Your subconscious mind is always on. Whether you are awake or sleeping peacefully, your subconscious is constantly taking in and processing information from a variety of sources.

Here, we are not talking just about the day’s events or information in the immediate environment. Your subconscious is also connected to the subconscious of every other living being on the planet. This is commonly what is known as “universal mind.”

So, your subconscious holds an tremendous amount of power, both on a practical level and a spiritual or metaphysical level. You can install new habits and beliefs into your subconscious through conscious effort. You can also connect to your intuition and psychic perceptions.

Now, the first stumbling block most people face when they begin learning how to work with their subconscious mind is an incomplete or ambiguous understanding of the subconscious itself. Many people think the term is interchangeable with “unconscious”, but that is not the case.

To be unconscious is to be knocked out. The subconscious, however, represents all of the things you know or are aware of, but are not paying attention to in the present. In other words, whatever you are actively thinking about is conscious, while whatever you aren’t thinking about is subconscious at that moment.

Remember when you first learned how to ride a bicycle?  You had to think about what you were doing at first, consciously focusing on your balance. You learned in the moment how to train your muscles to properly control your center of gravity.

Once you learned this, however, it became an automatic process. The “how to ride a bike” information was safely stored into your memory and your subconscious took over the “script” or “program” you created that tells your body how to ride a bike without even having to think about it anymore.

If you look deeply into this elementary example, you will see two things that stand out and point to how to begin working with power of the subconscious mind.

The first thing to notice is that, as a child, you approached things like riding a bike with a “beginner’s mind”. The second thing to notice is that your subconscious was trained via conscious repetition of focus on your goal.

Let’s say that you want to lose weight, and you decide to program your subconscious to help you make healthier food choices. First, you would still your mind through meditation or relaxation to get into a state similar to beginner’s mind. You want your subconscious to get the exact message, and not any of the clutter that goes through your conscious mind.

Once in this relaxed state, you visualize yourself making healthier choices. Let your imagination be as detailed as possible (taste the food, imagine yourself enjoying it, imagine how good you’ll feel, etc) and create in you the kind of feelings you want to achieve by creating this new habit.

The feeling component is very important. It’s the job of your subconscious to protect you, and it’s not going to budge on existing habits unless you tell it that the new habit leads to greater happiness and enhances, rather than threatens, your identity.

For best results, you’ll want to do visualization exercise for about 15 minutes a day, every day. It will take about a month of repetition for the average person to fully program their subconscious with a new goal or belief. Your results may vary, though.