Understanding The Connection Between Your Mind And Your Senses

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Have you ever smelled something and been immediately transported back in time to a long-forgotten memory? We do it all the time. How it happens is worth breaking down and understanding, because when you better understand how your mind works, you begin to tap into your most powerful resource.

Your conscious mind is where your analytical skills reside, your logic and deductive reasoning, and it is also the home of your five senses. Your memories however, are stored deep within your subconscious mind. So, how does smelling a flower take you instantly back for example, to your happiest childhood memory of being with your family on vacation in the summertime when you were seven? Through a very important function between your conscious and subconscious mind that we call the Critical Factor.  The critical factor exists upon the equator between your conscious mind and your subconscious mind, and its job is to analyze information. It’s that chatter box inside your head that’s always talking to you, and it’s usually not very nice!

So, when you smell that flower you are activating your five senses, and within a millisecond – your critical factor is running it against any memories or programming you have stored deep within your subconscious mind – to find a match. It does this to protect you and keep you alive. Had it been a wildfire you smelled instead of a flower, your critical factor would have received the information from your subconscious mind of danger, and your body would have shunted blood flow away from your immune system, digestive system and higher thinking mind and sent it to your heart and big muscles so you could fight or run. You are a highly functioning, sophisticated set of processes that make you, well, you.

Without even understanding it at first, you are transported back in time to a memory, and you are reliving it. After a few seconds, you become aware of your present surroundings again, thanks to your critical factor taking in more data around you. Perhaps you are jolted back because you hear a car honk, or a bird sing, or someone talking next to you. All of this matters, because the more you understand how your mind works, the more you can learn to harness that power and use it to create the healthy, prosperous and joyful life you want to be living!

So, what if smelling that flower took you back to a not so positive memory of trauma in your childhood? This is often referred to as “being triggered.” Your critical factor waits for word from your subconscious mind, which kicks back a memory of being unsafe or in danger, at this point several things occur at the same time. Your subconscious mind activates your autonomic nervous system, it down regulates your immune system and digestive system, (because it’s not time to procreate or eat a sandwich if you’re in danger!) It sends immediate resources via blood flow to your heart and large muscle groups as mentioned earlier, so you can protect yourself or get to safety, and it spikes your insulin and cortisol to help you do that. You instantly get a strong adrenaline rush. This signal of danger is what induces panic attacks when we’re actively and repeatedly triggered. A panic attack is a pattern learned when our minds begin to anticipate the trigger, even though we haven’t yet been actively triggered. Because the subconscious mind doesn’t know whether we are revisiting a memory or actually experiencing it in current time, our bodies respond to the trauma memory as though it is occurring right now. This is why it is so important to seek professional assistance to heal those traumatic incidences. We never lose our memories, but we can collapse the emotional charge around them and create a neutral response, so whenever something reminds us of that past experience, we can be in present time, without a high emotional response of danger.

Our senses are powerful response stimulators; we can smell a delicious meal and instantly feel transported to a wonderful memory of the holidays, or a restaurant we went to in Paris while on vacation. (Your mind just saw images of Paris didn’t it?) We can see and smell the beauty all around us in Nature when the flowers bloom, and be transported back to childhood playfulness as we got home from school and played in the yard or with our friends. When our senses are activated and our memories are positive, this floods our bodies with dopamine, the feel-good hormone, it lights up synaptic pathways in our brain and our creative thinking flows. This is being in the flow of life!

However, if we haven’t dealt with the wounds of our past, then it can feel like we have absolutely no control over our lives. At any time, a smell, touch, taste, or sound can set off alarm bells within us activating our fight or flight response. Over time, two things happen, our bodies begin to break down because we cannot sustain regular and repetitive fight or flight response, and our subconscious mind generalizes, so we begin to fear everything. This is how agoraphobia sets in. We become afraid of the world and ever leaving the small controllable space of home. Our worlds become small, as that is all we can manage.

All of these can be helped with Clinical Hypnotherapy by learning how to reprogram your mind and collapse the negative beliefs. You learn how to tap into your own positive resources, and you do have many, many positive resources. You may not believe that you do because your subconscious mind prioritizes the dominant negative programming to keep you safe, and that can feel like everything is negative, but it isn’t. Your subconscious mind also has tens of thousands of positive memories stored from this life and all your previous ones.

That leads us to exploring the benefits of past life.

What if I told you that we could revisit a past life where you had mastered a skill that would help you right now in your life. Would you believe that to be possible? I promise you that it is. I’ve experienced it first hand and it is extraordinarily powerful!

I’m going to be holding a special one-day online class where I will teach a group of people how their mind works, how hypnosis works and then regress them back to a lifetime where they had mastered a positive skill or attribute that they would find very beneficial to integrate and use right now, in this current life.

If you’re interested, and would like to read more, please click here

Space is limited. Register Now. Special early bird pricing.

With love,

Meg