Stop fighting your unconscious mind!

So much of personal development advice takes a conscious mind approach, it follows the format of, ‘Stop doing ‘X’, do ‘Y’ instead’ where ‘Y’ might be ‘eat a healthy diet, pay your bills on time, make new friends, or say ‘no’ to a difficult relative’.  But what if you make every effort to do ‘Y’ and yet it doesn’t work for you? Maybe you can manage it a few times, but can’t sustain it.   Maybe you can’t get it together enough to do ‘Y’ in the first place.  What if even thinking about ‘Y’ has you hyperventilating with anxiety and then you start beating yourself up for not being able to do ‘Y’ and add another layer to the misery?

That’s not to say that kind of advice doesn’t have it’s place because sometimes a conscious mind approach works. Sometimes, all someone needs is to be shown a better way to do something that they hadn’t thought of themselves and – hey, look – success!  Sometimes it is possible to push through with a bit of willpower and form a new habit and create fantastic new results.   After all, the mind is there to direct us: we make a decision about what we want, think through the best course of action and off we go. It makes sense that this approach should work at least some of the time.

But what about when it doesn’t work?  When you have sabotaged your diet (again!), when you have caved in and said ‘yes’ to something instead of ‘no’ (again!), when you can’t bear to open your bank statements because the anxiety is overwhelming (again!)?  What is going on? You know that ‘Y’ is a sensible course of action and yet when it comes to the crunch you just don’t do it.

What is going on here is that you are fighting your unconscious mind.  Your unconscious mind isn’t some baddy out to get you.   Really what it is doing is trying to keep you safe and protected from something it associates with danger.   Somewhere along the line, you experienced something that made you associate danger with whatever it is you want to achieve.  So when you start directing yourself consciously towards your goals, your unconscious mind kicks into gear and starts sabotaging your efforts. You might get very anxious, you might start procrastinating or get distracted, you might actively sabotage your efforts.  If despite repeated effect you are not getting the results you want it is time to look at what your unconscious mind is programmed with.

Rather than trying for the umpteeth time to push through with willpower, you need a way to find out what is happening deep down.   Most therapies are geared up to bring the unconscious processes to your conscious mind so you can deal with them.  Many therapies are geared to bringing unconscious processes up into your conscious mind so you can realise what is happening, but that can take time and sometimes even the conscious knowledge isn’t enough to make the change you want.

What I find works really well is using muscle testing or dowsing with my clients so I can tune into what is really going on for them and find the specific statement they need to bring into balance.  The problem with trying to use your own conscious mind to delve into your unconscious is that you don’t get to see your own blind spots.  Your unconscious mind becomes ‘tricksy’ if you get close to anything deep it starts distracting you, throwing up red herrings, or ‘going blank’ when you get close to the root of the issue.  This is why I think it is so good to work with someone, a good friend or good practitioner, who will hold that space for you and help you go through the blank stage when you think you don’t know the answer.   If that person is proficient at muscle testing or dowsing and can tell you if you are on the right track it is even more helpful.

For example, I worked on a client this week and the statement that came up for her to work on is that ‘I am able to say ‘no’ when I need to.’  I was able to test to show her that although she said she wanted to say ‘no’, her whole unconscious mind was geared up in the opposite direction.   I tested to see what she needed to do to clear that statement and it turned out that she needed something called a ‘parts integration’ technique from NLP.   We started the process and it was taking a long time.  She told me that she didn’t think it was working, but through testing I was able to confirm that we didn’t need anything else, we just needed to be patient and allow the process to continue.  A few minutes later she had integrated the belief that she was able to say ‘no’ when she needs to.

There’s still more work to do with this client as we work through more aspects of her situation, but in one session we were able to make a lot of headway and significantly reduce the amount of anxiety that came of for her when she even thought about saying ‘no’.

It can take a few sessions to peel away all the layers of an issue, you still have to use a bit of willpower to hold fast onto the results you want, to consciously develop new habits and to keep doing the clearing work.  But it is so much easier to make changes when your whole energy system is in alignment with that change.  If you are experiencing resistance in making changes in your life you might find a session working to heal the unconscious processes that are blocking you to be a very effective way of making a breakthrough.