Wondering how to align conscious and subconscious mind? The conscious mind is your waking state. But your subconscious mind lies beneath and controls many of the outcomes in your life, often without your awareness. On the surface, you may think you are “trying” all you can to achieve some outcome in life, but unless you can align the conscious and subconscious mind, all your best laid plans can be completely derailed.
The conscious mind could be considered the iceberg exposed above the waterline. The subconscious or unconscious mind could be considered as the rest of the iceberg which lies beneath the waterline.
How To Align Conscious And Subconscious Mind
Unless all parts of your mind are working together, your unconscious behaviour patterns, thoughts and beliefs can derail your best laid plans. Unless you make these unconscious patterns conscious, they will control your life and you will call it fate.
“Until you make your unconscious conscious, it will direct you and you will call it fate.” – Carl Jung
But how do we make our unconscious behaviours, thoughts and beliefs conscious? Firstly we need to shine the light of awareness on our old, habitual thoughts, words and behaviours. Are they all lining up with our intentions and goals which we say we want? For example, say you plan on losing a stone of weight in the next 3-5 months.
You get a gym membership and start working out. But your old behaviour patterns work against you and before long you find yourself over eating and drinking on weekends. Despite turning up to the gym for 2 months, your interest wanes and you quit before you reach your goal.
Your old behaviour has taken control of your goal and you’ve decided that eating out late and drinking alcoholic drinks is more important than your original goal! What happened?
How To Align Your Conscious And Subconscious Mind – The Self Image
The self image is a good measuring device as to how well you will do at accomplishing a specific goal. The self image is a large part of your subconscious programming and you “feed” it all the time with your conscious thoughts.
“I’m an early riser because I like to do such and such”, “I hate my job”, “I’m not very good at exercising”, “I’m an athlete.”
These are examples of what you might tell yourself given a certain view of yourself, who you are and what you’re capable of. By changing the self image to that of the person you want to become, you can tap into a deeper part of your subconscious mind and better control certain outcomes which otherwise would be much more difficult.
Maxwell Maltz was a plastic surgeon who discovered that many of his clients were still unhappy even after plastic surgery. He started working with his clients before surgery helping them to change their self image. Many clients decided they no longer needed to change their appearance because something inside had changed permanently.
Self Talk
Pay attention to your inner dialogue if you want to change some aspect of your life. It is constantly talking, to others or to yourself inside your head. Your inner dialogue is feeding the subconscious mind on a near constant basis. Unless you learn to control this voice, and notice the subtle suggestions it makes as to what is or is not possible, the harder with will be to align your conscious mind with the subconscious mind.
Using the example above of weight loss, imagine you have set the goal of losing weight over a 3 month period. Your conscious mind decides on the goal and you join a gym and start taking some action. But your inner dialogue keeps telling you to eat the same (bad) food, or that you deserve that nice glass of wine. Old habits dominate your behaviour unless you change the programming and alter your self talk and self image.
Aligning All Parts Of The Mind With Mantras and MetaStories
Most people have mantras they are not aware of:
- I’m a failure
- Money doesn’t grow on trees
- I’ll never be…
- It’s easy for them but I…
- Life’s a struggle
- Why is everything so hard?
- Why can’t I…
Many of these “programs” were taught to us while we were growing up before we had the conscious reasoning faculties to reject them. In fact, most of our underlying beliefs were picked up before we were 10 years old. To align the conscious and subconscious mind, you need to choose a new program you can use to replace old programs which are sabotaging your efforts to make a positive change:
- Money comes easily and frequently
- Things always work out for me
- I lose weight easily
- I get paid for being me
- Life is easy and effortless
- I can do anything I set my mind to
Of course your conscious mind might reject some of the above suggestions. So it’s a good idea to choose new ideas which can be used in a positive way which you have less of a resistance to. Of course your old mantras which don’t serve you will likely have been around for years, possibly decades. So repetition on new ideas will take some time to become habits.
Cybernetic Transposition
Stuart Lichtman was an MIT professor who developed what he called the cybernetic transposition technique. It is a method of aligning all parts of your mind to work together in achieving a seemingly impossible goal. Check out his book below.
The method involves creating a personalised mantra or “meta-story” based on exercises explained in Stuart’s book. By repeating this story over and over you can reprogram your subconscious mind to “flag up” a specific goal which is then focused on by the unconscious mind like a magnet.
Your subconscious mind gets to work even when you aren’t thinking of your goal, and finds ways to bring it about even faster. This is often what is happening when our subconscious and conscious minds are not in alignment. Only we find that we don’t achieve what we want. Our conscious mind is focused on achieving something we want, while our subconscious mind is repeating old beliefs which aren’t in alignment. No wonder why so many people struggle achieving their goals!
Visualisation
Visualisation can be used to communicate to the subconscious mind. With visualisation you are communicating in feelings and images directly to your unconscious mind. This is powerful because the subconscious mind talks in feelings and images during your dreams.
If you learn to relax deeply and do creative visualisation, you may be able to make far more effective changes in your life than you would by thinking, worrying, planning, and trying to manipulate things and people. – Shakti Gawain Creative Visualisation.