Why your mind is holding you back...
Article by Kevin John
...and what you need to do to break free
Do you know which is the most powerful part of your mind? Is it the part we call the conscious mind?... Or is it the part that we call the subconscious mind?
STOP! Think about it for a moment...
Your conscious mind is the part you are most familiar with - it does all your conscious thinking, it processes the information that comes in through your senses, it makes decisions that affect everything you do during your day and it's the part that is your awareness.
That's all pretty amazing! But, the power of your conscious mind is limited. There have been a lot of studies showing that your conscious mind can manage at most between 5 and 9 things simultaneously - it just can't cope with more.
It's your subconscious mind that is a real powerhouse. Your subconscious operates outside of your awareness, but just because you aren't aware of it doesn't mean it's not doing much. Here are a few of the things your subconscious does for you.:
* It manages all the muscles in your body, so that you can breathe, walk, talk, drive a car and much more. Sometimes hundreds of muscles have to be co-ordinated to achieve what you ask your subconscious to do - an amazing feat in itself!
* It processes, stores and retrieves vast amounts of information (there's a lot of evidence that our whole life experience is stored somewhere in our mind - if we could just remember it!).
* It tries to protect you and do the best for you at all times. Like when you touch a hot kettle, and your reflexes snatch your finger away.
THE DANGER OF UNCONCIOUS THINKING
Look at reflex reactions in more detail...
Snatching your finger away from hot kettle is obviously good for your survival. But the subconscious mind is so much more powerful than that. It learns from your past experiences how to respond to inputs from all your senses and your thoughts. It can help you respond without having to use the limited power of your conscious ! mind, al most as if you are on auto-pilot. One name for this process is "habitual thinking".
Habits or as they are sometimes known, programmed responses, can be very useful for you: sensing people's emotions by reading subtle tell-tale cues, driving a car, adding and multiplying numbers...All done instantly and without conscious effort.
However, not all the things that your subconscious mind has been programmed to do by your life experiences serve you as well.
In fact, all of us have negative as well as positive experiences in our formative years - and even as adults. When your subconscious mind is exposed to a negative experience it doesn't have the reasoning power of your conscious mind to judge what's happening to you. Instead it goes ahead as usual and forms a habit that you will have for the rest of your life.
Quite commonly people have bad experiences in their childhood - their parents go through a painful divorce, they get abused, they experience something really terrible - and this often leads to some very negative habitual thinking. Thoughts such as "I'm not worthy", "I'm a failure", "I can't..."
These traumatic experiences can leave you completely trapped in negative habits as an adult.
More subtly, you may have an experience in childhood that wasn't bad at the time but that led you to form a habit that is now bad for you. It can happen like this...
Maybe when you were growing up you learnt that finishing all the food on your plate made your parents very happy. Maybe they re-enforced your behaviour with a bit of guilt about "all the starving children in the world". So you got into the habit of doing as you were told.
Now that you're an adult, you might find it impossible to not eat everything that's put in front of you. So now you constantly struggle to loose weight, you become frustrated, miserable, depressed because another part of your mind doesn't like your appearance or the feelings of poor health...
KNOCKING DOWN YOUR INTERNAL OBSTACLES
I h ave shown you how your subconscious mind has a tremendous amount of control over your life. Mostly it acts for your good and it achieves its purpose of helping you to live your day to day life in the best way possible.
But, sometimes the way it has been unintentionally programmed by past events leads to habits of thought that prevent you from getting where you now want to go. And these habits can imprison you as well as any real locked door in your way.
The answer to overcoming these negative habits ingrained in your subconscious mind is very simple, you need to change the programming.
Yes IT IS that simple...
But it's very hard to do!!!
After all you've perfected your habits over years of use and now you are a real expert at doing all those things that you don't want to do. Changing bad habits can be one of the hardest things you will ever have to do for yourself...
Luckily, there is help out there for you.
People throughout history have struggled with the problem of eliminating negative mental habits and solved it. Methods have been tried tested and refined over hundreds of years. The fantastic news is that you can have access to all this wisdom through books, tapes and seminars. In fact there are so many answers that there isn't time to go through them all here.
So, get out there and start searching for a solution that works for you.
About the AuthorIf you want to learn about some useful tools to knock down your internal obstacles you cant get the free 5 part e-course "Achieving your dreams" here: "http://www.achieving-your-dreams.com/ecourse"
Use and distribution of this article is subject to our Publisher Guidelines whereby the original author's information and copyright must be included.Jon Kabat Zinn - Wherever You Go, There You Are! (Part 1 of 3)
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