the_mind

Think of yourself as having basically two minds: your conscious mind and your subconscious mind. Your conscious mind is your thinking, awake state of awareness, yet comprises a remarkably paltry 12% of your mind. Let’s see what’s in that 12% . . .

Your Conscious Mind

Your conscious mind has five functions.

Analytical

Rational

Willpower

Working memory

Voluntary body functions

Analytical

First your conscious mind is logical because it is your analytical mind. Its job is to analyze problems that you have and figure out how to handle them. This comes in handy when you are balancing your checkbook.

Rational

There is also a rational part of your conscious mind. The function of the rational part of your conscious mind is to give you reasons why you do the things you do. Did you ever notice that you can always come up with logical, rational reasons for why you do the things you do? We call this rationalization. The only problem with this rational reasoning is that even though it’s logical, 99% of the time it’s incorrect. This is because the true motivation for our behavior and responses comes from a deeper part of the mind that we just don’t have easy access to with the conscious mind.

This rational function is important because it allows you to conjure up answers to some very difficult questions. For instance, have you ever asked a smoker why he or she smokes? Your smoker-friend might say something like: “I smoke because it relaxes me and gives me time to pause and gather my thoughts.” Even though this isn’t the true reason a smoker smokes, it sounds rational and logical and the smoker can comfortably continue to smoke.

Note that the “rational” function is also the “rational-ization” function, which means it creates lies when you need them (like what your smoker-friend says). The sole job of the conscious mind is to think and provide judgments. And part of its job is to protect the feelings felt by the subconscious mind, which means it will LIE to protect the subconscious.

Willpower

The next part of conscious mind is the part that we ask to do things that it was never really meant to do: this is your willpower. Willpower is your ability to control your behavior by stopping and thinking about that behavior first. If you stop and think about what you’re going to say and do before you say or do it, then you are using your willpower.

Willpower doesn’t work very well for changing habits because it’s tiring to consciously think before you act for an extended period of time. The moment you let up, the habit comes right back! All of us have tried using willpower to change something that we dislike. Before coming to see me many of my clients tried to use willpower to change bad habits, such as looking down before their jumps or riding with too long of a rein, but they weren’t successful. They all had the same result: a temporary success, followed by a rebound right back to the habit they were trying to extinguish. And sometimes that habit is even worse on the rebound.

Working Memory

The working memory, or short-term memory, is the only memory you need to get through life on a daily basis. Once a bit of memory no longer serves a useful purpose, it just seems to disappear and we seem to forget it (although we don’t actually forget it). And this is the way it should be. We shouldn’t have to remember everything we’ve experienced, all of the time. That would just clutter up our minds too much.

Voluntary Body Functions

You can stand when you want to, sit when you want to, and raise your hand when you want to because your conscious mind is able to send messages to what we call your outer shell. Your outer shell is composed of the large muscles controlled by the conscious mind. The inner core of your body is the purview of the subconscious mind and includes functions such as: breathing, heart rate, new cell growth, and digestion. This distinction is important because if I asked you to control your digestion, could you do it? I submit that you can, but only by accessing your subconscious through some form of hypnosis.

And perhaps the most important thing to remember about the conscious mind, is that it accounts for only 12% of your entire mind! If you’re thinking that the really important stuff happens elsewhere, you’re right ...

Your Subconscious Mind

The subconscious mind is a level of awareness that you generally don’t have easy access to in a waking state, yet it represents a whopping 88% of your consciousness! Your subconscious has some features that might surprise you ...

It’s the Boss

When you are hired to do a job you either do it or leave because the Boss has the power. Authority means power, right? Well, it probably won’t surprise you to discover that there is no power in the conscious mind’s 12%. That little boss goes through life shouting, talking a mile a minute, thinking, thinking, thinking, providing color and drive—but it has no power of its own.

The subconscious, on the other hand, is quiet like the night sky or the deep of the ocean. Its single most significant characteristic is that it deals from unawareness. It doesn’t tell you “Say boss, I picked up some info for you.” No, it goes quietly about its business performing all its functions. It is so vast and yet so totally ignored as part of your mentality. In fact, most people go through their entire lives ignoring the fact that it exists. Meanwhile, with only the small 12% working for them, they wonder why life is so difficult.

Like an iceberg, the human mind shows only its tip. The rest is hidden out of sight, quiet, dark and ever obedient.

How do we know we have this much power?

Any time the human body is traumatized, the power within is revealed.

Exhibit A: The son jacks up the car and it falls on him. His 100-pound mother lifts the car several feet off the ground, for several seconds, while her son rolls to safety. Where did she get the power and energy?

Exhibit B: Jackie Kennedy took enough Ametol when her husband was shot to flatten a platoon of men, remained awake for three days and nights, completely overriding the effects of the drug. How?

Exhibit C: Your riding and jumping are flawless and you consistently experience peak performance, without ever thinking about it. How?

We can allow the mind to function as it was meant to function when we discover how it operates. Reaching the subconscious requires no effort, no concentration. It is a matter of allowing, not forcing. You allow yourself to relax and then you are in the most receptive state of consciousness.

The subconscious cannot think or reason, and it cannot argue. It can’t judge the merit of an idea, either. But it can do something very powerful. It tells you whether something is smooth or rough, hot or cold, sad or funny, and painful or pleasurable. It feels. The subconscious is your emotional mind. You have feelings about everything in your life, but most of the time these emotions are beneath your conscious awareness, in your subconscious mind. Ordinarily, whenever something triggers an emotion, the subconscious opens up so you can feel that emotion consciously. As human beings we all get to experience the full range of emotions, and that can’t be helped. You learn emotions in different ways. Not all are learned by direct experience, but are learned by watching them.

Who you are, how you respond, and what you believe, are functions of your subconscious mind. All of your automatic responses come from your subconscious mind, including your beliefs. You don’t have to stop and figure out what you believe in order to be true to respond to a situation. You simply know what you believe to be true and your responses are based on your beliefs.

Your habits are a function of your subconscious mind. When you do the same thing in the same way, with enough repetition the subconscious mind will make it a habit. A habit is an automatic response, or reminder to respond, to a certain situation in a specific way. For example, you probably have a habit of mounting your horse from his left side. Each time you approach your horse, you immediately go to his left side. Why? Because your subconscious reminds you to. Why? Because that’s what you’ve always done. Why? Because that’s what you were taught way back when. Why? I don’t know, but I do it too.

People who call themselves “social smokers” will find themselves unconsciously picking up a cigarette when they order a drink or walk into a bar—simply because that’s what they’ve done so many times and because they will be the first ones to tell you that they aren’t smokers, they are just social smokers. Their subconscious minds corroborate that idea by creating the behavior to support it. Luckily, any habit can be changed by working with the subconscious mind through hypnosis (even the habit of calling yourself a social smoker).

The subconscious mind stores the memory of not only everything you experience, but also all of your thoughts, fantasies, daydreams, and night dreams. This occurs because your subconscious mind cannot tell the difference between something that is actually happening to you and something that you are imagining. The subconscious mind records everything you experience, whether real or imaginary, as a memory, and reacts to both with the same intensity. Your inner mind cannot tell the difference! Hypnosis uses that concept to help you reprogram your behavior. Many hypnosis techniques use the imagination to help you actually change what your subconscious is thinking and feeling.

(Note that because of the subjective nature of long-term memory, we never assume that a memory recalled in hypnosis was something that actually happened. We may address it in hypnosis as if it really happened, but we would never assume that it had.)

The subconscious protects you from real danger and imagined danger. An important aspect of your subconscious mind is your protective or self-preserving mind. Its job is to protect you against danger, both real and imagined. This is how phobias or irrational fears can develop. The subconscious mind is using a powerful emotion called fear to try to protect you from what it believes to be dangerous. For example, if a car swerves in front of you, your subconscious will jump to action and tell you to swerve to avoid it.

How the Conscious and the Subconscious Work Together

The subconscious and the conscious minds complement each other; they work together, each doing separate tasks. Your subconscious registers your feelings and impressions, and promptly passes them on to the conscious, at which time they register in your awareness.

The only thing the subconscious can do is agree with you; it was designed by nature to be your servant. If you say, “I’m a terrible jumper,” your subconscious will produce exactly what you tell it to produce. It cannot say No to you.

Think of the mind as operating like a computer. The conscious mind is like the desktop on the display.

Picture the desktop; what’s there? The icons for files you are dealing with right now, and the ones you can easily access with the click of a mouse. Meanwhile, your subconscious mind is like hard drive that stores all of your files. Where the heck are they, anyway? Unless you’re a computer expert, all you know is that they’re in there somewhere, and they’ve got all my stuff! And you also know that without their programs, your information would just be mumbo jumbo.

Regardless of whether you believe your hard drive was empty when you were born or was already filled with thoughts and memories from lives past, it can still be reprogrammed.

Then, little by little, it was programmed by your life experience so that today you are a sum total of everything that has ever happened to you. And I mean everything, from impressions of everything you have ever done, seen, heard, tasted, smelled, or imagined.

Everything?

Yes, because your subconscious holds your long-term memory (sometimes called permanent memory). Recall that I mentioned that you seem to have forgotten some things from your past. The key word there is seem. In reality, you have never forgotten anything that has ever happened to you. Every impression is stored somewhere in your subconscious mind. Using certain hypnotherapy techniques, you can recall or re-experience early childhood events, even your birth experiences.

With hypnosis you can also change your attitudes and beliefs and thereby change your emotional responses. It’s possible to reduce guilt, anger, hatred, and resentment, opening you up to experience more emotions such as care, joy and happiness. Who wouldn’t want more of those?

How to Observe Your Subconscious In Action

Because this may be your initial exposure to an altered state of consciousness, and in order to give yourself every opportunity to observe your subconscious mind in action, the following exercise will illustrate that:

You do have a subconscious mind

It does operate effortlessly

You can guide and utilize its powers

You can tap it for information

If you want some evidence that your subconscious can access just about anything that has already been stored there, practice the following memory exercise.

Let’s review the properties of the conscious mind and the subconscious mind:

Conscious Mind Subconscious Mind

12% 88%

Master Servant

Effect Cause

Thinking Feeling

Perception Blindness

Awareness Involuntary

Will Power

Activity Quiet

Light Darkness

Objective Subjective

Hypnosis is simply about making a change in the subconscious mind. This is very powerful because if a suggestion is allowed to go into your subconscious mind, then it has the power to change your beliefs and change your behaviors. So how does a suggestion get into your subconscious? In other words, how does hypnosis happen?

The Critical Factor of the Conscious Mind

There is another part of the mind, which operates automatically when you are using your conscious mind. It is called the critical factor of the conscious mind, and it acts as a critic or a judge of all suggestions presented to you. Its job is to protect the status quo of your beliefs in your subconscious mind. This is an important function because if you didn’t have it, anyone could walk up to you, say something, and totally manipulate you. When you hear a suggestion, your critical factor checks with your subconscious mind to see if that suggestion is in agreement with your existing beliefs. If it is, the suggestion is allowed to go into your subconscious and the belief is made stronger. If it isn’t, the suggestion is rejected and there is no change.

You can really see the critical factor in action when you try to discuss religion or politics with someone who has different beliefs than you. Because the critical factor doesn’t allow the opposing belief to enter the subconscious and you keep steadfast to your own thoughts. So how do we get suggestions into that subconscious mind? How can we effect change of belief and habits? We use hypnosis.

Hypnosis bypasses the critical factor of the conscious mind in order to open the door to your subconscious mind (i.e., your hard drive) and focus the mind to accept positive information in, such as suggestions. In other words, a hypnotist is a kind of human computer re-programmer. If an idea is permitted to enter into your subconscious, you are positioned to change. In fact, you will automatically begin to respond differently.

Now if this was all there was to hypnosis, we hypnotists would be able to control our clients. All hypnotists would be millionaires for sure, but since we know that’s not the case, I want to address the one element to hypnosis that prevents a hypnotist from being able to control you: you never lose the awareness of the suggestions given to you.

Yes, when you enter hypnosis the critical factor is bypassed, but now your conscious mind takes on the important job of protecting you against suggestions that are not good for you or that you don’t whole-heartedly want. You see, when you’re in hypnosis, you can hear perfectly everything that’s going on. Actually, all of your five senses become sharper, and more powerful. And your ability to decide what you will and won’t do, or what you will or won’t accept is much stronger when you’re in hypnosis. So you see, your conscious mind is still aware and you can hear every suggestion that is given to you.

Our subconscious mind is where our brain deals with habits, emotions, long-term memory, and self-preservation. It is the part of the mind that the hypnotist focuses on, and the part through which it is possible to bypass the conscious mind entirely in order to open the door to positive change.

You’ve Already Been Hypnotized Hundreds of Times

A hypnotic state (also called a trance) is a natural state of mind. Believe it or not, you go in and out of hypnotic trances all day long. You’d be surprised just how many times your critical factor is being bypassed everyday. For example, we’ve all heard of highway hypnosis. That’s when you’re driving down the road and you don’t remember driving the last block or maybe the last several miles or perhaps you missed your turn. That’s because while you were daydreaming, your subconscious mind took over driving for your own protection.

Television is one of our greatest hypnotizers. We tend to zone out and get very relaxed while watching TV. So much so, that sometimes we even ignore things going on around us. Add to that the fact that advertisers know everything hypnotists know about bypassing your critical factor. Advertisers use that knowledge to suggest to you or to hypnotize you into buying their products.

Authority figures can also bypass your critical factors. For example, you will tend to believe people you look up to: those who you think know more than you do. This includes doctors, schoolteachers, preachers, and motivational speakers. All kinds of people bypass your critical factor. Anytime you’re feeling a strong emotion such as love or fear, anger or grief, you are more suggestible. Things said to you, or things you say to yourself, will bypass your critical factor and become part of your subconscious programming. So you see, you don’t have to be in any kind of relaxed state at all to accept suggestion. We call this waking hypnosis, and it happens everyday.

Hypnosis is all around us. Sometimes we have behaviors or feelings that we want to change that need more than just positive suggestions to change them. Phobias, panic attacks, and excessive behaviors are good examples of this. We don’t develop phobias out of a habit, but rather because of some situation that frightened us badly in our past. Usually, this situation occurred during early childhood. For example, most people have fear of public speaking to some degree and many people are terrified of snakes, spiders, or heights. We learn these fears from early experiences sometimes long forgotten. With hypnotherapy techniques, we can remove the fear by changing the response where it lives in your subconscious mind. That’s why hypnosis is so effective for these kinds of problems.

But you have to have the right attitude ...

Attitude is Everything

Three Mental Attitudes Affect Your Hypnotic State

The mental attitude you hold when you hear a suggestion determines whether it goes into your internal computer in order for change to begin, or whether it’s rejected and there will be no change.

1) The first mental attitude you can hold onto when you hear a suggestion is: “Boy I like that suggestion. I know that that’s going to work beautifully for me!” Yes, and it will. You see this attitude means that you passionately want and trust the suggestion, and it should be allowed into your subconscious mind. And because the suggestion is allowed to go into your subconscious computer, the change happens.

The other two mental attitudes will cause you to reject the suggestion, and there will be no change at all.

2) If you’re thinking: “I don’t know, there’s just something a little uncomfortable about that suggestion,” you will reject suggestions for change of things you feel strongly about, such as your morals or religion. In short, there will be no change.

3) Finally, you can also be neutral. For example, you don’t care if you get it or you don’t get it, but you are willing to try new things. But there’s not enough energy behind that suggestion for it to make much of an impression, so it is rejected and there is no change. If you have ever known someone who has said something like, “I tried hypnosis and it didn’t work,” that’s because, providing they went into hypnosis in the first place, they’ve probably held on to this last mental attitude that caused them to fail in hypnosis. When they heard a suggestion they said to themselves, “I like that suggestion. I sure hope it works”. What they didn’t realize was that hope means doubt, and doubt rejects the suggestion.

If you hope it’s going to work, you really don’t believe it’s going to work, and instructs your own mind to reject the suggestion. You can hope all day long that I’m going to make you change and it simply won’t happen. I cannot control you. But if you want the change and you focus on the suggestion with a positive attitude, trusting that it will work, the suggestion will be allowed in and positive change will definitely happen!

Don’t be neutral. Embrace the mental attitude that says, “By golly, I like that suggestion, and I know it’s going to work for me”. When you do that, hypnosis can make changes happen so easily it seems like magic. So you see, you are the one in control; you determine whether or not you can change with hypnosis. When you allow your hypnotist to bypass your critical factor and introduce the suggestions you want, you will get the change you desire.

Remember:

The hypnotist cannot control you, make you do things you don’t want to do, or make you tell secrets. You are always in control.

Hypnosis is a voluntary act. You can only be hypnotized if you want to go into hypnosis and are willing to follow the hypnotist’s instructions. When you do this, nothing can keep you from going into hypnosis and everyone can be hypnotized if they want to be.

You are not asleep or unconscious during hypnosis; you are always aware and able to hear, to talk, and to make decisions. You are intentionally accessing the hypnotic trance that occurs without intent, probably several times a day.

Hypnosis can create powerful positive changes in your life when you hold a positive mental attitude toward a suggestion offered to your subconscious mind.

HOW HYPNOSIS WORKS

I. Conscious Mind/Logical Mind

A. Analytical Reasoning

· This is the part of us that looks at simple and complex problems and gives us the best answer.

B. Rational Reasoning

· This part must give us a reason why we behave in any particular fashion.

· Unfortunately the reason is never original.

C. Will Power

· Will power is the fuel that initiates action towards a given goal.

· Will power is always short lived.

D. Working Memory

· The working memory is the place we store the information that has been drawn from the long term memory

· The working memory is located in the conscious mind for use at any given moment

II. Subconscious Mind/Computer

A. Long Term Memory

· This is where we store the memories of everything that has ever happened to us.

· Everything that we have every heard, seen, smelled, touched or tasted since our brain was formed.

· It is the information that determines how we react to any situation.

B. Habits

· Good Habits - saying thank you, getting exercise, and keeping clean.

· Bad Habits - smoking, eating wrong foods, and biting fingernails.

· General Habits - How we respond to the phone ringing or a doorbell.

C. Emotions

· We can be happy.

· We can be sad.

D. Self Preservation

· This part of our subconscious protects us from any harm - real or imaginary.