4 Ways To Stop Your Unconscious Thoughts & Feelings From Ruining Your Life
Don't let emotional issues keep you from living your best life.
Unsplash Unbeknownst to most, your past experiences keep repeating themselves and duplicating over and over again. These emotional baggage issues can lead to PTSD symptoms that can overwhelm your relationships and ruin your happiness.
Even with your best intentions, deep inner work, and being fully committed to not repeating your past, here it is again! Same story, different scenario, new people.
The story remains as the inner experience that you work so hard to change.
Your story has three ingredients: Thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Is there a way out of the past?
Oh, yes there is!
Even though the steps are straightforward and practical, you really have to apply them diligently and repeatedly to leave behind the past.
It’s your emotional and mental connections to your past that repeatedly have you carry them into this present moment and then into your future. Of course, this is not something you do consciously, and in order to stop this pattern, you first need to know what it’s made of.
Obviously, the past is the past. Nobody can deny that. The question is, how do you finally leave it behind without running it as an unconscious program all day long?
What will it take to be able to think about the past with all its painful and traumatic experiences, without reacting and contracting around it?
According to neuroscience, 95 percent of your life is lived as an unconscious program, which only leaves five percent to make conscious choices and decisions. Unfortunately, being unaware of this divide is part of the unconscious. This means that you have no idea that your life is an unconscious program most of the time.
If 95 percent of your consciousness is "stuck" in unconscious behavior based on the past, that means you only have 5 percent consciousness left to "deal" with the rest. That is not a lot!
It means you have to slay Goliath (95 percent) with a small stick (5 percent), and even though the odds seem small, it actually is possible.
You just need to know how to apply the 5 percent consciousness that you have available and keep adding to it by applying these steps:
1. Become aware of what's not working in your life
It always starts with awareness and what you are aware of. Obviously, you cannot be aware of what you aren't aware of, but you can become aware of it by placing your awareness on it.
Get curious about your current life situation. Ask yourself, "What part of my life is not working for me? Frustrating, challenging, something I want to get rid of?"
By focusing on that area of your life, you are becoming aware of it in a more conscious way and the door opens. Now you need to keep it open by walking through the door and getting curious.
2. Become aware of your negative thoughts
What are you telling yourself about your life situation? How do you explain to yourself or others why this is happening to you?
Being curious works much better than making yourself wrong for it, by the way. Curiosity keeps the door open and you want to keep walking through this door to learn about all the ways you tell yourself about yourself.
Please get out a pen and paper and write down what thoughts you are engaging in and believing about yourself, others and the world. Write them down. You are entering into the 95 percent unconsciousness with your 5 percent curiosity and commitment to uncover this big area.
By taking these first two steps, you are engaging yourself in a new way and shining your light of consciousness on the darkness in the unconscious. This already helps you grow your 5 percent to maybe 6 percent, and diminish the 95 to 94.
You just got stronger and took your next step toward freedom.
RELATED: 3 Easy Steps To Help You Overcome Your Negative Thoughts And Get Out Of Your Own Head
3. Become aware of your negative emotions
Keep walking through the door into the 95/94 percent unconsciousness. This is the only place where you can learn more about how you keep reliving the past and how it influences this present moment.
Truth be told, it’s in this moment that you experience your thoughts and emotions, right? Even though they are connected to your past, you experience them now. This is how you "rollover" your past into your present moment, and you’ll do that indefinitely until you stop it. Then you can start creating a new future without the past program.
Are you ready to expose more of what impacts your life 24/7?
Back to your current life situation, get curious (not judgmental) about the feelings and emotions you are experiencing when you look at your life? Anger, fear, frustration, despair?
Write them all down on the next page. Every time you feel another emotion, write it down. Just do your best. You're used to judging your emotions and never really get a chance to be curious about them or learn from them.
Please don’t judge them. That will only keep them hiding in the 95 percent and prevent you from gaining more consciousness and freedom. However, judging yourself for having these feelings is part of what you are becoming conscious of, so use that as part of your curiosity and write "judging" on your page, too.
When you succeed, you’ll now have a page with the thoughts you have about your current life and one with the feelings and emotions about it.
Just by becoming conscious of it, you already have a little more consciousness available and have transferred another 1% from the unconscious to the conscious.
You are conscious of your feelings now, right? Hence, let’s say you now have 7% consciousness and ‘only’ 93% unconscious to deal with. Still a long way to go, but…. you are doing it! Congratulations. Let’s go to the fourth step.
4. Become aware of your own actions
You're going to shine your curiosity and consciousness on your actions now. By doing that, you start pulling more energy to start changing your life.
Notice your habitual behavior of how you react, respond, and act in your current life situation that you don’t like.
Are you overworking to avoid dealing with it? Overeating, drinking, or doing drugs to avoid feeling your despair? Blaming others, yourself or the world for the way your life looks?
Be curious with a strong dose of kindness about how you struggle to be happy, feel loved and just "make it through." Write it all down on the next page. Include all the ways you act, react, or respond to your life and stay open to learning more about yourself and the 93% unconscious ways you live your life.
Most likely, you won’t see it all right way, but please see what you see as you take your first look into your current life and know that you are becoming aware of more of the unconscious ways you keep repeating the life you really want to change.
If you wonder what to do next, I encourage you to keep becoming aware of your thoughts, feelings, and actions and write them down in the categories.
Then ask yourself the question: “Do I want to keep thinking, feeling, and acting like that?”
Most likely your answer is no.
That’s when the next stage begins on how to build your consciousness muscle to choose a different way every time you catch yourself thinking, feeling, or acting in a way you don’t want anymore. This will feel like the heavy lifting in the beginning while you train your new consciousness muscle to say no to the old and choose a new way.
This doesn’t happen overnight! Commitment and curiosity are good companions on this journey. It’s a long and worthy process.
Pernilla Lillarose is a self-love mystic and mentor at Divine Feminine Flow, who helps women experience more love, peace, and joy in their lives. Feel free to check our her free eBook to learn how true self-love can turn your whole life around.