If you want to access your subconscious mind, you first need to explore what the “mind” is.
We make a distinction between the conscious, subconscious, unconscious, and even superconscious mind.
There is much debate whether the superconscious mind even exists, as it is defined as being beyond human consciousness, binding everything together, like a universal consciousness.
Everybody knows about the conscious mind as the state we’re in when we’re fully awake and are able to experience the world with our five senses.
You see, you hear, you smell, you taste, and you can touch stuff, which tells you: it’s real.
Some people say they have a sixth sense. Maybe they can see or feel “energy”, or they can see glimpses of the future, or even talk to dead people’s spirits.
I believe that everybody has some sort of a sixth sense. It’s what I call intuition.
Intuition, or any sixth sense, lives underneath consciousness. It resides in the subconscious mind.
The subconscious mind is not some nebulous woo woo thing, but a network of brain cells that communicate with each other without reaching the parts of the brain that make up the conscious mind.
(How the subconscious mind gets its information, other than from the material, tangible universe, is another story…)
I like to compare the brain to a very advanced supercomputer.
The conscious mind would be what you see when you’re using your keyboard to type, move your cursor, give the computer commands, access your apps, etc.
The monitor lets you follow along with what you do, and you take action based on what you see happening. A computer without a screen or monitor is useless unless visual signals get translated into something you can hear. Beyond that, the computer is limited. No smell, no taste, no touch, right?
Yet, behind or underneath what you see and hear, the computer is busy like crazy. Electrons are flitting around through carefully controlled circuits to give you exactly what you want. (Most of the time ?)
These electronic boards house what we could call the computer’s subconscious and unconscious parts.
The subconscious could be all the apps you load onto the computer, from your browser to your gaming apps. They do your bidding without you needing to know how they function exactly. You know they’re there, and you can ignore, disable or uninstall them.
In the body these apps could correlate to your organs. You know, feel, and hear your heart beating, or your stomach rumble, for example. Don’t disable or uninstall those, please.
Underneath that, and making possible that the apps run smoothly, is the operating system. You can configure a brand-new computer any way you want. But first you need to install an operating system, or it won’t run. What the operating system does are a gazillion calculations, all just answering one question: yes or no? You are completely unaware of the shenanigans of the operating system until something goes wrong. It’s sitting in the depth of the unconscious.
In the body, the operating system resides in the brain and the nervous system.
If you want to move a muscle, you just think of doing it, and voilà, your hand grabs a beer. You are not consciously aware that nerve cells transmit your information at breakneck speed. Again, until something goes wrong. My friend Amanda, who suffers from MS, could tell you a lot about that.
Next, if you hook up millions of computers through servers, we get to the superconscious. Something like Google, which seems to know everything…
The same information gathering and distributing happens in the human brain, albeit in a much more complex way.
Every piece of information you’ve ever had gets stored in the subconscious part of the brain. Your genetic code has a lot of influence over what gets stored where, and what importance that information has for you.
It makes sense to think, for example, that people who have never sat in an airplane would feel some fear until they get the experience that nothing bad happens when they fly. Being high up in the air is not natural for humans, after all. They might fall out of the sky!
The subconscious mind is imprinted with that fear of falling because it’s a survival instinct.
Everything you experience during your life gets coded into neural pathways in the brain; all your experiences, good or bad, leave a trail in the subconscious mind.
Unfortunately, again based on necessity of our ancestors and thus anchored in our genes, bad experiences have a stronger presence.
You might know these as limiting beliefs if they interfere unnecessarily with your life.
(More about limiting beliefs HERE)
Most of the time you cannot access the subconscious mind because you are busy thinking, feeling, and acting while being conscious.
Only when we sleep or meditate, impressions from the subconscious mind float up to the surface.
That’s why we can have bizarre dreams or nightmares that seem impossible in reality, at least to the logical mind, but are frightening, nonetheless.
The brain cells of the subconscious and unconscious mind, which by far outnumber the ones of the conscious mind, are constantly at work.
They are responsible to keep the body functioning. You don’t need to think about breathing, or your heart beating, or food being digested…it happens by default.
The circuits of the subconscious mind influence everything you think, feel, or do in more obvious or in subtle ways.
Some are clear (you are hungry, e.g.), others not so much.
Why on Earth did I get stark raving mad when my husband told me I messed up, again? I FRAKKING DIDN’T!!!!
But my reaction was not warranted. I over-reacted, unquestionably. (After shouting, I bit him LOL)
That little word “again” totally set me off.
Apparently, my subconscious mind decided I was being fatally threatened…
Why? My subconscious monkey brain provided a reason for his behavior that was totally false, because my impressions from and interactions with the world are filtered through the lenses of beliefs and habits. And woe him when those filters are dark…
Where do those filters come from?
As I mentioned in the blog about beliefs, these get created as soon as the brain starts developing.
Initially, all these pathways are foundational to make the body grow and function.
Then, one by one, pathways are created according to experiences the young brain gets inundated with. It learns. It learns to adapt, to accommodate, to make life better for its owner. Most of the new pathways are not necessary to deal with by conscious thought, so they become hidden.
Now we’re faced with a dilemma.
Our belief filters are programmed into the subconscious mind.
How can we access and even change them if we don’t like what we find?
First, we need to find a way to tap into the subconscious mind.
There are many techniques, notably meditation and hypnosis.
What I have found is that meditation is a wonderful tool to access the subconscious mind. But it didn’t allow me to change anything. I was a passive audience and gained a lot of knowledge. I was able to “see” incredible scenes that gave me an expanded view of life, the universe, and more. Sounds totally woo woo, I know. But, like I said, once you’ve experienced something, it becomes real…
To change beliefs in the subconscious mind I tried affirmations, afformations (a term coined by Noah St. John, who said they work better than affirmations because they ask questions, which the subconscious mind wants to answer), tapping, memory reconsolidation (basically imprinting non-real memories), and more. Nothing really worked.
Until finally I came upon a course called “Clear Your Beliefs”, created by renowned healer and “subconscious pattern detective” Lion Goodman, that uses a fun way to go into the imaginal realm (where stuff lives that is imagined, real or not) and deal with beliefs there!
Gosh, I found so many surprising things I would have never been able to dig up from my conscious mind. I encountered deeply ingrained core beliefs that made me cry and parts of myself I didn’t know existed. What’s even better: I was able to let go of these beliefs and instill empowering ones instead!
Scientifically speaking; what I was able to do was to emphasize and stimulate more beneficial neural pathways and neglecting negative or unwanted ones. And you can too!
The powerful techniques I learned in this course are easy to understand for everyone. What’s even cooler? You can use them on yourself! You don’t even need a coach. Did I already say they’re fun? (Especially for the ladies, you’ll see) ☺
If you’re curious about what it’s all about you can find out more HERE.
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