If you’re not already someone that meditates habitually, do you ever wonder what the real benefits are for those that do?
During the past three years, I studied a ton about how the unconscious mind works side-by-side with the conscious mind, and it finally hit me (while I was at a three-day event) how it works.
And of course, how meditation comes into play.
Essentially, we have our:
- Conscious mind – the part of the brain that makes conscious decisions such as going to the gym or what to eat for lunch.
- Subconscious mind – the part of our consciousness that takes in information behind the scenes (whether it’s heard, seen, felt, or remembered). We may not be actively aware of the information at the moment. Yet, it still can influence us.
- Unconscious mind – as quoted from Diffen, a part of the brain that cannot be known by the conscious mind and includes socially unacceptable ideas, wishes, and desires.
Now that we understand how the different parts of our mind work, we might start to wonder how we would access what our unconscious mind thinks.
When we take the time to meditate more often than not, I genuinely believe that it allows us to quiet our ongoing, over-analytical thoughts so that we can be open to hearing what our unconscious mind wants to tell us about how to live our best lives.
The subtle hints from our unconscious mind to remind us of our deepest wishes and desires that we’re so afraid of showing the world. The challenge is that we tend to suppress these unconscious desires so profoundly that it feels impossible for us to understand and realize what we genuinely want to make us happy. We go along with what is socially acceptable in terms of what to want, have, and need, then we begin to believe that it’s the only way to live our lives. Ultimately, it makes so many people unhappy, and they can’t seem to figure out why when they’ve reached all the levels of success that they’ve set for themselves.
Subtle hints from our unconscious mind to remind us of our deepest wishes and desires
Of course, we’ve all heard that meditation can be challenging to do when we first start. We get distracted by noises and the continually running thoughts. However, after practice and progressively making our meditations longer, we can only get better and better, which is then where, I believe, the magic happens.
It’s the times where we get out of our head and into our hearts (a.k.a stop overthinking and listen to your deepest wishes and desires), where we find the most joy. So I invite you to start meditating for 1 minute a day, then progress to 3 minutes, then 5, then 10. See if you can allow your unconscious mind to speak to you and give you the answers you’ve been searching for.