Understanding your Subconscious Mind
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will dictate your life and you will call it fate.” – Carl Jung
A fun fact: Your subconscious mind makes up 88% of your mind. Leaving your conscious mind to only make up the other 12%.
Your conscious mind consists of your reasoning, will-power, decision-making, logic, intellect, and desires. (masculine energy)
Your subconscious mind consists of your emotions, your life script, your core beliefs, and your motivation. (feminine energy)
If your subconscious motivation is not congruent with your conscious desires, then you better believe that you will continue to face blocks + resistance in acquiring what you’re desiring.
From the ages of 0-9, you are making sense out of the World around you; and based on your environment and upbringing you adopt certain core beliefs about yourself and your reality.
Whether positive or negative, your core beliefs are familiar; therefore they are safe to you. No matter how unhealthy they might be, they are what is known to you.
The vast majority of our core beliefs were formed when we were children.
However, we are likely not aware of them because they reside deep within our subconscious mind and don’t make any sense logically. You cannot use logic or intellect to try to understand or analyze the subconscious mind. It is a world unto itself, and it speaks in the language of metaphors, symbols, and images.
This is why hypnotherapy and dream therapy are so powerful. They are specifically targeted to understand and reprogram the subconscious mind. We cannot use logic and intellect (conscious mind) to analyze it’s functionality. The subconscious mind is deeply feminine. It’s dark, chaotic, mysterious…. and very protective.
Like a mother with her child, your subconscious mind serves to protect you at all costs. Although it may not feel like it at times. The unknown is terrifying to her. She cannot predict the unknown, therefore, she cannot protect you in the unknown. She will stop at nothing to keep you from entering into the unknown. This is what we commonly refer to this as “self-sabotage.” Self-sabotage is your subconscious mind deterring you from that which is unfamiliar, by holding you in your familiar patterns.
The unknown feels like total annihilation to mama subconscious; which is why, when you start to take those big steps toward your goals, you are met with so much fear and resistance. This can look like: negative & discouraging self-talk, lack of energy and follow-through, pessimism toward goals because they seem too unobtainable, giving-up, making excuses, victimization. These are some of the many ways it tries to keep you small, comfortable, and in familiar territory.
Our core subconscious beliefs are running the show. Whether we realize it or not, they are distorting our perception of reality through their filter.
For example: if one of your core beliefs is “I am not good enough” then you will constantly find yourself in situations that will validate this belief to you. You will unconsciously attract people and circumstances to confirm and hold this belief in place.
Until this belief is understood consciously, it cannot be properly healed and integrated.
We make our beliefs——> and then our beliefs make US.
Beliefs are designed to perpetuate themselves to allow you to have a human experience. Without beliefs, we don’t exist. We have to believe we exist, to exist.
According to Dr. Joe Dispenza- “Your brain is so powerful that it generates more electrical impulses in one day than all of the cellphones on the planet, combined.” That is some powerful electricity our brains are firing every single day. The thoughts that you have been thinking, and the beliefs you have been believing all of your life, have physically become little clusters of neural networks in your brain.
Nerve cells literally store and communicate information between each other. Just like in a relationship between people; the more they communicate, the more bonded they become. The more these nerves are charged electrically through certain thought patterns, the stronger and bigger these neural pathways become.
“Where our attention goes, energy flows.” -Dr. Joe Dispenza
The good news is- anything learned, can be unlearned.
We come into this World with only two fears:
- Fear of loud noises
- Fear of falling
Everything else, we have learned. This is why hypnotherapy is such a powerful way to reprogram the subconscious mind. Hypnosis is used to create new neural pathways in place of the old ones. It is a positive redirection that happens on a subconscious level.
The beauty and effectiveness of hypnotherapy is found in it’s gentle and subtle approach to penetrating into the World of mama subconscious. Through hypnosis, the hypnotherapist is able to bypass the conscious and critical mind, and access the subconscious by gently guiding the client into a calm state of mind using music and spoken word that induces an alpha/theta brain wave state.
Hypnosis is just a fancy term for shifting your state of consciousness by bringing your brain into lower states.
You are still completely conscious and aware, you are just extremely relaxed. The more relaxed you are, the more suggestible you become to new suggestions. This is when your subconscious mind is the most receptive. Relaxation = receptivity. It’s the same process that happens right before you fall asleep or when you are deep in a guided meditation. The purpose of this is to introduce new ways of thinking and being to your subconscious mind, until eventually they become known & familiar to you. Once this happens, new neural pathways are formed that override the old ones that were no longer serving you. Your mind does not know the difference between real and imagined reality; which is why visualization, mediation and hypnosis (which combines the first two) is so effective and powerful.
It’s like magic. 😉
Dispelling the myths around hypnotherapy:
Hypnotherapy is actually the combination of talk therapy + hypnosis. When people think of hypnosis, they sometimes get confused with “stage hypnosis” which is a completely different ballgame. Stage hypnosis is for entertainment, whereas hypnotherapy is for healing. The effectiveness of it comes from weaving everything you discuss cognitively into a script that is then fed to your subconscious mind during the hypnosis portion of the session. This whole process is the most effective through repetition. The more you do it, the stronger the bond.
Your subconscious mind is like clay; it has been formed a certain way but once you understand it, you can shape it to be in accordance with the life you desire!
A few amazing books I can recommend to further understand your subconscious mind:
- You are the Placebo by Joe Dispenza
- The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by by Joseph Murphy
- Break the Habit of Being Yourself by Joe Dispenza
Xo,
Zoe
