Getting to the Heart of Unconscious Thought Patterns

Since becoming a mother i have noticed that sometimes when i open my mouth, out pops something that i remember being told when i was a child. At first i thought that this was just a little quirk of parenting, but on giving this a bit more thought, promted by the book i'm currently reading "The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud and the Search for Hidden Universes" By Richard Panek i realised that, "our language is necessarily steeped in preconceived ideas. Only they are unconscious preconceived ideas, which are a thousand times the most dangerous of all". (The quote is actually by Henry Poincare on page 72).

Now, i've come across the idea that ideas can be dangerous but i normally equate this with large political ideologies and have never given thought to the fact that just a small phrase repeated enough times could have a profoundly negative impact on someones life, well not until i became a mother that was. So, most recently i have been listening to myself repeating phrases like, 'well, that's life' and 'life is tough', 'life is hard' and 'you'll have to learn the hard way', and suddenly the impact that these words could have on my children dawned on me, like a rock falling out of the sky. What i realised is that yes, life is hard, but it's even harder if you believe it to be hard.

In fact i have found being a parent so damn hard that it has forced me to seek a different path through life. I have done a lot of soul searching and realised that i was fighting all the time. Everything was an effort to me, and with the extra pressure of caring for two small people it was not possible for me to continue with the way in which i was living.

One of the most fundamental ways in which i am beginning to change my approach to life is to try and understand my perception of life. How do i view life? Because perception is the structure within which we base all our ideas, opinions, values and beliefs. What i found was this is a very hard question to answer. It's also the main point of the book: that both Einstein and Freud were able to do to solve their own problems (the intellectual problems of their generation) by approaching their respective subjects in a different way to their contemporaries.

So i'm trying bit by bit (through careful observation of my thoughts, actions and words) to uncover a few of these preconceived ideas. And today i realised that if i keep telling my girls how hard life is they too will find themselves struggling and fighting their way through life, and that's just not what i want for them.

From what i have found there is a path of least reistance, which involves just listening to your heart every moment and hearing what it has to say; it will tell you what your next move should be, and the answer will always be the most harmonious, and more intelligent decision. And it means that you have a constant stream of reliable information at your hand 24 hours a day!