Our Body Is Our Subconscious Mind
Our body loves us. If we hate our life, our body will help us die.
As originally published in Change Your Mind Change Your Life on Medium.com.
Image: francescoch on iStock
My life experience has left me with no doubt that the mind-body connection is real. But I wasn’t always aware of this and certainly didn’t recognise it in my own life — until it was almost too late.
If your health is suffering and you can’t seem to find an explanation as to why, then keep reading. This article may just shed some light on the issue for you.
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This article is also an expansion on insight #3 of my recent article “Quite Possibly the Only Knowledge You Need To Change Your Life” after multiple requests to expand on the insights with ways to implement the lessons learned.
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We Move Through Life Mostly Subconsciously
As a hypnotherapist, I’m well aware of the split between the conscious (which determines 5% of our behaviour) and the subconscious mind (which determines 95% of our behaviour). I’m also very familiar with the body storing memories. But at a recent Dr. Joe Dispenza retreat he gave me a new way of looking at the subconscious mind in saying that this was our body — and it made a lot of sense to me.
Once we learn how to do something and repeat it enough times, our body begins to do it automatically.
For example, we don’t think about how to walk; our body just does it. We don’t think about how to brush our teeth; we just do it. We don’t think about how to read; we just do it. But at one stage early in life, all of these tasks seemed like almost insurmountable challenges.
The same principle applies to habits, good or bad.
Image: Revival Health GmbH — adapted from Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work
We develop habits based on deep-seated beliefs we hold about ourselves, most of which are formed in childhood. I wrote more about this in “Why We Feel Like We Are Not Enough.”
According to Dr. Joe Dispenza, 95% of who we are by the time we’re 35 is a set of memorised behaviours, emotional reactions, beliefs, perceptions and attitudes, that function like a subconscious computer program below our conscious awareness.
In other words, for the most part, most people are unconscious all day long.
For better or worse, it takes trauma or something dramatic to make us feel differently and then see ourselves differently.
This was certainly the case for me.
Illness Has a Role, Function, Purpose, and Intention
I hit rock bottom in life about four years ago.
It was after a decade of what felt like one trauma after another — my brother died which broke me; I was dragged through courts in extortion attempts for 6 years; I was let go by the company I worked at; my grandmother died; my mother died (three weeks before my wedding); I was dumped the day before my wedding (three weeks after my mother died); I found out my ex was leading a double life; and the list goes on…
I was ‘living’ in a permanent state of fight or flight. But in fact, I was barely surviving, and my body was reflecting this (a seizure, back surgery, and so much more).
My physical ailments kept compiling, and I didn’t understand why.
Looking back it’s so obvious now.
“The universe is not punishing or blessing you. It is simply responding to the vibrational attitude you are emitting.”
Abraham Hicks
Our body loves us. And if we hate our life, our body will help us die. Mine was doing just that.
No organism in nature can tolerate the effects of living in emergency mode for extended periods of time.
When all our energy is directed to our external environment (to survive), there is none left for our internal environment — none left for growth and repair and the internal environment of the body begins to break down.
Long-term effects of the hormones of stress disregulate and downregulate genes to create disease.
Disease = Dis-ease
Our psychology affects our physiology and vice versa. And our environment affects both. It’s epigenetics.
“The environment that surrounds us and the thoughts that fill our mind, create chemical reactions in our body that determine our biology.”
Dr. Bruce Lipton
There’s a saying that goes “If you listen to your body when it whispers, you’ll never have to hear it scream.” But because so many of us are not only unaware of the mind-body connection but opt for denial even if we are aware, there indeed must be a rock bottom or significant trauma to force any kind of transformation.
How Does Our Body Communicate?
Almost any physical condition is based on an emotional root cause.
Louise Hay, best-selling author and speaker, has written about the mind-body connection extensively.
Here are some examples from her book “You Can Heal Your Life”:
Image: Revival Health GmbH — using information from Louise Hay’s “You Can Heal Your Life” book
Do you see how the probable cause corresponds to the problem?
If you think and believe you are unworthy of taking up space in this world, your lungs reflect this in the form of an inability to take in enough air.
“Our thoughts and beliefs are like a switch that turns our genes on or off.”
— Dr. Bruce Lipton
Our physical health is a manifestation of our emotional health.
Emotions are energy in motion. And pain is emotion stored in the body.
Therefore, unpacking, understanding, and upgrading our emotions would appear to be the key to improving our physical well-being.
“‘Cure’ comes from ‘curious’.”
Jim Kwik
What’s more, is that our body does not know the difference between an actual experience in our life that creates an emotion and an emotion that we can fabricate by thought alone. To the body, it’s exactly the same.
Thoughts are the language of the mind. Feelings are the language of the body.
And feelings are like gas. They only cause discomfort when we keep them in.
Don’t Kill the Disease. Heal Your Life.
Our mind will always take us to what’s familiar. That’s the subconscious program running us on autopilot.
As humans, we inherently dislike change because it means venturing into the unknown. And that’s scary.
Therefore, change generally only occurs when the discomfort of facing our fear of the unknown becomes less than the discomfort of our current situation.
My healing journey was painful. Because it meant confronting my deep-seated fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, fear of being alone, and most of all, the belief of not being enough.
These fears are, at their root, primal survival fears, usually from an early age. And these fears are the primary drivers of co-dependency, one of the hardest victim mentality patterns to handle and the best one to overcome to come home to our sovereignty.
RTT hypnotherapy helped me with this because the work is done by tapping into our subconscious.
But in every healing journey, there comes a time when we must let go of who we were so that we may become all that we can be. For it is not possible to move towards a new future whilst holding on to emotions of the past.
I wrote about how to do that in “Release, Renew, Revive: A Practical Approach to Letting Go.”
To me, the transformation was about learning how to live, not how to die.
It was shifting from victimhood into creator mode.
You are a thermostat, not a thermometer. A thermostat sets the temperature and the environment rises. A thermometer measures the outside environment.
Jim Kwik
It was looking inwards for the answers instead of outwards.
Image: Revival Health GmbH
Lingering emotions create our mood. If the emotions are left unattended, this mood becomes our temperament. If left unattended even longer, this temperament becomes our personality. And our personality becomes our personal reality.
Therefore, it is not only within our power, but indeed our responsibility to make sure this personal reality is one we actually want.
Make Your Body Your Boss
Our bodies are miracles. Think about it:
Every second, your body produces 25 million new cells. That means in 15 seconds, you will have produced more cells than there are people in the United States.
There are anywhere between 60,000–100,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body. If they were taken out and laid end-to-end, they would be long enough to travel around the world more than three times.
Pound for pound, your bones are stronger than steel. A block of bone the size of a matchbox can support up to 18,000 pounds of weight.¹
There are hundreds of incredible facts about the body like this.
Given the millions of cells, systems and functions, it’s a miracle more doesn’t go wrong far more often.
Learning to actively listen to my body has empowered me to act instead of react when it comes to my health.
It has helped me evolve as a person and ignited more curiosity than ever to continue learning how to become a healthier, happier human.
We can’t outsource healing. It’s on us.
So take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live in.
And wherever you are on your healing journey, always remember that YOU ARE ENOUGH.
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