs to positive ones by repetition – as long as you will believe it! Next The Power of the Mind.