Are you struggling with change? Do one of these statements match your life?
- I know what I want. I’m trying. It’s not happening, or it’s so slow I’m frustrated.
- I don’t know what I want, but something has to change.
- I can’t make changes because of my responsibilities, or my situation, or something I can’t change. I’m trapped.
- My life needs to change but I’m barely coping as it is. I can’t handle making changes.
- My life is painful but change could make it worse.
- How can I be sure I’m doing the right thing?
Even when you want change, it can be difficult. It’s important that you satisfy your personal values and know you are doing the right thing. With the right information and tools, change can become much easier, even when you feel trapped by your situation.
Any effort to make a change, or to decide what to change, or to know what could change, is complicated by the fact that your subconscious mind considers any change a threat. In fact, your subconscious will sabotage any efforts to make decisions that lead to change and it will sabotage your efforts to make change. This sabotage occurs because your subconscious believes that any change is bad, even a change that could make your life better!
Why would your subconscious sabotage a change that could make your life better? Your subconscious mind runs on primitive survival programs. For your subconscious, different is dangerous. Your subconscious is not concerned with your quality of life – it’s concerned with keeping everything the same. Why? Because you have survived with the past, so to protect your survival, keep things the same as they were in the past so you will keep on surviving. Back in the cave, a simple change in where you walked could expose you to a big hairy beast that wants you for dinner.
Your modern, cognitive brain knows that you can make changes without attracting dangerous hairy beasts that might want to eat you. Your modern, cognitive brain would be more concerned with traffic than hairy beasts.
The good news is that you can teach your subconscious brain to accept changes that make your life better. The challenge is to talk to your subconscious in a language that it understands. To help you reach your subconscious I have created a set of tools on the Living Your Light CD or Download. These audio files can be played while you’re doing other tasks, as long as those tasks don’t require focused attention. For example, you could play them while folding laundry, but not while driving. Enjoy!
Insights Column
September 2013
Tone Magazine
