“I believe that understanding our subconscious mind is a non-negotiable education for all of us”
We are often directed to the needs of our body, but rarely are we directed to the needs of our mind. And yet our mind is in control of our body. The health of our mind greatly affects the health of our body; therefore, it makes sense to have a greater understanding of how our mind works and what it can do to better support us throughout our life.
As a health professional with a broad clinical background, I could see how difficult it was for clients and patients to make essential lifestyle health changes consciously, even knowing the detrimental health consequences involved if they didn’t make those lifestyle changes. It was often a repetitive cycle with keeping up their changes being the hardest part of maintaining long-term health.
Unfortunately, in today’s world many people know very little about how their own mind works and what it can do to better serve them in their health. Once we become aware of its existence and what it does, it can help us lead a more fulfilled life and help us to achieve our lifestyle wishes and desires. The way we use our mind will either support or oppose the health and life that we truly want. It’s important to update our subconscious mind regularly to support and benefit our present and future health changes and challenges. Focusing on and becoming aware of what’s going on in our mind will open a new empowering world to tap into.
What is the subconscious mind and why is it so incredibly important?
The subconscious mind is our programmed mind, a place where we hold our life experiences. It stores our habits, addictions, beliefs, fears, memories and everything from our past. Neuroscience tells us that the subconscious mind makes up about 95% of our total brainpower and activity, compared to only about 5% of our conscious mind, which is our creative, thinking and present mind. As you can see, the subconscious mind is far more powerful and influential than the conscious, therefore it has a tremendous influence over how we go about our everyday life and the decisions and choices that we make on a daily basis. It can help to shape our personality and who we become; therefore, awareness is key to this miraculous part of us.
Sometimes, it is necessary to re-programme our subconscious mind to keep it up to date with what we want to achieve in our health, and the changes that we want to make. The mind has a specific job to do, and it does what we direct it to do. How we talk to ourselves and the language that we use are crucial to our health and wellbeing. Our body responds to every thought we have. If we talk to ourselves in a demeaning and negative way then this will affect how we feel, think and act, and affect the chemicals that are released in our body. Our thoughts may come from an outdated past programme that creates an unwanted pattern of thought. If we tell it a different story, then the story will change. A different thought will produce a different emotion with a different image and therefore will create different actions and outcomes. If we are still living from our past programmes, of which many will stem from childhood, then our life will remain the same in many ways until we realise that our programmes are holding us back from achieving what we want in our health and life today.
Back to basics…
Everything begins with a thought, every thought carries energy and has an emotion and an image associated to it, then we act. Research tells us that we have about 60,000-70,000 thoughts a day, and a high percentage of those thoughts can be debilitating to our health and happiness. Research also tells us that about 90% of our daily thoughts are the same thoughts as the day before. As a result, very little changes in our day-to-day life and we are largely living our life from our past programmes. We are creatures of habit, and we tend to live a very repetitive life that favours familiarity. But this doesn’t help us when we want change, whether it’s a lifestyle change for health reasons, or our life needs to change in some way.
Changing a limiting belief, in our sea of beliefs that have been stored in our subconscious mind for many years, will take much conscious effort. As with any change that we make in life, it can feel a little uncomfortable at first, because we are shifting from familiar territory to unfamiliar, which isn’t always easy. However, once we have set our mind to the intention of where we want to be with our health, we can move towards it with the help of visualisation, hypnosis, neuro-linguistic programming and, of course, commitment.
Setting the ‘intention’ in your mind of what you want to achieve is beneficial for the path ahead. Writing this down each morning before your day begins and each evening before sleep will help to reinforce what you want to achieve.
Long-term change is often achieved through repetitive thought and action, because the mind learns by repetition, whether it was learning to walk, riding a bike or the ABCs as a child, it all took repetition of action and thought, then it became the perfect programme. It’s the same in adulthood when learning and forming new habits of change. If we get good at becoming aware of those limiting and familiar subconscious thoughts each time they come into the forefront of our mind, then the mind will catch on and understand that we want change. Therefore, the familiar will become unfamiliar and the unfamiliar after a while will become the familiar. Remember, our mind is always open to change, so it will work towards what we want, depending on our determination and commitment.
How is a habit formed?
Put simply, a habit is something that we’ve done so many times the body does it automatically, without having to think about it anymore. Repetitive thought and action become a habitual behaviour. This is when we see the body (which is the subconscious mind at play) take control over the mind. Therefore, to overcome a habit, we need to bring the mind back into control again. Take the habit of nail-biting for example. You have carried out the action so many times that you bite your nails without conscious thought, it becomes automatic, habitual. You can do it anytime, anywhere, without thought. This repetitive behaviour has now become a part of a subconscious programme.
Our internal world can bring a new way of thinking because when the mind and body are in a relaxed state, neurologically, chemically and biologically, the brain is releasing the right chemicals for growth, repair, clarity of thought and energy, which will improve the immune health and help to create the right mindset for change. The brain always releases the chemicals that match our thoughts, good or bad. To build a mental picture of what we want to achieve, and to make that image bright, bold, big and colourful, and to also build that emotional state of awareness to it, is a beneficial act to do. The science of hypnosis, meditation and neuro-linguistic programming is excellent for this. There can be no other way but to move towards what we want. Everything will then begin to gradually reverse in the subconscious mind. Again, the unfamiliar will become the familiar. The health changes that we want to achieve will then become easier to maintain. This is what I work towards, which often includes education, hypnosis, NLP, meditation, energy healing and breath work.
Self-care is also something to reflect upon, because if our mind is supported by self-worth and love then any change will become more effortless. We are worthy of this new lifestyle change, visualise it, know it and believe it!
Fortunately, the subconscious mind is always open to change.
How are our beliefs formed?
Research has found that in the first six to seven years of life, a child’s mind is operating primarily in a hypnotic trance, in theta brainwave. Whatever the young child experiences and observes is directly downloaded into their subconscious mind, which at this age absorbs everything like a sponge. This download then starts to form their beliefs which in turn will form their personality and character. What is downloaded from their environment into their mind from parents, carers, siblings, relatives, teachers, religious leaders etc at this crucial time in their young life is critical to their mental and emotional development and their future beliefs. This can have a huge impact on how they go about their adult life.
Therefore, conscious parenting is essential to the emotional and mental health of our children.
If some of our thoughts and emotions are coming from a belief that was formed in childhood, then those thoughts may not be aligned to what we want to experience in our life today. They may have served a purpose then, but life and circumstances change as we grow older. Therefore, it is beneficial to form a different, updated set of beliefs that work for us in our current health and life.
How we use our mind affects every cell in our body.
To acknowledge and understand our own personal belief systems that we have formed over the years is an enlightening step to take if we find change in certain areas of our health and life difficult to achieve. With commitment and thought, our limiting beliefs can be recognised and updated to form a contemporary outlook that works better for what we want to achieve in our personal and professional lives today. Conscious thought is one of the most important activities we can do for ourselves because it will become the game-changer for our future health and happiness.
My passion is to help people’s lives flow freely without subconscious resistance, by growing awareness to the possibility of choice being the motivator for change. And to know that choice and change come from within, our internal world, not always needing the external world to give us continuous validation for what we choose to do…
My next article will be about hypnosis and why we can’t live without it.
Always know that you are worthy of the very best,
Lisa Rice-Rickman
RN, OHN Dip, BSc (Hons), CLIN HYPN Dip, CNLP, Reiki
Lisa Rice-Rickman
Lisa is a Health Professional, who is a Registered Professional Clinical Hypnotherapist and a Neuro-Linguistic Programming Practitioner who studied with the co-creator, Dr Richard Bandler. She has a bachelor’s degree in Health Studies and studied Health Psychology. Lisa is a Reiki Practitioner and has also studied Rapid Transformational Therapy with the Marisa Peer School. She has her own Mind Health and Energy Medicine business and also works with Evergreen Doctors Functional Medicine in Sydney, Australia where she lives.
Lisa is from London and trained as a Registered Nurse at St. George’s Hospital. She has worked in various specialties of nursing including Paediatrics, A&E, Communicable Diseases, Medical and Surgical. She then studied at the Royal College of Nursing, specialising in Occupational Health. She has worked for the Metropolitan Police Service as a Health Adviser and several other companies and clinics in London, Auckland, Perth and Sydney.
Lisa’s passion and interest in mind health began when she worked on a placement at a Psychiatric Hospital in London. She became interested in how the mind works and how the mind’s consciousness affects health. She has since studied and explored ways to treat mind health naturally, that have no side-effects and are non-addictive.
When Lisa worked as an RN and an OHN in clinics and corporate health, she could see how difficult it was for clients to make essential lifestyle changes consciously, even knowing the detrimental health consequences involved if they didn’t make those changes. It was often a repetitive cycle with maintaining their health being the hardest part of long-term change.
This is the reason why Lisa works with the incredibly powerful subconscious mind, that stores everything from our past. She has studied how the brain processes our thoughts, emotions, memory and consciousness and depending on how people use them, can greatly affect their health, positively or negatively. Lisa works with the ‘whole’ person for optimum health results. This involves the mind, thoughts and emotions and energy healing, which balances and creates harmony within our physical body. As well as being a Reiki Practitioner and a qualified spiritual healer, Lisa has recently commenced the highly renowned Barbara Brennan School of healing course.
