One Minute to Mindfulness
Where do our experiences come from? Two people can go through the exact same situation and have vastly different reactions to it. Sometimes, if you’re like me, your reaction to a situation can be borderline irrational based on the circumstances. Why do we act this way? Because the external circumstances aren’t what really matter. So what really determines our experience of life? Not only do I think I have an answer, I believe that this short exercise can allow you to take back control of your own mind.
Every one of our unconscious minds has a screen, like a TV or a computer. Modern medicine has no idea where to find this screen, but still doesn’t doubt that it exists, because we all know it! Everyone sees their experience of life play out on an internal screen. The secret is that there are really two screens: one conscious and one unconscious. Our conscious screen is where we see our life as we currently envision it. In fact, you can’t do anything without first seeing a picture of it. Everything we humans have ever done or created was first seen on this internal screen. But what happens when our external circumstances don’t align with what we see?
At that point, our reaction depends on the other screen, the one we can’t see. For example, if you find yourself feeling road-rage in traffic one day, it’s a sure sign that your unconscious screen is showing an anger memory. So the anger you feel about traffic isn’t really about traffic at all. The traffic is only a trigger. What’s more, almost anytime you have something negative on your unconscious screen, that negativity is based on a lie.
You see, in one way or another, negativity on our unconscious screen can always be traced back to a fear of death. Your unconscious mind creates these triggers as an early-warning system to protect against future dangers. Unfortunately, the unconscious mind often overreacts or misinterprets these “dangers.” Maybe a clown scared you as a child, and now whenever you see a clown you feel fear. You know better now, you know the clown isn’t going to hurt you. But to your unconscious mind, that’s beside the point. It has its evidence, and it will act on it.
So why isn’t this problem restricted to just causing fear? Why can it make us angry, for example? This is actually pretty simple. Identity and self-worth are two things that all of us need as badly as we need the air we breathe. A threat to either of these is a threat on our lives, but not in the same way as a physical threat, so it can provoke a wide range of reactions, depending on the lie, and on the individual.
The lie is what really causes negative patterns in your thoughts, feelings, and even physiology. The good news is that you have the remote control, so to speak. You can change the channel, from anger to patience, from anxiety to peace, and from sadness to joy. And that’s the lesson I want to share with you.
When you realize you’re experiencing negativity from your unconscious mind, the first thing to do is pray. If you don’t believe in prayer, you can instead make a request of your heart. Stop what you’re doing, and just take a quiet moment to reflect. You don’t even need to ask that the picture on your unconscious screen be changed, only that the lie would be removed. Whatever memory your mind is latching onto doesn’t need to be erased. You only need to be able to see it from a truthful perspective. Once you can do that, I always find that it doesn’t bother us so much.
More than half the time, this one step is all that it takes. If not, it means that your mind interprets its own version of events as a trauma, and it’s trying to protect you from any further harm by sending out an early-warning distress signal. This tends to take a bit longer to mend, but it’s still very much fixable. Try to use this simple exercise consistently for a period of forty days. That period of time is usually enough to rewrite the way your unconscious perceives that memory. Otherwise, the only thing I know is to use the Healing Codes. It’s the entire reason they exist, and I don’t know anything that works better.
Have a blessed, wonderful day!