By Jenny Peterson
If you want to heal your chronic symptoms using your mind, then there is some prepwork to do.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but your subconscious is most likely full of clutter right now that is blocking your healing.
That clutter needs to be cleaned up so you can do what I call “the deep work” otherwise your brain will backfire on you.
I will be going over 4 ways you can prep your subconscious for doing the deep level healing work. I promise you, if you skip this, you will only delay your healing!
If you walked into a space that needed a major clean up, you wouldn’t do the deep cleaning first like the walls or carpets. You would have to pick up the things that were getting in the way of cleaning those, like clutter on the floor, things on the wall, furniture, etc.
The same thing is true when it comes to doing mind body healing. Without working on the surface level subconscious patterns, the clutter, it will be impossible to do the deep work.
I have mentioned in many of my blogs and podcast episodes about surface level work and deep level work when it comes to healing. Essentially both types of work are needed to rewire the subconscious and bring safety to your body to heal. Surface level is more conscious level stuff that you can do right now and deep level work is digging into the survival subconscious patterns that are at the root of symptoms.
Everyone thinks that they can go right to the big stuff, the deep work. This simply doesn’t work due to the brains design.
For you to be successful at anything, you have to train your brain. Get accustomed to doing certain things over and over again. A professional quarterback doesn’t become successful overnight by throwing a football once. They practice daily, year round, building those automatic patterns in their brain and body.
For you to do the deep work, you will be required to look at your beliefs, memories, thinking patterns, etc. If you don’t train your brain to see those patterns, they will be hard to see. If you don’t practice shifting thoughts in the moment, shifting something that happened 20 years ago won’t be easy. If you don’t build that discipline muscle with basic daily stuff, then doing it with the deep stuff won’t happen either.
If you are someone that has chronic symptoms for a long period of time there are many patterns that need to be cleaned up to ensure long term success. When symptoms become our focus, that becomes a pattern. When we fear our symptoms, that becomes a pattern. When we complain about our symptoms, that becomes a pattern. I could go on and on.
These patterns that have gotten woven into our minds from years of having chronic conditions are just as important to address as the deep patterns.
Subconscious work is the work of neuroplasticity. It is changing old patterns in the brain. You have been doing neuroplasticity for years and don’t even know it. Anytime you do something different than what you normally do, you are breaking that old pattern in the brain. The pattern gets weaker.
When you repeat something new over and over again, that becomes a new stronger pattern. Learning is neuroplasticity.
Your brain is amazing and in order to heal you need to take advantage of this and understand how it works.
Before I dive into the 4 ways to prep your subconscious for healing, I need to say this.
These 4 suggestions are only a part of the process. They are not going to be the specific targeted work that you need to do for your symptoms. A pet peeve of mine is when someone says to me, I’m doing everything you mentioned on your podcast like smiling more, gratitude, visualizations and I’m still not better.
My friend, this is not what I said.
Remember these are the ways to prep your subconscious for the deep work. The deep work, which is your targeted work for your symptoms, still needs to be done.
Alright, now lets get to the list.
1 - Switch up your morning and evening routine.
The best times to rewire your subconscious are upon waking and before you go to bed. Now if I can bet, either negative thinking or your phone is taking up these times.
You are what you repetitively do. That’s why when it comes to retraining your subconscious mind, you have to start becoming conscious of how you spend your time.
When you get up, are you grabbing your phone to scroll? Do you immediately start thinking about your symptoms and how today is going to be with them?
When you go to bed, what is on your mind? Are you focused again on your symptoms, are you thinking about what went wrong in your day? Are you scrolling and filling your brain with more negative thinking patterns?
Ask yourself the following questions to determine if your morning and evening routines are serving you or not:
Is my current routine adding value to my life?
Do the things I do daily help me reach my healing goals or not?
How can I restructure my morning and evening routine to support my healing?
Any actions that do not add value to your healing are brought to the surface here and the good news is that they can be changed.
Here are a few ideas for creating a new morning and evening routine:
Incorporate meditation and/or visualization at either one of these times or both.
Get a gratitude journal and write down all the things you are grateful for before you go to bed.
Smile upon waking, and tell yourself “today is going to be a great day!”
Read a personal growth book upon waking or before bed
Get in slow, gentle movement upon waking.
Don’t pick all of these things to start with right now, just pick one. As you continue doing it, it will become second nature and then you can add another one.
This suggestion is going to teach your brain to start and end your day differently, which will make a difference in how you feel emotionally, and maybe even physically.
2 - Remove “I Can’t”
You have approximately 60,000 thoughts per day and a majority of them are negative. The brain is naturally wired to do this for survival but we also have to take some responsibility with it as well.
Have you ever met a person that has overcome bad or hard situations in their life or accomplished something really big, that uses the words “I can’t?” You never will. Because if they did, they would’ve never gotten to those places using that language.
On the other side of the coin, listen to a person that complains about their life and you will hear alot of “I can’ts”
These are patterns in the brain. And it is why I love the saying, “how you do anything is how you do everything.” Once you wire your brain with using the words “I can’t” for one thing, you will start to use it for everything. The same is true for the opposite.
There are most likely a lot of negative thought patterns running through your mind and I don’t suggest trying to micromanage all of them because it will be overwhelming. Instead, focus on one impactful and powerful aspect of removing “I can’t” from your vocabulary.
To do this, start with the following:
Set the intention. I suggest in the beginning of your day, tell yourself “today I’m going to be aware of how often I say I can’t.”
When you notice it come up, don’t get mad, just observe.
You may even want to write down every time it comes up, just so you can see how big of a pattern it is for you. The purpose of this is to build your awareness muscle.
Then once you build your awareness around this pattern, you can replace it with something better. Something like “Maybe I can try” Maybe I can do it” Maybe softens this approach and makes it feel not so big. Then you can step into “I can.”
Another one that really makes a big impact is, when you say “I can’t” replace it with “I choose not to.” This one is not always able to be used in every situation but a majority of the time it can. This is very powerful because it lets us see that it is a choice.
For some, the reason they use the word “I can’t” is because there is something deeper going on, like a fear of failure. It's important to recognize these patterns. Notice when you say I can’t and then ask yourself, but if I did do this, what would I be in fear of? Remember that whatever comes up with this is going to be an old pattern. It's just a story. You get to decide how much power that story has in that moment and on your life.
This suggestion of removing the words “I can’t” is important for all the reasons I stated and also for the simple fact that when you are doing deep level work, there are going to be days that you don’t want to do it. Your old brain may try to slip into that old pattern of saying you can’t and because you already practiced this, it may never even present itself or if it does, you know what to do to debunk it.
3 - Shift Your Focus
What you focus on grows.
I’m sure you have heard that before. But do you really know the impact that it's having on your healing? I don’t know about you, but most people that I talk to that have chronic conditions are heavily focused on what they don’t want to happen and their symptoms.
So lets just say a person puts a lot of focus on worrying that they will be like this forever and never be able to enjoy life. They see themselves being in the same place they are now, never getting better.
Knowing that your subconscious is always listening and that whatever you tell it, it considers true whether it is or not, is this a way of thinking that will serve your healing?
Rather than putting focus on what you don’t want happening in your life, put focus on what you do want happening. Again the brain doesn’t know the difference but it relies on you to be the captain of the ship telling it where it needs to go.
The same is true when it comes to symptoms. If you have chronic symptoms, these are typically not life threatening. They may feel like they are ruining your life but they are not life threatening. So the more you focus on them, the more they will continue to be your focus and consume your days.
Focusing on your symptoms is not going to resolve your symptoms. It is actually the opposite. The less you focus on your symptoms and the more you focus on shifting your mind, it will create a better healing environment for your body. Remember your body doesn’t get the permission it needs to complete the healing process until the mind is at peace.
So to start shifting your focus, you can do a couple things, again you don’t need to do all of these at one time. Just pick one.
When you notice your brain is thinking about symptoms, worried about them, or wanting to research about them, simply make a shift to something that weakens that old pathway. Smiling is great for this. We not only want to t-bone that old way of thinking but if we can replace it with something that brings in a little dopamine, that's even better.
Throughout the day, feel and picture what you want your life to be. See yourself eating anything, driving, or traveling with your family. Whatever it is that you WANT. Then add in the feelings of how this makes you feel. Now if your old negative nancy brain butts in and tells you all the reasons you can’t have that, just ignore her. She eventually will go away if you choose to not give her energy. It's just fear, not real fear, and an old story, that is trying to keep you safe.
This suggestion of shifting your focus is very important again for preparing you for the deep work. If you practice this, by the time you get to that work, your brain won’t be pulling you into rabbit holes that distract you from your healing because you have mastered your mind.
4- Change Your Environment
When reprogramming your brain for success, you have to limit negative influences in your environment. Your subconscious mind is constantly absorbing information from outside sources and using that information to form beliefs that shape how you think and behave.
Negativity from the daily news, toxic people and social media can have a profound effect on your subconscious mind without you even knowing it.
I suggest you:
Turn off the news
Get out of groups that are for people with chronic conditions (these are often more negative than positive)
Limit hanging around with people that are negative.
Stop following people that are clouding your thoughts regarding healing.
Buy books or listen to podcasts that are related to personal growth.
Unsubscribe from email lists that don’t support your healing.
The general rule is: if you are being taught to fear your body or something is attacking you, it's not helping you.
Your surroundings are super important.
Remember that not everyone is going to understand what you are doing either, that is ok. Support from someone doesn’t mean that they need to understand it or help you with it. Ultimately, this is your healing journey and your best support is YOU and what you decide to fill your mind with.
HOW TO KNOW IF IT’S WORKING
Subconscious rewiring can be tricky – But there are ways to tell if your efforts to reprogram your mind are working.
You’re becoming more self-aware. You must be aware of your subconscious mind in order to reprogram it. Are you getting better at stopping negative self-talk? Are you able to shift your focus at will? These are signs of self-awareness.
You take more risks. Everyone has different risk tolerances, but limiting beliefs cause us not to take any risks at all. When you reprogram your mind, you’ll increase your confidence and be ready to get out of your comfort zone.
You attract positivity or new changes in your life. You will notice that certain things will just happen to fall in your life, new opportunities surface or people start to respond to you differently.
Healing your symptoms using your mind is not an overnight process. Baby steps my friend. But if you do it right, you will receive long term success.
Start with these 4 steps to prep your subconscious for healing and you will be off to a good start!
These 4 ways of prepping your subconscious are also a part of the bigger picture, which is helping you step into a 2.0 version of you. Every time you do one of the suggestions I gave, you are building trust with yourself. You are building your confidence. That means that you are providing safety to your body, so it doesn’t need to adapt anymore, which means less physical symptoms.
Isn’t that what you want?
Doing mind body work on your own can feel like there is so much to do and you don’t know where to start. Let us help you simplify this process by providing you with a step by step plan for your healing.
If you would like to work with myself and the MBR team, the first step is to request a healing plan. This healing plan will be the exact steps you need to take to address your chronic symptoms and how we can support you in that plan.
Without a plan, you can plan on your old patterns to continue taking control and getting in the way of your healing.
We got your back at MBR.
We get it, you're desperate to have your illness be a thing of the past, not something that defines your days. But trying to heal WITHOUT a custom plan is costing you precious time, money and energy!
You are unique, your symptoms are connected to very specific patterns within your subconscious.
Without a plan unique to you, you will continue struggling and miss out on the life you deserve to be living! To help you get started on your long-lasting healing journey, we would love to provide you with a healing plan that is unique to you. Get your custom healing plan today!
You can also Download my free healing guide, “Why Can’t I Heal” where you will learn the 5 reasons that you haven't healed despite everything you've tried. These are the missing pieces to your healing and the key to resolving your symptoms for good.
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