Meditation, Hypnosis, and the Conscious & Unconscious Mind

The popularity of hypnosis and meditation as a pathway to healing, relaxation and self improvement, is evident from the proliferation of reading material, both online and offline.  To some, the practices of meditation and hypnosis seem mysterious and ‘new age’, yet they are neither.

Meditation and hypnosis have been practiced for centuries. Some eastern religions consider meditation to be the pathway to enlightenment.

Meditation and hypnosis share a common goal – to quieten your conscious mind. They operate on the same principle – that quietening the conscious mind opens the door to the unconscious. During meditation you quieten your conscious mind to receive peace or enlightenment. Under hypnosis, you open the pathway to the unconscious (sometimes referred to as the subconscious) to alter your beliefs or retrieve repressed information.  Both hypnosis and meditation strive to improve our conscious lives by accessing the unconscious.

To understand how meditation and hypnosis work, it helps to understand your different levels of consciousness.  We all understand what our conscious mind is, but when we attempt to define the unconscious we get a little lost.

Famous psychiatrist Carl Jung worked daily with the unconscious minds of patients he treated and he wrote a great deal about it. He concluded that there were two levels of the unconscious mind. The first, he described as a personal unconscious which contains all the things we’ve forgotten, whether accidentally or intentionally (repression).  The second, he referred to as the ‘collective unconscious’ which contains hereditary material, like our instincts, and other information somehow available to all human beings.

Jung knew that the unconscious was a powerful thing. Not only could it provide us with insights and knowledge not available to the conscious mind, for example ESP and premonitions – but our unconscious knowledge seemed capable of manifesting particular physical experiences in our conscious life.

His research suggested to him that in states where the conscious mind is at rest, material from the unconscious has the opportunity to slip through, and does so.  In other words, you can open a pathway to the ‘collective unconscious’ and a volume of information your conscious mind cannot possibly imagine!

Your conscious mind is at rest during sleep, hypnosis, and meditation. In the coming weeks, we’ll explain some of the ways you can use the power of the unconscious to improve your life - so check back regularly!