How We Really Create Our Future

If you become aware of your automatic habits and you are conscious of your unconscious behaviors so you cannot go unconscious again, then you are changing. ~Joe Dispenza

Creating Change

If you have been struggling to create lasting change — this alarming statistic may provide the answer to why change has eluded you.

Did you know that 90–95% of our choices and decisions are made unconsciously? That’s a staggering amount if you think about it.

What does it mean that our decisions are made unconsciously?

It means we’re sitting in a row boat without oars and the wind can take us to any given destination. If we’re lucky, it might be a place we like but often it’s not.

The Unconscious

The definition of the unconscious is: “The part of your mind that contains feelings and thoughts that you do not know about, and that influences the way you behave.”

What’s interesting about this definition is that it tells us the unconscious is “part of your mind.” Yet where do we find the unconscious? One of the ways we access it is through our bodies. This is all you need to know to understand how connected the mind and the body actually are.

In order to create the life we truly desire — we have to connect our mind with our body — which means living in an embodied place.

To be embodied means to incorporate all of us — mind, body and spirit.

Being embodied — not only affects our well-being, our health, and the way we show up in the world — it also affects the choices we make and how we create our future.

Our body physically operates unconsciously — our heart beats without us having to consciously tell it to beat, our blood pumps, our cells regenerate, etc.

Our body holds all of our somatic habits — driving a car, washing the dishes, showering — physical behavior that we can do “unconsciously.” We don’t need to consciously think about these actions. So when we don’t need to be conscious — we offer up our control to our body.

Our body also holds all of our memories — including all of our emotions that we have either repressed, ignored, denied, forgotten, or rejected. It basically holds everything we don’t want to deal with.

Let’s say we have some childhood memories that we’ve forgotten or traumatic memories that our mind has blocked from our conscious memory — these memories actually haven’t disappeared — they’ve just sunk into our unconscious where we don’t have to face them daily. At the time that these events happened — they may have been too overwhelming to deal with, or we may have been told to stop crying, or perhaps any loss or grief wasn’t given space to be processed and felt completely. All of these feelings got pushed down into our unconscious. Unfortunately, these feelings don’t go away until we attend to them. Like keeping things in a storage unit, we will have to face the contents someday and we pay a regular price to keep them there.

Don’t get me wrong, our mind is trying to protect us by putting these feelings in our unconscious, but there’s a cost to it. The unconscious part of ourselves becomes a part of a complex part of our psyche that psychologist Carl Jung calls “the shadow,” because it’s hiding in the dark. Once we shine the light on our shadows we make our unconscious — conscious.

Jung says: “Until you make the unconscious, conscious — it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

What often happens if we haven’t been consciously healing these unconscious parts of ourselves is that over time they build up and prevent us from creating the life we desire. We wake up one day and wonder why we aren’t in the perfect relationship, or manifested our ideal dream house or lost the extra weight.

The memories in our body’s cells, organs and bones haven’t forgotten our buried emotions. In fact these unconscious emotions are the very parts of us that are making our choices and decisions for us. They’re protecting us so we don’t get hurt again.

How do we tune into our unconscious and heal these buried parts of ourselves?

Our body inherently knows how to heal. We just have to be present in our body for our unconscious parts to come through.

The first step to become embodied is to tune into how we’re feeling and what our body needs in every moment. Then, as we begin to live in present body awareness—over time we will develop a new relationship with our body and our emotions. When we can accept all parts of ourselves fully and consciously—the buried parts of us will start to feel safe and will gradually come out of hiding.

Embodiment is how we create space for those buried parts to come through. For some of us, those buried parts can feel overwhelming. That is when it’s advisable to seek out the qualified guidance of a trusted therapist and/or healer who can accompany us while we walk into the shadows. Perhaps these unconscious feelings and memories were waiting until you were safe enough to face them either by possessing new skills or having the right people around you.

Summary

When we can intentionally and compassionately live embodied through mind, body and spirit—we can make space for those hidden parts in our unconscious to safely come through.

Once we get to know what’s hiding in our unconscious — we are handed the oars and we get to choose where the boat of our life will go, creating the lasting changes we so desperately desire.

Image by John Hain from Pixabay