What Are You Thinking? And Why?

By Toni Greene, Owner

Happy Hour Yoga Center

. http://happyhouryoga-reiki.vpweb.com

More Complementary & Integrative Healthcare Articles

What Are You Thinking? And Why?

The Conscious Mind and the Subconscious Mind: How They Influence Our Lives

Our thoughts are the seeds from which our actions, habits, and ultimately our lives grow. These thoughts arise through the interaction of the conscious and subconscious minds – two powerful forces that shape our reality. Understanding how each part of the mind works helps us become more aware of how we influence our own lives, intentionally or not.

The conscious mind is the part of our mind responsible for active thinking and decision-making. It’s what we use when we analyze a situation, plan a day, or make a choice. The conscious mind is logical and aware, and it operates while we are awake. It deals with everything we are currently focused on—our thoughts, observations, and judgments. However, while powerful, the conscious mind is only a small part of our mental processes – often said to be just about 5%.

The subconscious mind, on the other hand, runs silently in the background. It stores all our memories, beliefs, emotions, habits, and experiences – everything that isn’t in our current awareness but still influences our behavior. The subconscious doesn’t reason like the conscious mind; it simply records and responds. It accepts everything we feed it, especially through repeated thoughts and emotional experiences, and uses that information to guide our automatic reactions, intuition, and sense of identity.

Thoughts – especially the ones we repeat often – create patterns in the subconscious. When we consistently think a certain way, whether positively or negatively, our subconscious begins to accept those thoughts as truths. For instance, if someone repeatedly thinks, “I’m not good enough,” the subconscious absorbs that idea and shapes behavior to match that belief – often without the person even realizing it. In contrast, positive affirmations like “I am capable and worthy” can create empowering internal programming when practiced regularly.

This connection between thought and the subconscious is what makes our mind so influential over our lives. The subconscious acts like a magnet, drawing into our lives the situations, people, and experiences that align with our dominant thoughts and beliefs. This is why people often say, “Change your thoughts, change your life.” By becoming aware of what we’re thinking and reprogramming our subconscious with supportive, loving, and empowering beliefs, we can shift the direction of our lives.

Tools like meditation, visualization, hypnosis, and affirmations are effective ways to communicate with the subconscious. These practices quiet the conscious mind and open the gateway to the subconscious, allowing us to plant new mental seeds that align with our goals and desires.

Our conscious thoughts shape our subconscious beliefs, and together they direct the path of our lives. By taking responsibility for what we think and nurturing our inner world with intention, we become active participants in the creation of our life experience – rather than passive observers. Everything we have or don’t have, and everything we do, started as a thought.

Look at your thoughts… wow!! And the good thing about thoughts is, you can always change them. So don’t get stuck in your thoughts. Change your thoughts like a remote control – simply change the channel.