The unconscious mind is the part of us that we forget about. It's the cellar we bury things in when they are too difficult to deal with. It's all the little habits and behaviors that we don't think about and don't know why we do them. It's our very own treasure chest hiding in a dark corner, covered in cobwebs. Everybody has this and most people never shine a light on what's hiding there.

I have a theory around the unconscious mind - it's not as unconscious as you think. The unconscious mind is reflected through behavior, thoughts, and feelings all the time. Ever had a feeling you couldn't place? Ever been triggered? Do you have some habitual behaviors that you can't explain? The unconscious mind is constantly ratting itself out in these sorts of ways, asking to be seen. We just ignore it-over and over again.

Why do you think we ignore it? I believe most of us were taught to do this by other people who also ignored their unconscious mind. Not many of us are taught to pay enough attention to ourselves that we can pick up these little clues when they appear. Most of us fly on autopilot much of the time, allowing our thoughts, feelings, and behavior to be dictated by painful habits instead of conscious awareness and self-mastery.

The underpinning of self-mastery is the ability to pay attention to oneself—not in a weird or awkward way, but in a way that allows us to recognize, understand, and change painful habits of thought, feeling, and behavior. Self-mastery relies on being able to use our logical brain as a means of understanding ourselves in the experience. To do that, we have to free our logical mind from the pain. We have to sit above the pile so we can use it to explore everything beneath it. By stepping outside of ourselves with our logical mind, we gain the perspective needed to rationalize and understand our own habits and patterns.

I think most people are so afraid that their ego will take over that they hesitate to use their logical minds in this way. In doing so, they inadvertently protect themselves from themselves, making their ability to heal both their unconscious and themselves nearly impossible. 

The trick in not allowing the ego to take over is to recognize the ego. The ego offers a painful story all the time. For most of us the ego is extremely wounded and has a lot of bad habits. Recognizing the ego isn't all that difficult. Once you learn to see it you can't un-see it. 

I wrote an article on Substack entitled, "Why "Do No Harm, Take No Shit" Misses the Point". Once you see the ego in this statement you can't go back again. The idea of taking no shit is a self-defense mechanism that's rooted in the ego. It relies on our ability to defend ourselves from the outside world. We don't have to go around being an asshat, but we can't roll over and let people do whatever they want either. That's the gyst of the saying, but it's rooted in ego, self-defense, and pain. Once you can see that clearly it begins to change how you view the world around you.

When you look at yourself, can you see those same stories and beliefs? Can you see that same pain being reflected in how you show up in the world? That is what self-mastery offers you the ability to recognize. We learn to use the logical mind to recognize those things and then change them. We release the stories that cause us to believe we need to defend ourselves and then stop defending ourselves unnecessarily. Frankly, the only time we ever truly need to defend ourselves is if we're being physically attacked. At any other point, there is no need to defend yourself. 

Learning how to use the logical mind this way gives us a lot of tools to be able to dig into the things we consider unconscious. We don't have to be afraid of what we're going to find there when we learn how to keep our logical mind out of the story. Here's the truth about what's there. You put it all there for you to find at a later time. There is nothing there that says you're awful or undeserving. There is nothing hiding in the shadows that says you aren't worthy of love and respect. The unconscious mind is not about uncovering the bad parts of ourselves. It's about uncovering the hidden pieces of ourselves that we created out of pain at some point in the past.

Sometimes I think the fact that we call it "shadow work" or that it's unconscious is what makes people think that the things hidden there are somehow bad. That's simply not the case. It's hidden from conscious awareness but it's not bad. There are actually a lot of very helpful bits of information to be found in the unconscious if we can allow ourselves to explore it freely. The only way to become aware of it is to pay attention to the signals it offers you all the time.

Once you shine a light on the unconscious and learn how to free yourself from the stories and pain you find there, you will feel better. Discovering my own unconscious bits and pieces has freed me from a lot of stuff that I would otherwise still be hanging onto. It's not that I'm done exploring any of this because it's all connected and there are deeper parts to all of it that I have yet to explore. It's just that because I'm willing to do that work when it comes up, because I no longer shy away from any of it, I've freed myself to become more of who I truly am.

You are not your pain. You are not your habits, patterns, behaviors, thoughts, beliefs, or ideas. You are a spirit in a meat suit having a very human experience. Your spirit remembers who you are even when you don't. We're all being guided to uncover the hidden depths of ourselves. There's just a lot of fear out there around what's hiding or waiting for us in the shadows. I promise you, there is nothing there that you can't handle. How do I know that? Because you put everything there. It was yours when you put it there. It's still yours now. Digging it out is how you free yourself from it.

Love to all.

Della