Use of Conscious and Unconscious Images
When you flip through a magazine, your brain processes a staggering amount of information in rapid-as-lightning calculations in response to the visual cues. More than 200 million light receptors are found in the eyes, according to the National Academy of Sciences. Gazing upon a picture triggers a brain response that can include rational, emotional, associative, and subconscious thought and stored memories. Visual images can powerfully reinforce your intention to manifest your desires, whether they are conscious or subconscious.
Healers from a wide variety of cultural traditions understand that the brain needs both reason and feeling. The brain and heart must harmonize to best serve a healthy wholeness. Modern science, too, now embraces that paradigm.
Some Processes for Tapping the Subconscious
The following list includes ways that New Age practitioners and Law of Attraction teachers may help people tap into their subconscious minds to manifest results or make good choices to create the life desired.
Affirmation: the process of making a declaration of truth or statement of judgment
Autosuggestion: the process in which the suggestion for a belief, opinion, or course of action arises from within the self rather than from an external source
Emotion Freedom Techniques: the process by which disturbances in a person's energy field are healed through tapping on the body's energy meridians as the person thinks negative thoughts, thus dispersing the negativity and restoring harmony and balance
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): the integrative therapy technique developed by Dr. Francine Shapiro to help a person's brain reprocess the memory of a highly distressing event
Hypnosis: the process of engaging a person in the spirit of cooperation, acceptance, and abeyance of critical judgment to allow her to enter a state of heightened suggestibility in which she accepts a statement to be factual; often used to change self-limiting belief
Subliminal messages: the process in which a person accepts messages or suggestions aimed at the subconscious without the awareness of the conscious mind
When you cut out images from a magazine for your collage, your conscious mind may choose many of the pictures or words, but something else may be taking place. You might be strongly attracted to a particular image without any idea why. The reason you are drawn to it is found in your subconscious mind. It just might represent a long-suppressed desire that you would have manifested long ago if your life had gone differently. Pay attention to the things that capture your attention. What are they telling you about unfulfilled dreams or self-worth?
Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) theorized that the subconscious communicates with the conscious mind through dreams. His protégé Carl Jung asserted that each human's developmental task is to discover the unique truth of who he or she is by integrating unconsciousness into consciousness. Dreams, Jung believed, represented the most important means by which that process took place.
