I am entering a new chapter of life.
A chapter where my time and energy are not dictating by external demands.
It’s a little daunting to have this much physical and mental space. I am not sure how to fill it.
Especially has my default has been to stay so non-stop busy that I never had time to feel.
Up until now, I have kept myself in constant motion. Traveling non-stop. Allowing relationships where I prioritized the needs of others over my own. And their needs were vast which meant I was so busy focusing on the needs of others – anticipating what might please or displease them and attempting to pro-actively accommodate – that it never occurred to me to consider what I might want or need.
Case in point, I find football and certain films to be so violent that I have to either look away or leave the room. It is physically painful and depleting for me to watch others getting hurt. And yet, I was in relationship with people who enjoyed that. So I have spent my whole life forcing myself to do something that feels literally painful and never bothered to stop and notice that I am investing my time in something that does not bring me joy.
In the same vein, I love to move my body – walking, running, hiking, yoga, biking – anything where I am physically moving, ideally outside in nature. And the romantic partners I have chosen up to this point do not value that kind of movement.
So I spent my life up until now stealing time for myself to recharge. Hitting the gym or the trails early in the morning, before they woke up, so prioritizing myself did not impact the needs of others. The few times I tried engage my most recent partner in moving with me did not go well. He did not enjoy walking and would actively complain and shame me for “being an exercise freak” anytime I endeavored to include him in a walk longer than 5 minutes.
And here’s the really embarrassing part.
It never occurred to me that I could prioritize myself.
Never. Not once in the 57 years leading up to this point.
I had been so programmed and so conditioned to prioritize the wants and needs of other people or the expectations of our society that I never had the time, space or capacity to really check in with myself about what feeds me.
Until now.
But even with the time, space and capacity to focus on myself, there was still one unseen obstacle that seemed to sabotage and undermine my ability to launch myself into this new chapter.
The subconscious programming of what I was “supposed” to do.
This programming was so strong and so conditioned in me that it was driving the majority of my thoughts, behaviors, beliefs and even my sense of identity.
What is your Subconscious Mind?
Your subconscious mind operates automatically – often outside your conscious awareness – and is believed to control around 95% of your behavior. While your conscious mind is responsible for thinking, analyzing, and making decisions, your subconscious mind stores your beliefs, habits, emotional reactions, and patterns of behavior—everything that feels natural, familiar or “just who you are”.
Much of what governs what you do each day is driven by pre-existing patterns that feel familiar and predictable andhappen automatically, without requiring any conscious thought, including:
- how you respond under stress
- how you react to situations
- what you believe is possible
- your automatic default habits and thought patterns
- your perceived identity and expectations you carry into new situations
Your subconscious mind is the operating system beneath your daily behavior. Many of these codes were written in childhood. Some were inherited. Most were never questioned.
These familiar patterns help your brain conserve energy. Your subconscious mind draws from what it has experienced before and uses those patterns as a kind of shortcut for predicting what comes next.
So even when you consciously want something different, you may find yourself returning to the same reactions, habits, or choices.
Not because you are choosing them deliberately, but because they have become familiar pathways.
The subconscious often favors what is familiar over what is new.
And that is why creating change often involves more than simply deciding what you want. It also means becoming aware of the subconscious patterns that have been running automatically — so you can begin to create new ones.
What is Subconscious Programming?
Subconscious programming is the process by which your subconscious mind absorbs and stores information, beliefs, memories, and behaviors that shape your thoughts, emotions, and actions through repetition, emotion, and mental imagery. Subconscious programs act like an internal computer autopilot, shaping how you react to the world without you actively thinking about it.
Subconscious programming often happens during early childhood when your mind is highly impressionable and you were vulnerable enough to accept it as truth, whether you were consciously aware of it or not. It can also happen when you are in a vulnerable state—scared, unsure, in a new place, under duress or control of another person. This is how cults “brainwash” their participants—by programming them with beliefs when they are in a vulnerable state.
Through interactions with your environment – including family, cultural expectations, education, societal rules and experiences — your subconscious mind absorbs and internalizes these influences, forming the foundation of your belief systems and automatic responses.
Because your subconscious programming operates beneath your conscious awareness, it acts as a filter through which you interpret and respond to the world around you. Once the subconscious accepts something as “true,” it begins to execute it, manifesting that reality in your life. For example, if you constantly focus on negativity and limitations or if your subconscious mind is full of mental patterns of fear, worry, anxiety, or lack, your subconscious will manifest those realities in your life.
If you habitually focus on positive, empowering thoughts, your subconscious will also deliver those outcomes through your choices, relationships, and daily habits long before you consciously question if you actually want them.
The Impact of Subconscious Programs
Subconscious programs impact and shape every faucet of your life, including your:
- Physical Health
- Professional and Personal Success
- Wealth and Prosperity
- Beliefs
- Values
- Identity
- Intuition
- Creativity
- Emotions
- Self-Worth or Self confidence
- Unconscious fears, self-doubt, or feelings of unworthiness
- Imagination
- Long-term memory
- Protective reactions
- Automatic Bodily functions
- Relationships and beliefs about love
- Mental-Emotional Well-Being
- People Pleasing
How to Reprogram the Subconscious to Shift Patterns with Essential Oils
Your subconscious mind runs the show when it comes to your health and your habits. This is why so many of us stay stuck. Even when you desperately want change and know what behaviors you need to modify to help shift your mindset and your health, you may stay stuck.
This is how your subconscious mind can keep you stuck and sabotage your efforts to shift your health and your life.
Your subconscious can be difficult to access – it does not respond to logic or talk therapy. But it does respond to smell.
Your sense of smell can help transform your subconscious programming. In fact, your sense of smell is the only sense that reaches the areas of the brain related to instinct, emotion and memory directly without first passing through the brain’s main relay station, the thalamus.
When you see, hear, touch, or taste something, your brain processes that data logically through the thalamus before you feel an emotion. Olfaction (smell) circumvents this filter. It bypasses conscious thought and travels directly and immediately to your limbic system — the center of memory, emotion, and identity — via the olfactory bulb to the amygdala (the threat and emotion center) and the hippocampus (the memory center). This allows scents to trigger physiological and emotional shifts before your conscious mind even registers what the smell is. No processing. No filtering.
This creates a state where it is easy to access your subconscious mind before logic intervenes. Your instinct reacts before your intellect, reason or thoughts can even kick in. In other words, scent bypasses conscious thought and creates a state where it is easy to access the subconscious.
Your subconscious mind plays a role in processing and interpreting sensory information. It helps you make sense of the world by filtering and organizing incoming information based on your existing beliefs and experiences.
And smell works immediately. Scent elicits a three-times stronger brain activation than visual cues. And Olfactory signals alter your nervous system state (fight-or-flight vs. rest-and-digest) within seconds.
Your subconscious has already built automatic scent anchors throughout your life. To override these automatic negative triggers, you can deliberately introduce a calming scent whenever you notice your body tightening up from an old memory. When paired with intention and repetition, scent becomes a neurological anchor to release and shift subconscious programs.
Unstuck™
Unstuck™ helps you identify your subconscious resistance and make the invisible visible — bringing awareness to the subconscious patterns that shape your lived reality. When our subconscious minds hold you back from pursuing something that you love, it is because you are holding a conflicting belief about it. But once something becomes conscious, it becomes transformable.
Unstuck™ encourages gentle unraveling of karmic and generational patterns, including subconscious patterns.
These patterns may have helped you survive stress, trauma, grief, rejection, fear, or uncertainty. But over time, what once protected you can begin to limit you, keeping you locked in emotional loops, nervous system responses, self-sabotaging behaviors, and physical tension long after the original threat has passed.
Unstuck™ was formulated to support the gentle release of trauma, karma, subconscious imprints, and old emotional patterns that may be keeping you stuck.
This expertly crafted blend of Blue Tansy, Roman Chamomile, Ylang Ylang Extra, Pressed Lime, Mandarin, Lavender, and Rose works through the olfactory pathway to help activate the limbic system, the part of the brain involved in emotion, memory, and subconscious patterning.
By supporting a felt sense of nervous system safety, Unstuck™ helps create the internal conditions for deeper emotional release, allowing your body to soften old defenses, shift outdated patterns, and begin letting go from the inside out.
Parasympathetic®
Your subconscious mind works with your autonomic nervous system to regulate functions like body temperature, heartbeat and breathing, along with your mental self.
You have to be able to regulate your nervous system in order to support subconscious preprogramming. Unfortunately, when your body is in a heightened state of stress or arousal (sympathetic dominance), the ability of your subconscious mind to get programmed may be hindered.
Parasympathetic activation helps you become less reactive and more responsive: You develop the ability to consciously hold a space between your brain’s reactive movement and your subconscious awareness. This ability, as it grows, is what allows you the feeling of “freedom” from being a prisoner to the mind’s pull. Developing a stability in awareness is the prerequisite for re-programming subconscious patterns.
Essential oils are natural, non-invasive, and easy-to-use tools that can activate your parasympathetic nervous system and activate relaxation and flow state that helps enhance subconscious clarity and awareness.
Essential oils possess both olfactory (smell) and transdermal (topical application) properties, making them easy to inhale and apply to the skin to stimulate the vagus nerve and activate the parasympathetic nervous system. Topically applying the Parasympathetic® blend behind the vagus nerve on the mastoid bone can help ground your energy, activate your parasympathetic nervous system, and help calm the emotional reactivity triggered by trauma. It helps soothe the physical sensations of fight, flight, or freeze that you feel.
Limbic Reset™
Your limbic system acts as the emotional core of the brain and a major driver of subconscious behavior, processing raw feelings, survival instincts, and automatic memories outside of your conscious awareness. It is constantly filtering and bringing to your attention information and stimuli that affirms your preexisting beliefs as well as presenting you with repeated thoughts and impulses that mimic and mirror that which you’ve done in the past. If your subconscious mind is not addressed, it can undermine your healing by holding onto subconscious ideas or programs that undermine your ability to heal.
Your limbic system is often referred to as the “emotional nervous system” as it helps you interpret sensory information and determine whether external stimuli are threatening or benign. If a threat is perceived, your limbic system will then prompt your nervous system to activate the “fight or flight” sympathetic nervous system response. This threat response can become maladaptive and overly reactive, leading to poor emotional regulation and overly reactive emotional responses.
Restoring proper function to the limbic system can help TURN OFF the alarm in your limbic system—in effect rebalancing inhibition and activation—and TURN ON your body’s self-healing mechanisms by regulating your “fight or flight” response and rewiring your response to emotional triggers. Inhaling essential oils is the fastest and most efficient way to reset the volume of threat perception and help calm the over-firing of your limbic system. This is because smell can access the limbic system of the brain to lower limbic system activation, which then enables your body to enter the parasympathetic “rest, digest, and repair” state.
To help balance your biofield, inhale or apply Limbic Reset™ over Emotional Points located on the forehead (above the eyes and on the temples), an emotional release point located at the base of the skull at the back of the neck, on the bottom of the feet, and especially on the amygdala reflex point on the big toe. You can also apply over Filter points located on both sides of the back of the skull, which are used to filter energies that could pull you back into the old pattern.
How do you know if it is working?
Shifting the subconscious requires repetition and consistency – using the oils above on a daily basis. You will notice it is working if your emotional baseline starts to change. Old reactions feel weaker and your thoughts begin to shift automatically. New behaviors feel more natural. You start to notice shifts in your subconscious programming.