Each Journal is a self-reflection practice, helping you connect your conscious and unconscious mind.
Through this practice you will be discovering yourself in a deep and meaningful way. And through these discoveries, you will begin to learn more about changing unconscious beliefs and the behaviors they cause.
Research has consistently shown that conscious thoughts and actions originate from the biases (or beliefs) of our unconscious mind. Everything our unconscious mind has absorbed throughout our lives influences and directs our current conscious thoughts and actions. Our unconscious mind influences our emotional state, our reactions, and our anxieties (fears); it informs our conscious mind how we should feel about nearly everything in our environment.
*It can also move us into physical action without conscious thought; this would be a reflexive action, like catching something that is falling before you even realize that it is falling.
There is a reason our unconscious mind operates the way it does; put simply, it makes life easier. We don't have the time or mental resources to consciously think about how we should feel about everything happening in our environment; so our unconscious mind handles a majority of that process by drawing on our knowledge and past experiences. An interesting example of this is that most people tend to sleep better to the sound of birds singing; this is because the unconscious mind recognizes that birds only sing when they feel safe, therefore indicating that you are in a safe environment.
The Unconscious mind also handles mundane and repetitive tasks, like finding each letter on a keyboard when typing, speeding up the process and freeing up your conscious mind to think about what you want to type, not how.
The unconscious mind is a very powerful tool and very useful; with far more implications than what we've described here. That being said, there are drawbacks to this automation. Check out the next tab for more information.
One drawback to automating our thoughts and actions is that poor thinking habits tend to get automated over the years. A negative thought repeated time and time again can become a belief and then can become cemented into your unconscious mind. This repetition could happen in childhood and the belief could carry into your adult life.
Your mind, specifically your unconscious mind, acts in accordance with these beliefs. So when these beliefs work against what you want to do or accomplish, so does your mind. And this happens without conscious awareness; a lot of times it simply manifests as things like anxiety, lack of motivation, lethargy.
Remember, these are not beliefs that you chose, these are ideas that have become beliefs because they have been repeated, been reinforced by your environment, or caused by traumatic events. See the next tab for some examples of how this happens and what it looks like.
Examples:
If you are told at a young age that you will never be good at a particular sport, and you accept this and begin repeating it to yourself; it will become a belief and that belief will cement into your unconscious mind. Once this happens, you don't need to think about it consciously, if the sport gets brought up, you no longer consider the why, you simply know that your not good at that sport.
An idea can also become reinforced by your environment to become a belief. If an individual is in a toxic relationship and her partner consistently tells her that she is not good enough, over time, she may come to unconsciously believe this idea. Remember the unconscious mind is non thinking, it just takes information and moves to action; so if this becomes a belief, she will likely begin unconsciously acting in a way that supports her 'not being good enough' in multiple facets of her life.
