Emotions and The Unconscious

Calm is the basis of right perception and understanding.
Calm is strength.
-Thich Nhatt Hanh

What is the unconscious mind?

• The repository of automatic skills, source of intuition and dreams, and an engine of information processing
• The source of hidden beliefs, fears, and attitudes that interfere with everyday life.
• The foundation for our thoughts, behaviors and impulses
• The driving force behind our choices

Why is it so powerful?

• Because 95% of the choices you make are determined by the unconscious mind, the habit mind, formed between the ages of 4-9.
• The other 5% is considered your personality and your logic and reasoning.

Why is it so powerful?

• According to Dr. Bruce Lipton, the unconscious mind can process over 20 million bits of information per second, while the conscious mind can only process about 40 bits of information per second.
• That is over 500,000 times more processing power in any given moment!

Where does it come from?

• We inherit it from our ancestors through our epigenetics. In short, the emotional layer of our DNA.
• This goes back 7 generations on each side.
• In a recent study in caterpillars, they placed an epigenetic marker in a pairing and found that this marker passed on for 14 generations from the original 2 parents.

Why is this important?

• Because of how and why it is conditioned or patterned.
• We inherit these tendencies, and they become solidified into realities, generally between the ages of 4-9, when EVERYTHING is about us, and we form lasting beliefs about ourselves.

Why is this important?

• This patterning usually results from feelings of disconnection involving shame and guilt.
• These unconscious patterns become driving forces in our lives, and can dictate what we think is our conscious value system

What Does It Mean?

• It means that with the sheer processing power of the unconscious mind, it has the ability to find the perfect relationships, jobs, situations, and timing to place us in exactly the right place at the right time to confirm those beliefs.
• It is on constant lookout for evidence to support those beliefs/patterns to be true

The "I" in Identity

• By finding evidence to confirm our unconscious beliefs, it reaffirms our sense of Self established through those beliefs
• When they are formed, everything is about "us" and we have what I call "forever thinking", therefore the beliefs we form are true "forever" (or at least until we begin to question them as adults).

What Does Conditioning Do?

• It keeps us in repetitive mental and emotional rhythms and patterns.
• It continues to stay alive or receive support through our emotional responses to external stimuli.
• As they go unchecked, these responses tend to grow in magnitude as we age.

What Does Conditioning Do?

• It supports growing feelings of anxiety, stress, or depression, which all have physiological consequences on our bodies too.
• The same feelings will eventually arise no matter what relationship we are in, job we have, or practices we incorporate.
• They perpetuate feelings of shame, guilt, isolation and separation

What Does Conditioning Do?

• It becomes the driving force behind our behaviors and decision making.
• We expend lots of energy trying to tame it or keep it at bay, often leaving us with just enough energy to get through the day, or with consistent tension in our body.

Making the Unconscious Conscious

• Unless the core unconscious conditioning is brought to the light of conscious awareness it will continue to direct our choices and sabotage our attempts at lasting change.

Making the Unconscious Conscious

• When we bring it to our conscious awareness and neutralize the emotional charge, it can no longer drive us, we own it, and it fades into the background.
• We become the ones in charge of our lives instead of our lives being in charge of us, dictating our emotions, attitudes, behaviors and the overall quality of our experiences.

Making the Unconscious Conscious

• We all have our own threshold of feeling good or bad.
• This conditioning keeps us within the parameters of that threshold
• It can hamper our productivity, connection to Self and others, and from being fully present in our lives

Results

• Ecstatic Process - being excited about being calm
• Clients have reported feeling chronic tension leave their body, calm and centered in the midst of apparent chaos, a renewed sense of purpose and direction, clarity, confidence, and energy.

Results

• Situations and relationships that would once induce anxiety or stress no longer do so
• Real joy, love and gratitude become a greater part of one's everyday experience
• Where things once felt stuck, they now feel free.

Transformation

• When people break through this conditioning, there is nothing that we get rid of, avoid or discard. Instead, it is transformed
• They are no longer aspects of ourselves we are pushing away, but ones that we embrace with wholeness.
• We no longer act or react out of fear and separation, but respond and act from a place of grounded connection and love.

Who Do You Know...

• that feels stuck
• that experiences chronic anxiety, stress, tension or depression
• that struggles with seasonal or situational transitions, like S.A.D, holiday dread, divorce, job dissatisfaction, challenging familial relationships
• that have tried other forms of therapy or coaching without success.

This Work Is Not For Everyone

• It is for people who have the courage to face their fears and transform their lives
• It is for people that are ready to take responsibility for what they think and how they feel
• It is for people who are ready to shed the past and embrace the present with curiosity and love