The Power of the Unconscious Mind - one of the secrets to easier childbirth - By: Lisabeth Protherough

Copyright 2006 Lisabeth Protherough

One of the best ways I know to give a massive boost to your ability to learn new things, and then to put into practice what you have learned, is to leverage the immense power of your unconscious mind. This applies in any area of learning, whether academic or practical. Pregnancy and childbirth is a key area where women hold negative beliefs that do not serve them. They so often associate it with pain, difficulty, medical complications, as well as with the joy of the baby at the end of it all. Yet.......this can be changed to make the whole experience of pregnancy and childbirth positive and harmonious.

‘The thinking process is unconscious. We become aware of the results consciously. All change takes place at the unconscious level. We become aware of the change consciously when we are ready.’ Joseph O’Connor

What on earth does this mean???

Well, read on ……

Roughly two million bits of information per second come into the human nervous system. We are literally bombarded with information. To maintain sanity, our conscious mind filters out most of the stimuli and Miller (1956) discovered we can consciously handle only seven plus or minus two bits of information at a time.

The unconscious mind deals with everything else over and above the seven (plus or minus two) bits of information that you are not consciously paying attention to at a particular time. As soon as we switch our attention to something, then it becomes conscious. Some parts of your physiology will always be unconscious. This should not surprise us really. Our unconscious mind takes care of us all the time! We do not run our heart, lungs, kidneys, immune system etc… consciously do we?

I want to show you how to bypass the conscious mind in order to access the immense powers of your unconscious mind. The unconscious mind is around 90% of your total mind power as opposed to the 10% of the mind that you usually use in your normal daily waking state. The unconscious mind is a source of great treasure - of skill, of memory and experience.

Many people however, are in the habit of negative thinking - of dwelling on problem areas in their life by repeating exactly what they do not wish to happen. This often ends up compounding the original problems and making them even worse. For example, a Mother to be might keep on saying to herself:

"I’m scared of what will happen in childbirth".

Or: "Everything I’ve heard about childbirth says it will hurt a lot".

Or: "I simply won’t be able to take the pain".

The woman who constantly repeats these negative thoughts, either consciously or unconsciously, will be much less likely to have an easy or harmonious childbirth experience.

Underlying almost every negative emotion is a thought or belief, and most often these are unhealthy thoughts or beliefs. By unhealthy I mean they are not effective in getting you what you want in your life. They don’t serve you.

The belief (often unconscious) is like a trigger. It sets you up to be fearful and to fail in certain situations.

Remember this! If you do not THINK and fill your head with positive thoughts and beliefs, then negative ones will always come in to fill the gaps.

Please NEVER, ever, ever, ever underestimate your own ability to create positive thoughts, which serve you. It is never a question of can you do something. The real question is will you?

The power of positive thinking can be significantly enhanced and reinforced by the use of affirmations. An affirmation is a short statement in the present tense repeated frequently to impress itself onto and be accepted by the unconscious mind. The ideal affirmation must be short and totally unambiguous. This is very important, as the unconscious mind cannot easily assimilate long or complex statements. The unconscious mind is much more easily influenced by short, appropriately worded statements.

In the examples above, the woman was repeating the negative affirmations in her head. She should instead replace them with the equivalent positive affirmations. Such as:

"I know I will be confident and strong when I give birth to my baby".

Or: "Childbirth is natural and normal, and my body is designed for it".

Or: "The contractions are there for a reason - to help me give birth to my baby".

This might well seem difficult to do, particularly if you currently feel that reality is totally the opposite. However, believe me, like most things, it is just a question of practice.

Where attention goes, energy flows! You become what you think about most of the time.

The more often an affirmation is repeated, consciously or otherwise, the more quickly and effectively it will become real. But do take care because this works just as effectively for both positive and negative affirmations. An excellent time to repeat positive affirmations is just before drifting off to sleep at night or just after waking in the morning before you get up. At these times your conscious mind communicates best with your unconscious mind. If you can repeat the affirmations throughout the day and even write them down and place copies around your home, so much the better.

An even more powerful possibility exists as an alternative to affirmations that are stated aloud or within the mind. This is the power of "Subliminal messages".

The power of subliminal messages has been proven over many years to be a highly effective way of programming the unconscious mind by using either audio or visual methods. In fact, subliminal messages are so powerful in the way they work on the unconscious mind, that in 1974 the US government banned all forms of subliminal message advertising on radio and television.

Subliminal messages reach the unconscious mind by working at a level that cannot be detected by the conscious mind. The conscious mind therefore never has an opportunity to reject them and the unconscious mind can receive and act upon them.

There are two main ways of using subliminal messages in a most powerful way - visual and audio.

Visual subliminal messages are affirmations that are flashed before the eyes so quickly that the conscious mind cannot perceive them. The affirmations therefore go directly to the unconscious mind, which perceives and acts upon them immediately.

Audio subliminal messages work in a similar way by being played at a frequency that is just above the normal threshold of human hearing. Again, as with visual subliminal messages, although the conscious mind cannot perceive these affirmations, the all-powerful unconscious mind can perceive them, and will therefore immediately act upon them.

Both audio and visual subliminal messages are extremely powerful in accessing the enormous potential of the unconscious mind.

Once you understand the power of the unconscious mind and start to harness it, you can literally re-programme your mind to eradicate fears and become confident and positive about the childbirth experience that you will have. This is true even if you have had a poor experience of childbirth in the past.

About the Author

Lisabeth Protherough is a qualified Chartered Accountant and Education Consultant from the UK, with 20 years experience training and teaching in various business sectors. She is a mother of 2 boys and heads up Easy Childbirth - an organisation offering educational advice to pregnant woman around the world. She is passionate about great education and the life changing impact it can have. Lisabeth is on a mission to educate mothers to be and help them unlock their great inner strength. http://www.easy-childbirth.co.uk http://www.hearts-and-minds-global.com/pregnancy http://www.student-success-solutions-recommends-subliminalpower.co.uk

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