mindset

From the moment we are born, every experience and emotion we have ever felt is stored in the part of our mind called the subconscious. Intangible, immeasurable, and for the most part inaccessible, this portion of the human mind is complex and extremely important to our individual personal identities.

Our mind is like an iceberg. Floating in the ocean, we can only see what is above the surface of the water – and while this may be colossal in size, it only makes up a tiny ten percent of the total size of the iceberg. What is hidden underneath is nine times larger. Our conscious mind represents this ten percent of the iceberg in view, above the water, and our subconscious represents all that is below. The conscious mind is only a tiny portion of what is going on underneath.

The conscious mind is responsible for collecting information in our day-to-day life through our senses, which it relays back to the subconscious. The subconscious encompasses those activities we take for granted such as breathing, blinking and monitoring our temperatures, but it also stores every past experience, emotion, and thought we have ever had. Like the iceberg under the water, we can’t see or readily access the true depth and size of our incredibly powerful subconscious mind but it plays an extremely important role in all of our lives.

The capacity of the subconscious mind is incredible, with few limitations on how much it can store. According to motivational speaker, renowned self-development expert and author of Focal Point Brian Tracy, “By the time you reach 21, you’ve already stored more than one hundred times the content of the entire Encyclopedia Britannica.”

The subconscious mind is constantly active and responsible for an incredible amount of our human functions, actions, choices and personality. In psychological terms, the subconscious is a secondary mind system that stores everything we receive through our senses in a kind of data processing memory bank. It monitors information coming in from our conscious mind such as sight, taste, hearing and touch.

The two aspects of the mind – conscious and subconscious – communicate all the time. The elements that are processed by our conscious mind only stay in the subconscious if they are intensely emotional experiences. This is partly what makes the subconscious so powerful and important in its long-term effects on us as individuals.

What does the subconscious mind actually do?

The subconscious element of our minds covers more than just suppressed desires and forgotten traumatic memories that we are often told about at school. It is responsible for all of those day-to-day movements and activities that we take for granted or don’t even consciously recognise doing. For example, breathing, blinking and regulating our body temperatures are all acts we do subconsciously.

According to psychologist Havan Parvez, of PsychMechanics, the subconscious is always active, even when we sleep. It communicates with us through images and symbols in our dreams, relaying information we have encountered during the day or even from many years ago – the subconscious storage bank goes back as long as we have been processing information through our senses.

Another key function of the subconscious relates to our behaviour. It regulates our reactions, actions, decisions, and physical choices to fit with those it has previously established as ‘ours’. It keeps our thoughts and beliefs consistent, establishing our comfort zones and deeming what activities would suit them.

Brian Tracy, self-development author and motivational public speaker, states that the subconscious mind is what, “Makes (our) behaviour fit a pattern consistent with (our) emotionalised thoughts, hopes, and desires.”

Psychology blog, Mindsets, also claims our natural intuition arises from the subconscious, which uses our previous experience, emotions and memory to help us assess situations. If you have ever felt a ‘gut feeling’ or inexplicable sense about something, this is your subconscious mind communicating with you and sending you signals based on your own previous knowledge.

According to Yvonne Oswald’s book, Every Word Has Power, the subconscious mind does the following:

Operates the physical body.
Has a direct connection with the Divine.
Remembers everything.
Stores emotions in the physical body.
Maintains genealogical instincts.
Creates and maintains least effort (repeating patterns).
Uses metaphor, imagery and symbols.
Takes direction from the conscious mind.
Accepts information literally and personally.
Does not process negative commands.

How can we harness its power?

It is important to know the ways in which we can harness the power of our subconscious minds. Think about emotional experiences you have had that have impacted your future life. Can personal issues with trust, relationships, certain habits, that you currently have be traced back to an incident or experience you had in the past? This is your subconscious mind acting based on the intense emotions you felt during that time.

One of the most significant reasons why we should endeavour to use the power of our subconscious for our mental health is to clear emotional blockages and for the purposes of personal healing. According to Joseph Drumheller, award-winning author and leader in meditation, healing and education, we must be in the proper state of mind before exploring our subconscious. He suggests practising some detachment when considering our emotional charges or particular feelings in isolation. Distance your rational mind from these emotions. Then it becomes easier, and safer, to push into these feelings a little deeper.

Drumheller says that letting yourself explore and feel your emotions as they arise or as you consider certain aspects of your life is important when working on your subconscious. Through your detachment from these emotions, start to think about them more critically. Take mental note of when a certain thought, image, noise, or memory triggers a particular emotion. From this point, we can start to ask ourselves why we feel this emotion, and if from our space of mental detachment, we can see that it may not be warranted, we can start to let the feeling go. As the emotion grows fainter and less raw, we are letting go of this emotional charge and clearing some weight from our subconscious.

This method is useful to try, but the results can differ from person to person. Drumheller suggests that if we are stuck with a particular emotional charge that is difficult to shift, or we begin to lose ourselves in the feelings of that emotion, then there is another method to try. Visualise a large scared object or symbol such as a flower or a cross hovering directly in front of you. Imagine that it holds immense power. Start to think about each of your emotions and visualise this object pulling the force of these emotions out of your heart and mind, drawing them into itself. In this way the power has been transferred to the object rather than your mind in releasing the emotional charge and is a good method for beginners or those struggling with release.

Further suggestions

There is an extensive array of literature, podcasts and other resources available for information and guidance regarding our subconscious. Several books written on the subject are available as audiobooks which can be a fantastic way to engage with the material.

Based on readership ratings, the following books are recommended:

The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy
Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman
Beyond the Power of your Subconscious Mind by C. James Jenson
The Subconscious Mind: How to Use the Hidden Power of Your Mind to Reach Your Goals by Linda Siegmund

Exploring your subconscious is something that can be done privately but is also worthwhile when done with the assistance of a mental health professional such as a psychologist. Those trained in this field can guide you, provide suggestions, and offer support should you need it.

Therapies for your subconscious such as Private Subconscious-mind Healing (P.S.H) are also available for more guided or targeted exploration of the subconscious. This therapy is non-invasive, extremely gentle in its approach, and is designed to assist in resolving underlying subconscious problems that are affecting our day to day lives.

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Many people live as a victim of their own history. They act in servitude of bygone events and unconsciously towed into the future by the undercurrent of their past. For a person to become a master of their own destiny, we must first examine our own brain, understand what we value and change these values or forgive memories if they no longer serve us positively.

Human behaviourist, Dr John Demartini, has developed powerfully effective strategies (the Demartini Method and Value Determination) in identifying our personal values and learning manipulating oneself into becoming the most illuminated, clear-headed and equipped version of you possible.

The Demartini method, taught in his program ‘The Breakthrough Experience’, is a series of concise questions to help us see the hidden order in our daily chaos. It allows us to become conscious of unconscious information that causes us to have skewed, biased and emotional responses to events in our life.

By resetting the mind, we seek to turn negative events into opportunities for growth. Resentments are stored in our unconscious mind, occupying space and time, steering our behaviour and life. Dr Demartini believes you cannot escape the authority of past resentments and move forward unless we learn to love and appreciate them.

“I know a lady who was married to five men in a 25-year period, all of whom were alcoholics named Mike. Her father’s name was Mike and he was an alcoholic. As long as she’s got resentment for her Dad, she keeps marrying her Dad.”

One set of questions Dr Demartini devised in the method focuses on dealing with negative events and transforming them into positive lessons.

“Let’s say if somebody comes up and criticises you. You’re a little bit perturbed and upset. The question is what specific trait, action or inaction you perceive this individual to be demonstrating that you despise or dislike most. You define what just happened in the situation and what they did. And then you go to a moment where and when you perceive yourself demonstrating that same or similar behaviour in your own life,” says Dr Demartini

“It is not fair to judge somebody on the outside when they’re just reminding you of something on the inside, that you’re internally judging yourself for. A lot of our resentments come from things we’re ashamed of inside but don’t want to face.

“You then ask, how did that event serve you, how is it an upside? Every event has two sides, find out the upside to it and stack up enough benefits to it then you don’t have to be affected by it. You can actually be grateful for it and realise it has nothing to do with what happens, it’s your choice of perception. The resentment is no longer running you – you are running you.”

These questions assist in dusting through the attic of one’s mind in order to allow true perspective and make clear decisions that move forward, rather than murky ones that serve no one but our memories.

The complete method includes 80 questions; the 14 main questions are primarily about resolving resentment and infatuations, but others cater to more specific issues including perceptions of gain or loss, particular emotional states and dealing with dissociative states such as bipolar condition and schizophrenia.

The Demartini method exemplifies how a person can change their entire life through perception. Honed by Dr Demartini for more than four decades, it is used by governments, corporations, psychologists as well as ordinary people to reduce stress levels, eliminate emotional turmoil and focus on gratitude.

Value determination, used in parenting, leadership and self-actualisation, is a tactic to trick ourselves and others into doing something we want. It is another one of Demartini’s most popular mindset-based strategies.

Formatted around the idea that every human being, regardless of age, gender or culture has an evolving set of values that guide their life, value determination involves identifying these guiding inherent priorities in order to effectively motivate people.

Our brains create a hallucination based on how we filter reality, determined primarily by our values. Individuals are spontaneously inclined to do more of what they value and require extrinsic motivation and reminding from external sources to do things they value less.

“A mother whose highest value is children will walk into a store and her eyes will automatically seek children’s items. Her husband, whose highest value is entrepreneurship will have a completely different view when walking into the same store. Their children too will focus on different things than their parents.”

If we can identify what someone’s values are, we can frame a suggestion with their highest value emphasised. Respecting someone like a customer and selling ideas to them in terms of what they find most meaningful, will make the person both more responsive and gratified when the idea has been manifested.

This is a crucial tactic not only in parenting, says Dr Demartini, but in convincing ourselves to do something.

“If we can stack up enough benefits concurrent with your values, adding positive associations, we can eventually convince anyone to do anything.”

“If I took a hammer and asked to hit your thumb with it you’d say no, but if I told you that you could meet your biggest Hollywood crush, you’d put your thumb down on the table and say let’s go to work.”

“At a convention in Sydney, I convinced a woman at of her attraction to a not so typically attractive man in about four or five minutes. I painted a picture of him based on her fantasies, told her that he was intelligent, ambitious, entrepreneurial and suddenly her physiology changed. Because I accessed enough of her higher valued aphrodisiac centres, his looks were no longer an important factor. By the end of the conversation she was buzzing to meet him; I had to gently explain I had made this magical person up as an example.”

Values are constantly changing and growing throughout one’s life, through either gradual tweaking or cataclysmic change.

If the mother who holds her children as her highest value experiences her children dying in a horrific event, she will obviously have to adapt, and her values will subsequently change drastically. It is thus important to do a value determination test every so often to ensure we are working in accordance with our current self and not a past version.

In addition to easing difficulty in completing unpleasant things, value determinism allows meaningful fulfillment from accomplishing tasks that the individuals know are valued high to them. Increased resilience, adaptability, creativity, wellness quota and stronger immune system are tangible results seen by Dr Demartini in people successfully living congruently with their values.

Understanding oneself, knowing what we desire and having the tools to transform potentially negative situations into priceless information, are paramount to changing the relationship one has with themselves and others into something responsive and positive.

These two methods represent only a sliver of Dr Demartini’s practicing programs developed over 47 years.

More can be found on his website: https://drdemartini.com/

Human behaviourist is not a title likely to appear whilst rifling through career brochures, yet no other label fits Dr John Demartini as deftly.

A self-described ‘polymath’, Dr Demartini has studied psychology, human biology, chiropractic and neurology at a tertiary level and has an impressive field of knowledge outside that too; he could hold a perfectly respectable conversation on astrophysics if pressed. He is above all, an educator and studier of people.

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