Trust Your Subconscious

This weekend I’ve been attending zoom sessions of the CNFC (Creative Non-Fiction Collective) conference. I have a large exercise book that I use to take notes when I attend online webinars. Well, sometimes I take notes, sometimes I just doodle as I listen.

In between sessions this weekend, I idly flipped back to the first entry in the book, made in early 2021 when I was attending a series of online courses on The Artist’s Way (for those not familiar with Julia Cameron’s Artist’s way it’s about igniting your creative spirit, more about writing than drawing).

One of the exercises was to list things that would you would be interested in doing if you didn’t have to be perfect at it. It was one of those exercises where you just write, don’t think, put pen to paper without lifting it from the page.

Among the list of things I wrote (early in 2021, remember) were:

•           Write poetry
•           Write a blog
•           Spend time in a small town and learn to speak the language

Wait…WHAT??

Months passed, and:

•          In the fall of 2021, I started this blog, after responding (on a whim, or so I thought) to an email from Kerry Clare on her blogging school
•           Earlier this year I started writing poetry, adding them to these blog posts. Again, thinking the idea had just occurred to me out of the blue
•           Late last month I booked myself on a trip in September to Spain, secured a small apartment in a small town in the mountains and a week at a Spanish language school.

All these things I thought I’d done on a whim, spontaneously as opportunities occurred.  Turns out they were not spur-of-the-moment decisions at all. I had planted the seeds in my subconscious many months earlier.

We may think we make ‘airy-fairy’ wishes, then forget all about them. But they remain deep inside us, percolating, finding ways to emerge and become real.

I am currently reading the memoir “The Wishing Year” by Noelle Oxenhandler.  Living in California, with a background of Catholicism and Buddhism, she finds it hard to articulate her desire for the three things she really wants: 1) Buy a house 2) Find a man 3) Spiritual Healing.  The latter is the least difficult to express, the first two much more so, because we are conditioned to thinking that we must not wish for material things. That suffering is caused by desire.

Instead, we should lean towards making wishes for the greater good, like world peace and an end to hunger and poverty. She meets a woman who turns that paradigm around, urging her to seek abundance and be grateful for it.

And yet the writer, like so many of us, finds it hard to ask for things for herself. I can relate to that. What? Want a house with a view of mountains and trees when there are so many people who do not have a home? It smacks of being greedy and shallow, conditions to be avoided at all costs.

California is the land of “Putting it Out There”, with people constructing vision boards and shrines and the writer struggles with this. I’m early into the book so I cannot elaborate further. I expect the writer gets her three wishes or there likely would not be a book.

But what this post is really pointing to is that the simple act of articulating what you want for yourself trickles into your subconscious and places it there. It doesn’t stop there. It picks up on subtle shifts and signs. We’ve all experienced situations where we know in our gut when something doesn’t feel right, or the converse, when it feels exactly right. In writing, they advise you to go with the flow on your first draft, trusting yourself and your subconscious to lead your writing where it needs to go. The editing and revising can come later.

All indications seem to say – trust your subconscious, it knows what it is doing. And yet we resist, convinced that our head knows better. What if we were to turn this ‘head-thinking’ on its head?

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“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom” - Anais Nin