How To Do The Work

by Dr Nicole LePera

Our minds are familiarity-seeking machines. The familiar feels safe; that is, until we teach ourselves that discomfort is temporary and a necessary part of transformation.

To truly actualise change, you have to engage in the work of making new choices every day. In order to achieve mental wellness, you must begin by being an active daily participant in your own healing.

Emotional addiction is particularly powerful when we habitually seek or avoid certain emotional states as a way to cope with trauma.

The reality is this: few of us have any real connection to who we really are, yet we want others to see through all of our layers of self-betrayal and into our core selves. Like Jessica, we all want to be better versions of ourselves. But our attempts to do so have failed because we don’t understand our own minds and bodies. We don’t have the practical tools to understand how to create the changes we seek to make. We can’t expect others to do for us what we can’t do for ourselves.

‘We do not remember days, we remember moments.

Even though consciousness makes us human, most of us are so immersed in our inner world, so unconscious, even asleep, that we aren’t aware that there’s a script continually running through our minds. We believe that script is the true ‘us’, the Self. But that chatter is just our thoughts. We practise thoughts all day long.

Typically, as children, we are in touch with this spiritual Self-knowledge and have strong instincts. As we grow older and fall under the influence of others, we tend to become disconnected from our intuition. Our sixth sense gets muddied. It’s not lost, just buried.

When we’re running on autopilot, a primitive, or subconscious, part of our mind drives our reactions. Astonishingly, our subconscious stores every single experience we ever have. This however isn’t just a neutral storehouse for facts and figures; it’s emotional, reactive, and irrational. Every moment of every day, this subconscious mind is shaping the way we see the world; it is the primary driver of most of our (often automatic) behaviours. Anytime we are not fully conscious, our subconscious mind is hard at work being ‘us’. How we think, speak, and respond – all of this comes from the subconscious part of ourselves that has been conditioned by thoughts, patterns, and beliefs that became ingrained in our childhoods through a process called conditioning.

Yoga, which is considered a ‘top-down’ practise (meaning that the brain sets the intentions that the body follows), can be an especially powerful means of helping the mind settle into the present moment by focusing our attention as we practise channelling our breath and challenging our body.

Research shows that practises like yoga and meditation that help us to focus our attention on the present moment, are especially powerful in restructuring the brain. When new neural pathways are forged, we are able to break free of our default patterns and live more actively in a conscious state. In fact, functional MRI (fMRI) brain scans confirm this,23 showing tangible evidence that consistent consciousness practises actually thicken the prefrontal lobes, the area where our conscious awareness actually lives.

There is tremendous freedom in not believing every thought we have and understanding that we are the thinker of our thoughts, not the thoughts themselves. Our minds are powerful tools, and if we do not become consciously aware of the disconnection between our authentic Selves and our thoughts, we give our thoughts too much control in our daily lives.

If parent-figures have not healed or even recognised their unresolved traumas, they cannot consciously navigate their own path in life, let alone act as trustworthy guides for someone else. It’s very common for parent-figures to project their own unresolved traumas onto their children. When even well-meaning parent-figures react under the influence of their own unconscious wounds they, instead of offering guidance, may attempt to control, micromanage, or coerce a child to follow their will. Some of these attempts may be well intentioned. Parent-figures may consciously or unconsciously want to keep the child safe and protected from the world so that the child will not experience the pain that they, themselves, have. In the process, they may negate the child’s wants and needs. Even when this can seem intentional, these reactions often stem from their own deep-rooted pain, which may not be visible on the surface.