A Revolutionary Time for Therapy and Personal Development

One of the key findings of modern neuroscience research is that unconscious regions of our brains have a far more powerful influence on our emotional tendencies and habitual behaviors than our conscious regions of our brains (Haidt, 2006). This means that your attempts to consciously alter your emotions and behaviors will continually fall short as long as your unconscious mental processes remain concealed. This means that your emotions require careful tending to. You can’t simply ignore emotions, and in believing you can, they will rule your life and cause havoc to your social relationships and career.

Many older forms of therapy mostly help you understand thoughts and emotions that can be consciously recognized and talked about. With mindfulness therapy, the focus is on unconscious parts of yourself. The unconscious brain is estimated to process information 200,000 times faster than the conscious brain (Dijksterhuis & Aarts, 2016). Therefore, it’s very helpful to use states of mindfulness to slow down and increase your perceptive sensitivity. As a result, you’ll be able to recognize the ways your unconscious thoughts and emotions add extra stress and anxiety to your life, and prevent you from fully feeling positive emotions.

What is essential to understand: The best forms of mindfulness and somatic therapy will provide you with much more than useful skills to use in your life. High quality mindfulness therapy directly sets you up in a powerful state of mindfulness during therapy sessions. And through the use of mindfulness, you’ll have enhanced perceptive abilities to help you uncover deep insights about your emotional tendencies and habitual behaviors.

A Further Explanation of Mindfulness
and Somatic Therapy

The human brain, just like a computer operating system, has many layers of operating instructions. Often it’s the early coding (childhood experiences and early sociocultural conditioning) that has the greatest influence on our present-day emotional tendencies and habitual behaviors. This coding is mostly saved in the brain in the form of unconscious emotions, attitudes, memories, and beliefs. To access and update this content and the influence it has on our lives, specialized therapeutic techniques are often necessary.

Modern neuroscience research and ancient meditation traditions have provided insights that enable mindfulness therapy to access unconscious brain processes. For example, we now know that the unconscious brain reveals its content when it’s attended to with a welcoming, friendly, and non-judgmental attitude. In therapy, we will generate the optimal therapeutic conditions necessary for you to gain deep insights, and feel empowered to make vital changes to your life.

When you use mindfulness techniques on your own at home, it can take long periods of time to reach clear and stable states of consciousness. But when working with a trained therapist, deep states of mindfulness can be invoked in you within a few minutes, and then held for the length of a whole therapy session.

The unconscious brain is not only a storehouse of deep-seated fears and painful life experiences. It’s also a source of intuitive wisdom and fundamental inner truths that have accumulated in you through many years of valuable life experiences. When properly harnessed, your unconscious will provide vital guidance to your life.

References 

Dijksterhuis, A, Smith, P, & Aarts, H (2016). The Power of the Subliminal: On Subliminal Persuasion and other Potential. Radboud University, 10.

Haidt, J. (2006). The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. New York: Basic Books, 7-24.