Hidden Intent

As your conscious mind plots and navigates the world trying to get you what you want, your subconscious mind is moving the map around under your feet. Emotional instability tells us this movement is happening. One day you think you know what you want and how to get it and the next, you have no idea… and it messes you up a little.

The less time you allot to interacting with the subconscious, the more it will colour your life and choices. And you won’t know how, or to what extent it is doing so. And perhaps none of us can know exactly how or in what way the subconscious is doing this because, by definition, it lies in the dark, beneath the surface.

Maybe it’s good enough to know that this mysterious and powerful part of us is there, actively shaping our sense of reality while our conscious mind takes credit. The next questions that arise may be: to what extent is my subconscious running things, and how exactly can I engage with it? I think the answers lie in internally oriented practices of meditation, somatics and movement.

Although the subconscious doesn’t always speak in ways we understand, its intentions can be felt. Have you ever felt an uneasiness in your chest around a particular person? Well I think that’s your subconscious telling you something. Because your subconscious knows things better and quicker than your conscious mind.

It is an embodied system which interacts within and through you. Which means it communicates via sensory cues and emotions. It can absorb and process incredible amounts of environmental input and even be quite rational about it — perhaps more so than your conscious mind.

How could anything be more rational than your conscious mind? Well the limitation of the conscious mind is the need to communicate using language. Whenever you are doing this, you’re in a social situation of some kind where, you’re also juggling motives: primarily the drive to self-express and the drive to belong.

Here’s the strange part — belonging doesn’t require rationality — it just requires cohesion and consensus. So you could be talking absolute BS, but if the people around you vibe it, then you’re succeeding in both expression and belonging.

Now the subconscious doesn’t have to take on this tricky role of communicating directly with others. It isn’t slowed down by having to manage the social filters in the way the conscious mind does. So it can sponge up information from the world, rationalise and interpret it and then deliver it to the conscious mind as feelings or sensations. So, despite being in the shadows, your subconscious is probably more authentic and rational than “you” are.

And in order to navigating the world, trying to get your needs met, you’re having to juggle this rational, authentic aspect of yourself with the socially acceptable aspect. You’re trying to express yourself in a way which feels right and also leads to belonging. Your conscious mind is where these external and internal forces meet — and sometimes it can feel chaotic, like waves overlapping.

When you make spacetime for the integration of the subconscious, you’re allowing its motives to be felt or at least noticed in some way by the conscious mind, without the social and societal pressure that often distorts its messaging. Well, that’s the aim… but it requires us not to police or judge ourselves during this process — and the ego will often struggle not to do this, because judging is incredibly important (for belonging/survival).

To do inner work or pacify the ego, you’ll need to create a sense of bodily safety. You’ll need to learn how to regulate your internal environment, otherwise the ego will tighten the reins by seeking external safety via threat management. If exploring your inner world feels unsafe or impossible, it’s because you can’t yet regulate using meditative, somatic or movement practices… So your ego will regulate for you, by protecting you from the perceived threat (unknowns) of your shadow.

As you practice new tools to self-regulate, you’ll welcome a smoother relationship between the hidden and obvious parts of yourself because you’ll have created more paths to safety. Ultimately, you can become so good at self-regulating via different pathways that you’ll able to create safety even when taking social or environmental risks. In other words, you’ll diversify the risk by having more internal management strategies.

So, how can you create enough space for self-integration? Simply remove immediate existential threats and pay attention. Then eventually you may realise that not paying attention is the biggest existential threat of all. And fortunately for you, paying attention is the only essential human skill. It leads to infinitely greater amounts of presence and clarity — enough to close in on who and what you really are.