Do you Know Where You are Now?
People are often very unaware that their life right now, is actually a summation of every decision or choice they have made in their past. Some ‘know’ but not always consciously, that they are not their real selves. They have learnt to suppress, file away, sacrifice their needs and wants for others, to fit in with the crowd, be it family, friends or colleagues. They may not realise just how much though their real selves have taken a back seat over the years.
What do I mean? Bear with me whilst I explain.
When you were in the womb, you were like a blank sheet of paper. There were no stories, beliefs, emotions or experiences of the world.
Once you are born though, the picture of your world begins to build. You use your five senses to start taking in everything that is going on around you and then all of that information is sent to the brain whose primary function it is to keep you safe. To do this your brain needs to understand what is good and what is bad, what is safe and what isn’t, so it starts processing all of this information and any information that does not appear to have a use is efficiently filed away. By being efficient, the brain has more space to watch and protect. It starts to learn patterns, habits and beliefs that help it process the information more effectively. Let me explain – how do you know a door is a door?
You “know” what a door is, in all of its many forms, from plastic to metal, from functional to designer, size, shape etc. and you probably learned this from your parents, your teachers and books. But when you first came across a door, you needed to learn what it was, how it can actually hurt you (if your fingers are in the way and it closes for example) and how to use it. The brain passes this information back into the memory ready to be accessed whenever you come across another door. Each time you do, any differences are added to that memory bank so that you get more and more of a sense of what the different variants of a door.
What this means is that when you see a door, your brain does not have to re-learn what it is and what you do with it. It just knows and in a fraction of a second, so do you. It has gone into your memory bank of files held in the part of the brain known as the Unconscious mind, searched for the information and presented it to you, without you even knowing that the process has happened!
All of your experiences will have been processed in the same way. Some will be good, some will be bad, some will be safe and some will be dangerous. Some will be fun and some will be scary and so on.
Each time you have an experience the body will produce a chemical reaction at the same time, instructing the body as to what it needs to do. One set of these chemical reactions is known as emotions and for extreme experiences, (usually the ones you remember) there will be an emotional (bio-chemical) memory attached to it. As a result, you will have been experiencing your world since birth, (and arguably before in the womb) with your brain processing, analysing, attaching emotional responses and deciding whether it is good for you or not.
As a young child who knew very little, you were reliant on others to teach you what you needed to learn. So if your learning comes from your parents, school, friends, teachers, work, doctors, society, religion, country etc., and you accept that this learning is the same for everybody, you can begin to see that they ( the adults in your world) will have been through exactly the same process themselves as babies and that what they are (potentially) teaching you and instilling within you are their learned beliefs for life (beliefs), values (what is important to them) and behaviours (habits) that they have learned. Which could begin to explain familial patterns of debt, illness, relationship challenges etc perhaps? Because even if you have done things differently, particularly as a teenager what you have done is taken a learning and said to yourself not me.
As much of this information is stored deep in your memory banks, you may only become aware of it when an outside event triggers the retrieval of the information or when your soul is communicating with you.
You have a powerful library of memories and experiences that your brain accesses to help make choices or decisions faster, sometimes without you actually knowing about it. For example, how you make a cup of coffee, what route to take to work, what sock you put on first, lots of small decisions that you do not give a thought to. Your brain is now acting like a filter to everything you experience and you are using habits, or trancelike behaviour that requires little to no thought from you.
By your early twenties much of this information is already hardwired and is either added to or subtracted from your memory banks according to how your life plays out. You are now, however, unaware of most of that information.
So what does this mean for the you of today? It means that you are potentially living up to 95% of your life unconsciously with your day being based around what your brain understands of the past, through beliefs, values, emotions and habits.
Are you ready to address the issues in your life by clearing those unwanted, outdated conditioning?
If so, click here to buy my book – Midlife is NOT a Crisis. The self help book that offers more!