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 to 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 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 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.
  
• Journaling, especially free writing. You can use journaling in many ways to access your subconscious. Here is one approach I like the best. Before bed briefly journal about something you are struggling with. Then first thing in the morning journal again. This time do more a free write 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.
  
• 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. Check out my intuition class if you are ready for more.
  
• Ask your higher source/Angels for information. Our soul carries memories from each lifetime we have had. The information contained there is available to access. Asking our spiritual support team for help in seeing this can allow amazing things to appear. You can do this simply by asking for what you need, journaling about it or meditating on it.

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.

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 or 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:

1. 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.
   
2. Meditation - there are many great positive meditations that help you re-write specific issues.
   
3. 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 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? Check out my coaching services!

Check out my YouTube Playlist on your subconscious. Covers all the above, plus some meditations to assist you in accessing your subconscious.