Tony Robbins, “Whatever you hold in your mind on a consistent basis is exactly what you will experience in your life.”
“Achieve anything you want using the subconscious mind.”
Freud introduced the 3-level mind model where he stipulated that the mind is like an ice-berg – it operates from three places; conscious, pre-conscious and the unconscious. And that each of these three states contributes and influences our thoughts, emotions and behaviours.
Conscious - Full awareness of your thoughts, memories, emotions and behaviours. It’s the awareness, the rational and logical thinking mind. It can recall or access memories, its primary job is to identify data received through the senses and secondly, to compare the data to information stored in the subconscious mind. In addition, analysis and decision-making are also roles of the conscious mind.
Pre-conscious – Unrepressed and accessible to recall specific experiences. This is where new learnings and experiences eventually become second nature, like driving a car. It can be seen as your protector and it passes you information based on what it sees as relevant based on past events, memories, results and emotions. However, things that have been programmed into the subconscious for years could be holding you back and may need to be reprogrammed to create new belief structures.
Unconscious / Subconscious – Primary function is to store and categorize data. It’s like an information bank of your thoughts, experiences, emotions and behaviours. It’s subjective and is overshadowed by the conscious mind. Repressed experiences, fears, emotions, desires and automatic behaviour patterns from your past that you cannot recall or remember or were unable or ill-equipped to deal with at the time (painful experiences, traumas, neglect). Example: lets’ say that as an adult you keep coming to a block in your relationships at about two years in. You have no conscious awareness of why this keeps happening because you’ve likely repressed the trauma behind this. As you work on identifying your traumas, you discover that your parents left you at home alone at two years old and you felt abandoned and unworthy, which has led to self-sabotaging behaviours and patterns in your relationships breaking at the two-year mark. The role of your subconscious mind is to ensure that you behave in line with your programming (your thoughts, words, behaviours etc). When you change your programming, you can release your blocks.
Freud posed that our default human behaviours derive from our subconscious mind. So, if you feel you’re constantly repeating patterns or coming across blocks in your path, there could be some work to do on your subconscious programming.
The relationship between all three states of the mind and its processing is pivotal. As if the conscious mind directs the subconscious mind, you can see why if your conscious mind is filled with negativity of self-defeating experiences, thoughts and behaviours, then this is what you’re passing and storing in your subconscious mind. If you want to change the fundamental structures and beliefs of the subconscious mind, you have to feed your conscious mind with different information. You then also need to do the work, take action to reprogram the structures your subconscious mind is built on. You can do this by targeting the subconscious directly, and as you learn your triggers you begin to push the repressed memories and experiences into your pre-conscious mind so that you can call upon it through the conscious mind.
It's cyclical – you must also work on consciously feeding new structures and positive experiences into your conscious awareness, which will push down into your subconscious storage to start changing your story.
The best time to reprogram your subconscious/unconscious is early in the morning when you are just waking up and you’re in the theta state, or just before bed when you’re transitioning from alpha state to theta state.
How to reprogram your subconscious:
Identify your fears
Write to understand
Visualise to create
Practice affirmations daily
Check your environmental influences
Trust and accept your connection to your higher Self
Be grateful
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With Love,
Divya
My mission is to be of service to our community, future generations and our environment through conscious living.