Tag: subconscious

At My Age Words Are Scary

Sometimes we forget how scary words can be. We should have learned at a young age that words have great meaning but sometimes we forget.

Like when Little Red Riding Hood had her conversation with the big bad wolf who threatened to eat her up! Yeah, that should have been a hint he wasn’t there to play Candyland.

But I for one have too many times been guilty of dismissing the enormous power of language over our lives. Despite the little engine that could, I have too frequently told myself I can’t.

We are wired to absorb words into our brain, then they settle somewhere in our word vault where they sit, either doing good or bad as we plow through life.

Yes, I used plow because sometimes life can be as hard as digging up dirt in a rocky field.

Yet although we are aware that words can be damaging, abusive and harmful, we are often the ones who foist the harshest of the vocabulary upon ourselves.

Our subconscious, which is not always a friend by the way, can put the kibosh on our good times. Sort of the way a metabolism that sees carbs and ignores their existence instead of breaking them down, can create more fat cells.

Even if we change our rhetoric and tell ourselves we can instead of we can’t, our subconscious refuses to accept the latest version of our confidence level.

The negativity we have pushed forward stays and overpowers any new positive thoughts.

And yes, although we are saying nice things about ourselves, our subconscious, who let’s face it runs the show, isn’t buying it. So we’re locked into old ways of thinking, when we may have not been too happy with us and inserted some pretty rough stuff into the old confidence mechanism.

Our subconscious is like a movie critic that only likes black and white pictures and dismisses any benefits of color.

So how can we change our attitudes and fight this monster we may have created?

By the way, not everyone has filled the subconscious train with negative cargo and been unkind to their psyche, but many have. As one who stowed away plenty of harmful baggage, I’m here to say, that train is tough to get up a hill.

We all have a way to sabotage ourselves even if we don’t choose to do so. Our subconscious will find a way to keep you from doing the things you really want to experience, because it’s very tone deaf.

Yet, I still believe knowledge is power and so I’ve adopted a new attitude ala Patti Labelle. A new battle attack against a subconscious that has run the show for years. That was wired in our childhood. I now choose to be the new General George Patton, a real son of a bitch. I am taking back the reins of this old work horse and jumping over those hurdles.

How am I achieving this great feat you ask? I assume you would want to know because you’re still reading, so here goes:

I have eliminated the words “At my age” from my vocabulary. Or sure they can be used with other words, but no longer together. I seriously could not believe how many times a day I said these three self-sabotaging words. Is the phrase just another aspect of aging? Who knows, but it’s not good.

Do you want to travel to…? At my age I can’t rush around so much.

Should I buy a new couch? At my age why spend the money?

At my age I’m slowing down.

Do I need a new car? At my age…at my age… What the hell? Who am I methuselah?

So recently I head a story from a friend about an incredibly successful and influential man in his nineties remarrying for the fourth time.

“Wow, quite an optimist,” I said.

“No, you don’t understand,” my friend said. “That’s not how he thinks. He lives like he’s in his forties and has his whole life ahead of him. I think he believes he’ll live forever.”

I was dumbfounded. “Yes, but we don’t,” I said. Well I really didn’t say that, it was my subconscious adding its two cents.

“That doesn’t matter to him, he acts as though he’ll live forever and therefore he believes he has all the time in the world.”

Point taken, at least on a conscious level.

I decided I would embrace this new way of thinking. I would do the things I had told myself I was too old to do, feel, think and achieve.

After all I had my whole life ahead, right? No one actually knows how long that is, so why not believe it’s going to be super long?

Of course, my subconscious mind scoffed, fought for power and tried to override this whole new me, but I prevailed.

I have totally rearranged my thought process from, should I? to, why shouldn’t I?

We all should and age shouldn’t determine any decision that would bring happiness or more satisfaction in our lives.

Perhaps the key to staying young is simply not accepting that you aren’t. I know words have power and I am using all of mine to become that little engine that could. I think I can I think I can, No, I know I can. At my age at least I’ve learned that.

Oops, okay that was the last time I say them together, but it just seemed to fit in this instance.

Someone once said, “Words mirror how one feels and thinks. The moment people say something, they are already inevitably shaping the world.”

It’s your world, so take control and shape and shift it as you will. For as long as you will.

In Dreams We Can Fly

An interesting thought occurred to me this morning as I awoke from a really crazy dream. Apparently as we grow older the only thing about us that doesn’t change is the ability to dream.

People interpret dreams in hopes of understanding their meaning. But does knowing what they mean change our lives, influence our choices or improve our ability to achieve our goals? Some believe it might. As far as I’m concerned the jury’s still out.

Of course there are the usuals and recurring episodes I and many others view nightly.

Ones like I’m late for my finals and can’t find the classroom. Or I haven’t read any of the assignments all year. These stress dreams as they’re called still awaken me in a state of “wow, that was scary” even after all these years.

Then of course we all have the powerful dreams where we are with those who’ve left us and awaken with a certain sadness at facing reality once more.

One of the things I find most puzzling about dreams is ones when I find myself in a place I’ve never been in my waking life. The setting is familiar, and I return to that place on a consistent basis. These are very inviting places I remember when I dream of being there again. These are dissimilar to other dreams I soon forget, but these places remain in my memories always.

For me it is a department in a store I’ve never seen. It recurs occasionally as though I’ve just been shopping there. But I haven’t because it only exists in my dreams.

A lake house where I enjoy spending time appears as well.  I also see a modern cityscape where the view is futuristic like a movie about life on planet earth fifty years from now.

The only similarity about these locations is they all sport beautiful views to which I am partial. But the familiarity I feel when they appear in my dreams is palpable.

It’s almost as if these locations are movie sets I choose to use as a backdrop to whatever script I’ve written for that night’s episode.

Of course it begs the question…are they? Movie sets I mean. Are our dreams merely the motion pictures we write and produce each night based on real life stories we live each day. Are they the nightly wrap up our conscious mind memorializes in our subconscious to use at a later time?

It’s rather surprising how dreams can elicit so much emotion. We can awake sad, frightened, puzzled and any number of emotions from a night’s sleep. We even awaken from the creepy ones with hearts pounding. So it’s obvious dreams have a physical effect.

Many of our dreams we forget, but the ones that seem to stick in our minds bring a need to analyze them and determine what they were trying to tell us. Like a secret message from our subconscious we are compelled to decipher. If we fail to decrypt the secret could it have implications in our waking lives?

Is someone or our own mind trying to help us in some way to avoid a mistake we are about to make?

I think that’s a possibility. In my own life I have been faced with choices and dreamed about the decisions. Failing to understand who or what was warning me, they’ve turned out badly.

So how do we learn the language of our dreams? Shouldn’t we be able to understand our own minds?

Can they warn us if we don’t dismiss them so quickly?

Experts spend their lives studying the human brain. It’s truly a remarkable computer that stores, creates and functions as the clearing house and control center for our entire body.

Quite a little workhorse taking on so many tasks.

Yet I find myself feeling that dreams may be something very different. Are they merely movies we create each night out of the multiple choices in our catalog combined with experiences from our day?

Or are they a vehicle to allow messages inside our brain from parts unknown? Is our imagination busily at work each night writing and editing what we see?

Or is there something much more?

Because most people share the types of dreams they have, like the stress dreams they select when they are under duress, does our brain provide the elements from which to choose?

Why do so many people have the school dream, the falling dream and of course the flying dream?

I especially love the flying one because it is such a freeing sensation. Some meanings are obvious as in our desire to escape our earthly bounds and soar above.

Yet some experts suggest “dreams help us deal with emotions, solve problems or manage hidden desires. Others postulate that they clean up brain waste, make memories stronger or deduce the meaning of random brain activity.”

A new theory claims “nighttime dreams protect visual areas of the brain from being co-opted during sleep by other sensory functions, such as hearing or touch.” Experts also suggest that dreams help us process emotions and memories and can also inspire creativity and provide self-knowledge.”

One experts notes that “Even though the exact mechanisms and functions of dreams are still not fully understood, understanding their importance and interpreting them can enhance our quality of life.”

Perhaps all these things are true, but I can’t help finding dreams an interesting way to spend a night. I’ll continue create new blockbusters if my subconscious allows and add more flying to the mix. Perhaps I always secretly wanted to be Tinkerbell and all I really crave are some wings and a magic wand to be happy.

Now that wasn’t that hard to interpret, was it?   

How to Live Without Guilt?

How To Live Without Guilt?

The other day as I was erasing old emails and clearing more room on my iphone memory, I thought about how easy it was just to sweep away the past. With a simple swipe of my finger old emails, phone calls and messages disappeared into the ether to be lost forever in some nether world of clouds. To remain forever somewhere with no permanent way to simply clear out the storage or turn off the whole damn computer.

Suddenly I realized how much better life would be if we could simply swipe left and erase the memories that fill our minds with sad and unresolved messages from the past.

Experts (whoever they are) claim that a major portion of our decisions in life are actually made by our subconscious mind.

In other words, we think we are making our choices, but surprise, surprise we’re not.

That little container of all hurts and negativity from the past has stored away all the memories guaranteed to sabotage even our most diligent efforts to cast off the bad.

As long as that storage memory is the keeper of such power we can only make what we believe are our conscious decisions. But are they?  Did we really choose that chocolate ice cream or did the choice come from somewhere deep inside the recesses of our mind. Selected for us from a childhood trauma in second grade when there was only vanilla left, but you wanted the chocolate and now you’re compensating and…

Wow that’s a pretty scary scenario I’d say. It kind of tells me that no choice is ever without some link to the then.

In our memory bank the storage is never full and we can’t find a way to empty out the old clutter and input new and fresh ideas. So even if our attitudes and our thought processes have evolved, the little storage bank in our brain has a strangle hold on our creative minds. Too deep?

Okay let’s make this a whole lot easier for those of us who haven’t had our morning coffee yet, that sucker called the unconscious mind is out to get us and we really have no way to fight the bugger off.

Clear now? Yep, and seems even more scary after our coffee.

Our brains are truly only computers that begin accumulating information when we are born. At least that’s the popular notion. I know there are others that may disagree, but for our purposes I’m going with the computer thing here.

So whatever is inputted into our brains goes immediately to a storage locker titled our subconscious that locks it away and it alone possesses the key.

Thus we simply go through life making choices based on information we believe we can clearly see and know. Wrong, it’s that evil sabotaging sucker up there in our brains, dancing around a fire with a key that gives it control.

So how do we defeat the little bastard? It’s not easy I can tell you as someone who has gone more rounds with my subconscious than Ali or Fraser.

So many times in the past I’ve believed decisions I’d made were perfectly rational and well founded. Think again.

At the end of the day a part of me had reverted back to old patterns I thought had long been forgotten and eliminated from my psyche.

So what the hell can any of us do to change the old and bring only the new forward?

Some experts say we can reprogram our mind through deep meditation or a voice talking to us while we’re sleeping.

My subconscious just laughed. No, I actually heard it daring me to even try.

Wow this is pretty heavy so let’s lighten it up. Disguise it as advice which my you-know-who won’t pay any attention to anyway.

I have some suggestions for eliminating the power our subconscious mind wields over us.

One: eat more chocolate. I believe we’re all aware, especially chocoholics that a giant dose of cocoa beans will completely take our brains into another world. Coat them with a haze rendering them weak and spaced out. Thus, the subconscious will be buried under a sea of Oreo cookie residue and unable to exert any power.

Second: get into a food coma. I highly recommend this be done at Italian restaurants. I have nothing against Asian, Mexican, Greek or any other ethnic offering, but hey let’s remember our history here. A couple of bowls of pasta and a slice of pizza and Brutus was all about the knife in Caesar’s back.

A good Italian food coma does wonders to cloud our brains. Besides even the worst pizza is better than any other food on earth. So while that thing in our heads is sleeping it off we have the power to make our own choices.

Trick it: Yes, that’s what I said. Trick your unconscious mind into thinking it’s making the decision, but use reverse psychology.

For example, a jerk asks you out on a date. He’s the same type of slimeball you’ve always been attracted to until it’s too late. So, this time you say out loud “he’s such a saint.”

Phone a friend and sing his praises about the work he’s done with orphans in Africa and how kind and thoughtful he is. Your saboteur will be listening carefully to this conversation and the very fact he is everything you have never been attracted to will make him extremely desirable to the little evil bully in your head. So if you convince your brain he is perfect, your mind will instantly reject him on all levels and you will saved from yet another bad choice. Brilliant huh?

But why do we have to go to such lengths to trick ourselves into making smart choices? Who instilled us with the bad habits we have embraced?

Damned if I know. Who am I Freud?  I mean it doesn’t take much to see if a guy’s a jerk, yet our brains seem to overlook the obvious. Or do they?

Are we aware we are actually making bad decisions? Don’t we know that when we’re on a diet that double chocolate brownies are not allowed, but we stuff them into our mouths anyway?

So why do we give up control to you-know-who, he who shall not be named?

I say it’s because it’s easier than fighting.

Yep, just give in. Then you can just blame that evil little monster in your mind for all your bad choices.

Otherwise, we’d have to blame ourselves and that guilt would force us to make more bad decisions.

Perhaps the subconscious mind is simply a great deal stronger than us, especially as we age. Seriously how would you fare in a tug of war right now without help from Conan the Barbarian?

I’d be mud bound in two seconds.

Your brain has given you a great excuse to make stupid choices. I say accept the gift and be grateful! Go ahead, embrace your subconscious, love the sabotage and shovel that Godiva in with no guilt. After all you’re not responsible. It’s you-know-who.