Understand and Master Your Subconscious Mind

What is the Subconscious Mind?

The subconscious mind is everything that is not currently in your present awareness. This can be anything from body functions to limiting beliefs and past childhood traumas.

There is a lot of debate around definitions of subconscious, unconscious and the roles they play, but for this article we are going to keep things simple. I will refer to present awareness – you are thinking about what you are doing. And subconscious, everything not currently at mind. If you do want more of the debate side, check out this article.

Subconscious Mind Examples

• How to Breathe – unless you are doing mindful breathing exercises, you don’t need breathing to be in your awareness to happen. It just does.
• You experience a trauma on a boat but block the memory. Now you panic when getting on a boat but have no idea why. This is a limiting belief that the cause is in your subconscious.  You are aware you are afraid of boats, but you are unaware of why.
• Habits are also subconscious once they have been done enough. For example, when you forget that it is the weekend and start your routine before work. You do this because it ingrained in your subconscious. It’s not until something reminds you it is not the work week that it is brought to your awareness and out of the subconscious.

Why is the Subconscious Important?

Most of what we do is driven by the subconscious. And this is by design. You wouldn’t want to have to think about breathing and your heart beating all the time. You would never get anything done. The subconscious helps us focus on other things; it frees up our time.

Where subconscious becomes a problem is when you start to move into the beliefs and habits areas. This is the part of the subconscious that will cause you problems in reaching your goals. The rest of the article will focus on helping you access what parts of your subconscious is causing you problems.

How to Reach the Subconscious Mind While Awake

Refocus On a Different Activity

When trying to solve a problem take a break and allow your mind to continue processing. Studies show our decision-making section of our brains never stops, so if we take a break it works for us! Consider getting some physical exercise or doing menial tasks such as housekeeping. This will increase your subconscious mind’s ability to pull together what you need.

Meditation

Meditation allows you to calm your mind and let what is in your subconscious to appear as you need it. Especially guided meditations which help you solve specific problems or explore areas that you are struggling with.

Hypnosis

Hypnosis helps us enter altered states of brain waves. This helps us access not only repressed memories and limiting beliefs, but even past lives. All showing us subconscious issues that may be holding us back. (I have my certification in hypnosis and past life regression. If you want to learn more about my services click here.)

Hypnosis can be done with a therapist or on your own with pre-recorded downloads.

I recommend using a therapist when you aren’t quite sure what the limiting beliefs or blocks are. They can help guide the session to first uncover and then explore. If you know what the problem is then you can choose pre-recorded to start getting relief right away.

For example, when my son was young, he was very scared of storms because of a few bad ones that impacted us. It was becoming difficult to manage. So, I used a hypnosis track with him and within a month he no longer had a fear of storms.

I personally use Hypnosis Downloads, I like the therapists’ voices and have just about any topic you could want. This is where I got the fear of thunder track.

Journaling

Using the free writing journaling technique is a great way to access your subconscious. You can use it first thing in the morning to get your uncluttered thoughts.

To expand this approach to get more of your subconscious into it start the night before. Before you go to sleep briefly journal about something you are struggling with. This allows your subconscious to process it while you are sleeping. Then first thing in the morning journal again. This time do a free writing session versus writing on the topic specifically.

Let it flow with no interpretation. Then later in the day, or even the next morning, review what you wrote. Continue this process till the right information shows itself. This gives your subconscious time to pull together answers for you.

Intuition

Develop your intuition. Our intuition is part run on our subconscious. The more you can listen to your intuition, the more you are aware of what your subconscious is doing. This is a skill, so if you are not used to using your intuition, give it some time. Try keeping a log of what pieces of intuitive information comes up and if it was accurate. This will help you hone your intuitive skills.

Reprogramming the Subconscious Mind

It’s one thing to know what is going on in your subconscious and a completely another issue to reprogram what is there. In this section I will share tools to help you reprogram your subconscious. And answer one question I get the most!

How Long Does It Take to Reprogram Your Subconscious?

Probably not the answer you want to hear, but it depends. On what? how long you have had the belief or issue that is causing the problem. If you have a limiting belief that you did not know about, but was reinforced in multiple ways over a decade, then it will take longer than one that was recently created.

I highly recommend you don’t put a timeline on it. If it takes 40 days instead of 30 days, are you going to skip reprogramming it? The goal is not about time to reprogram, but to reprogram – no matter how long.

Tools to Reprogram Your Subconscious Mind

My three favorite tools to help with reprogramming are:

• Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT or tapping) – this is hands down my favorite way. It uses our energetic meridian systems to help us uncover and rewrite limiting beliefs. If you are unsure how to do it I have an article on how to learn to do it on your own – Learn to Use EFT Tapping
• Meditation – there are many great positive meditations that help you re-write specific issues. You can use an app like Insight Timer or YouTube to find free mediations. I have my meditations available on both of the above and as a podcast. Learn more about Meditate with Andrea.
• Affirmations – I am not a fan of generic affirmations; they typically don’t work because your subconscious mind won’t belief them. But once you have identified a subconscious belief and are able to bring it into the present moment, then affirmations can work. The best way to do this is to write an affirmation statement specific to what you uncover, then use it as part of a mantra meditation practice.

Need help on uncovering and working on your subconscious beliefs? Have your guides help you! Explore my energy healing services.

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