“Your subconscious mind has what is called a homeostatic impulse. It keeps your body temperature at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, just as it keeps you breathing regularly and keeps your heart beating at a certain rate. Through your autonomic nervous system, it maintains a balance among the hundreds of chemicals in your billions of cells so that your entire physical machine functions in complete harmony most of the time.” ~ Brian Tracy
So how many of you have woken up and the first thing you consciously say to yourself is – breathe? That’s not to say that at times we don’t have to remind ourselves to simply breathe, but it is something that is happening automatically – each & every day until our last breath. And what is controlling that? Our subconscious (or unconscious) mind.
The subconscious mind controls all automatic body functions. It controls breathing, heart rate, respiration and perspiration. Have you ever thought about your breathing? If you decided to concentrate on it, you will find that it disrupts the whole process. Before you started thinking about it, you were breathing just fine. Your subconscious mind was managing quite well without any conscious effort. Your subconscious mind knows how to measure how much oxygen your body needs, and then automatically lets your lungs and diaphragm know what the right speed and depth of breathing is required. But when you start consciously thinking about your breathing, you don't know if you are breathing fast enough or slow enough, or deep enough or shallow enough. It is not until you start thinking about something else that your subconscious mind can take back control and handle things perfectly.
This is a simple process but some people make a mistake. If I told you to not think about your breathing, it would be difficult for you to do that. It is difficult to not think about something by trying to not think about it.
Where is all this leading you may ask? Hypnotherapy (not stage hypnosis). I like to describe hypnotherapy this way – it’s a deep level of relaxation & yet focused state of mind (same as the level you reach as you are just about to drift off into sleep). It is different for everyone and most people experience it daily, in some form. You know when you’re driving home from work and do not recall the entire drive; or when you are so engrossed in that book, are oblivious to the outside world and the time just “flies by”.
Typically, a session for hypnotherapy will put the client into this relaxed state, where the conscious mind simply allows the subconscious mind to be accessed; it stops that “monkey mind” from controlling us and creates that opening that will allow change to happen.
The subconscious doesn’t know the difference between fact or make believe and one way to tap into the subconscious mind is through the imagination, often through the use of metaphors.
By utilizing someone’s imagination, we magnify aspects of their mind and personality, and therefore are able to implement change and transformation. By hypnotic suggestion, circulation of the blood can be controlled, heart beat slowed or sped up; action of organs & glands change; the rate of healing of a wound or injury greatly increases; body temperature lowered or raised. You have the ability to self-regulate your body. You can control your body, and you can learn to do that through practice.
The study of Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) has scientifically proven that your mind influences your body and immune system. Even different personal traits have been found to have different influences on your immune system’s response. According to medical research, being in a negative state of mind can reduce the strength of your immune system, making you more susceptible for illness. As long as your mind perceives a threat, the body remains on alert. If the stress response remains turned on, you may be increasing your chances of a stress-related disease.
Hypnotherapy is an effective method of communicating to the immune system and our thoughts govern the condition of our body with the body responding to those thoughts. The subconscious mind can be used to re-program the immune system to function properly.
The reason why physical healing takes place is because of mental processes; the mind and the body are inseparable. And they work together as one. So, when we impact the mind, we are impacting the body.
Sir William Osler, the great 19th-century physician who was the father of modern medicine said: “The care of tuberculosis depends more on what the patient has in his head than what he has in his chest.”
Now your subconscious will only initiate any course of action under the right circumstances, and there are two main reasons it may do so. First – if it thinks it is necessary, even if you don’t. For instance, if I asked you to go and play in the middle of the road with traffic coming, your subconscious would NOT allow you to stay there and be run over, because your subconscious is there to protect you and to help you feel good.
The second reason your subconscious will make positive changes is when it believes that YOU want that course of action – wholeheartedly! That’s why positive thinking works and is so powerful – when you set your sights on a goal, your subconscious does everything it can to help you reach that goal.
It doesn’t take a huge event to start that process in motion. Just a simple thought or action, or better still, a thought AND an action combined will trigger the process of positive change.
Your subconscious mind continually monitors everything that is happening around you and inside of you too. A little like a computer program running in the background. That powerful subconscious brain of yours is a bit like a mass storage device. Try to imagine the biggest hard drive you could possibly think of – and then double or quadruple or even times it by a million – and even then, you are unlikely to be anywhere near the capacity your mind has for storing information.
There are trillions of connections in your brain – so no wonder everything we have ever witnessed, learned, seen or done is perfectly accessible in that incredible storage device.
What most people never realize is that the subconscious mind continually monitors each and every part of the body. As mentioned earlier, it allows your heartbeat to remain steady, helping the blood pressure to remain even. It allows the lungs to breathe and then filter clean fresh air, supplying life giving oxygen to every single part of the body, via the intricate cabling system of our veins – those veins carrying blood all over the body.
Can you visualize all of those cables – and your amazing heart working tirelessly, effortlessly pumping blood around a circuit that links throughout the entire body – like some intricate road map.
I wonder if you can see other cables too? Providing signals to your nerves and muscles in the way of neural pathways. So that when you tell your mind to relax your hands for example, you can feel that relaxation spreading around your hands and into your fingertips. You may even feel a tingling sensation as those neural pathways fire off signals back to the brain. Signals which tell the body to rest & relax.
The subconscious mind has a cleverly designed mechanism, one that is monitoring your surroundings, every second of every day – 24/7 – even when sleeping – processing millions and millions of pieces of information with no effort at all. Helping to keep you calm, confident and in control, whatever the situation. This mechanism has been working from the precise moment you were born. In fact, it was developing even from before you were born, which makes it one of the most precise and effective mechanism ever discovered. It controls all of your most instinctual drives. It checks every cell in your entire body continually and it can instantly initiate repair processes without you ever being aware.
And sometimes the subconscious might raise up a little fear or worry of some kind, like an alert so that you deal with whatever it is calmly and simply. That alert can come in different forms, sometimes it might just be a thought, other times a physical sensation. But however it alerts you, you can rest assured that it already has everything in hand and will do the very best for you at all times.
That helpful subconscious mind continues doing exactly what it is designed to do 24/7 and because you are now aware of this safety mechanism, because you realize that if ever there were a problem, your subconscious would simply deal with it, or would let you know about it and then your conscious every day mind could deal with it.
In the future, if you feel any unwanted sensations, you will be able to communicate directly with your subconscious mind by first acknowledging the feeling and then by thanking your subconscious for keeping you safe and making you aware of whatever it is. And you will also thank you subconscious for giving you the opportunity to change the way you feel in a split second.
If you take a moment to simply rest, becoming aware of your breath without controlling it – just being aware. Feel your body relax and as you do, I want you to think about your right arm. Feel how heavy it feels on your lap, or at your side. Disregard any other thoughts or outside sounds and concentrate on that right arm and how heavy it feels. Spend some time doing this and notice that without changing anything about your right arm, that it is indeed feeling heavy.
The influence of our imagination allows us to affect change physically. This is the power of the subconscious and how healing can take place. I am not necessarily saying that hypnotherapy can heal dis-ease, or is a cure and that no other modality is needed. My point is that hypnotherapy IS very powerful and a great tool to add to your medicine cabinet or healing protocol.
To your health & happiness,
Michele Root ~ Empowering You!