Goal – I want to share with people how our past, and childhood in particular, leaves a lasting impression on us and is the starting point of the ego – the mind made sense of self. I want to talk a little bit from a scientific perspective how the brain and mind evolves and how we absorb experiences from our environments. Further, I want  to speak about how these translate into our present adult lives. Why it is important to break the bonds with our past, listen to the inner child and liberate it. How the peace and satisfaction we are seeking is inside, not outside. And the only way to  So that we become responsible parents and as a result responsible humans.

Meta description – The inner child can be synonymous with the subconscious mind. The body will always serve the inner child’s desire, no matter how silly you think it is or how grown up you think you are.

When did your childhood end? And when did adulthood begin according to you? Like most things in life, there is a sense of subjectivity to these questions, don’t you think?

Whether our individual childhoods were pleasant or not, we all have to agree that it was special in one way or another. It was not perfect in any way, it can never be. But it was real.

In this article, I want to shed some light on how our past, and our childhood in particular, leaves a lasting impression on us and is the starting point of the ego – the mind-made sense of self.

I want to educate you on how the mind evolves and absorbs experiences from the environment. Further, I want to speak about how those experiences translate into our present lives.

Through this article, I want to initiate you into seeing, acknowledging and breaking the subconscious bonds with your past, listen to the inner child that resides within you and liberate it.

First Impressions – A note on Mirror Neurons

Humans have the most elaborate childhood amongst all animal species. It is not only because of the sheer length of this beautiful phase of life, but the complexity of it too.

As you probably guessed, this is primarily because of the human brain. The human brain is an integral part of our survival mechanism. But because of its complexity it needed additional time

to be nurtured, nourished and developed.

“It takes a village to raise a child” is an old proverb which points to the fact that the growth and development of a child is dependent on every aspect and interaction within the environment during the formative years.

Of course, our parents have a huge impact on the way we perceive the world. They are our world to begin with. As our world expands through the years, every interaction makes a mark on us – the friends we make, the experiences we have, the school we attend being some of the events that come to mind.

To give you an evolutionary perspective, primates and apes learn through imitation. The young pay attention to the behaviors of the adults in the community and learn from them. The way their mother breaks a nut, the way they swing from one branch to the other, scratches each other’s backs etc.

This imitation behavior is attributed to a certain segment in the brain that are called mirror neurons that can be accessed when we truly pay attention to something. This is more predominant in primates than other species. Mirror neurons help us to watch and learn. It lays down the neural pathway for a motor action to be performed.

That’s how children pick up languages from their parents and learn how to walk.

As a kid, you always paid attention. Maybe not in the traditional way that you’re thinking. You paid attention to your inner world. In fact there was no clear distinction. The inner world and the outer world were one and the same. That’s why you could play imaginary games with your soft toys.

Till the age of 12, children are extremely impressionable, vulnerable (and adorable before the teenage take over 😛 ).

The Subconscious Mind – A note on Brain Wave patterns

Now, why is it that suddenly from the teenage, there is a sudden shift in children?

Because around that age, the development of the mind is complete. What do I mean by development? And what do I mean by complete? Let’s explore!

I’ll briefly explain the different brain wave patterns that occur in our brain and what each of them correlates to when a child develops. There are 4 brain wave patterns depending upon their frequency. In very simple terms, how fast the wave is moving.

• Beta brain waves
• Alpha brain waves
• Theta brain waves
• Delta brain waves

There are also gamma brain waves but for now we’re not talking about those.

Delta brain waves – For the first 2 years of our lives, our brain is in delta. It corresponds to deep dreamless sleep. We are sound asleep even with our eyes open. That’s why a newborn can not stay awake for more than 7 minutes at a time. Their brain is in hibernation mode.

Theta brain waves –  From 2 to 6 we are in theta. We slowly develop our sense perceptions and can pick up more information from the external environment. Delta and theta brain waves correspond to the subconscious mind. For the first 6 years, we are completely in our subconscious mind.

The entire focus is on the inner world of feelings. When a child notices a change in his or her feelings, they associate it with an external event that caused it. The brain makes these associates and when a powerful emotional event occurs, it gets stored as a long term memory in the subconscious mind. They start feeling more things and they start using senses to perceive and create memories.

Alpha brain waves – From age 6 to 12 children are typically in alpha brain waves. This can be considered as a mix of conscious mind and subconscious mind. The inner world is still quite real. You are still paying attention to your thoughts, feelings and mental images. When you learn a skill with full attention, you are in alpha. The brain does neural consolidation in alpha. More alpha correlates to how creative you are.

Somewhere between 6 and 9 our analytical facilities (neocortex/higher brain/thinking) starts developing. Your personality and view of the world is slowly shaping up. You do not believe everything. The subconscious mind is being slowly closed down. Your young rational mind filters out information depending upon its naive experience of life so far.

Beta brain waves – From our teenage years, the subconscious mind is pretty much consolidated. Emotionally charged events will still of course continue to shape us, but by and large our views and behaviors will be a reflection of what has gone in so far. Our attention is now on the outer world and that becomes far more real and shapes our inner world. Thus, we become conscious of the way we look and talk. Of what our peers think of us.

 No new information can come in greater than how you are feeling. If someone tells you “you are pretty” but deep down you don’t feel that way, your analytical mind will not let that thought seep in.

There are different levels in beta (low, mid, high) depending upon how stimulated you are and how much of a threat you perceive from the outside world. Normally, we are in low beta. But if you have to give a presentation in front of an audience you may move to mid level beta. If you’re in an argument with someone or you are anxious, you are in high level beta. The brain goes into overdrive.

Why is this important for you to know? Because it is these brain waves that decide which part of the brain is activated. If we have to change our behaviors, habits and perspective of the outside world, we have to make the journey from beta to alpha to theta brain waves, enter the operating system (i.e. the subconscious mind) and change the programming that was set by the naive, honest and innocent 6 year old you.

The Subconscious Mind

The conscious mind is only 5% in terms of control. It controls logic and reasoning. The remaining 95% belongs to the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind directs the show all day long. And the majority of the programming of the subconscious mind is done prior to our teenage years.

What drives the subconscious mind? Emotions! Not logic!

As you read in the article earlier, whenever an emotionally charged event occurs during your formative years, the brain takes a snapshot of the internal chemistry (the emotion) and the external environment (the stimulus) and saves it as a long term memory.

Fear is usually the root of most survival emotions (such as anger, envy etc.). Every animal feels fear and that ensures its survival. That is what we call animal instinct.

Now, these emotions, especially survival emotions, are quite addictive and the body craves these emotions.

Like an animal in the wild, our body also feels fear and that ensures its survival. But unlike other animals, the human brain has the ability to remember and imagine. As mentioned, it remembers emotionally charged events and stores it in the subconscious mind.

Now, the beauty of human design is that the body can’t tell the difference between reality and a thought. The body craves the emotion and the mind creates thoughts to feed the emotion. In short, the body has become the mind.

In the subtlest, yet profoundest way, the subconscious mind is directing your behavior and habits and gravitating you towards the underlying unresolved emotion. You are subconsciously creating your life through your choices and behaviors as a way to fulfill that emotion.

I’ll share one of my own patterns that I recently discovered in my meditations. Hopefully that’ll give you a little bit of insight into the complex workings of this.

Our Beautiful Scars

Lately I’ve been meditating a lot more than I used to, almost an hour or 2 every day. My meditations continue to become more profound with each day and with a quieter mind, I am able to dive deep and isolate the underlying emotions and get insights into my ego and behavior patterns. Quite like peeling the layers of an onion.

I wanted to share one such childhood pattern in me that I came to terms with recently in my meditation. I want to give you a glimpse of how these things tend to work.

My mother was an airhostess. That meant she was always flying and was away from me during my childhood. Of course she was simply doing that to provide for her family. Like a mother eagle, leaving the nest to get food. But unlike other birds and animals, humans can remember every experience thanks to our amazing brains.

Of course, I loved my mother very much and I guess the kid me was always wondering where my mother was going. On some level, the infant me realized that I can get more of her attention when I fall into trouble.

With my analytical capabilities not yet fully developed, my mind made the naive correlation that trouble of any sort will fetch me attention and the internal chemistry that goes along with it.

And as it turns out, I became mischievous in school, subconsciously craving the teacher’s attention (the female figure). Mischief would eventually get me attention.

As I grew up and played football, I became extremely injury prone with muscle pulls and spasms. Of course, it’s a sport, injuries are part of it. But there’s a deeper dimension to it. Subconsciously, the injuries were a way for me to get the attention of my friends and loved ones. And my body was simply recreating the situation again and again to feel all those emotions that went along with the separation or overcoming the separation. Everyone who knows me, knows one thing about me without a doubt – I get injured.

It can’t be a coincidence that 6 of the 8 years that I was in a relationship with a girl, I was separated and in a long distance relationship. The body would simply create such situations and make choices where similar emotions could be experienced.

Now, the conscious and logical mind is trying to get away from these situations and emotions with its 5% control. But the subconscious mind wins, it always wins with its 95% dominance!

Hence, it is easy to be who you never want to be. Locked up inside your own life.

There’s a lot more. Some patterns I now know off, and some I still don’t. It is a process.

Understand that you have never seen yourself from the outside, you have always seen the world through your lens, from the inside out. There is nothing right or wrong about this. Simply acknowledge that everything is happening for a reason, both, your behaviors and the larger process of life. Once you come on the other side, it’ll all make sense, I promise you!

I hope I have managed to paint a clear picture. The inner child can be synonymous with the subconscious mind. The body will always serve the inner child’s desire, no matter how silly you think it is or how grown up you think you are.

FYI – I love my mother very very much. I spoke to her about this revelation recently and we both had an amazing heart to heart conversation about our individual childhoods and how they shaped us. We wouldn’t change a thing about it because it brought us to this moment and that is all that matters. I took her consent and blessing before sharing this.

And what do you know, having seen this pattern in myself and resolved it, automatically many of the things in my life have changed. Because the underlying emotion has been dealt with, there is simply no need for situations of that frequency to exist in my life.

Final Thoughts

For most animal species, childhood is the most difficult period. Many often don’t survive.

Only for humans, the story is a bit different. Childhood is a memorable (quite literally) and beautiful phase. As a kid, an average child laughs 400 times in a day and an average adult 4 times. What went wrong? Why did the smile turn upside down? We have done everything in the pursuit of happiness, and yet, we’re still in the pursuit of happiness most of the time. Why?

No matter how hard our parents and caregivers tried, we have all picked up scars along our childhood. That’s absolutely fine. It’s those scars that make us special and add to the beauty of who we are.

But it’s those very scars that keep us tied to the past. It’s the emotions underlying the scars that keep us on the loop – the pursuit of happiness. It is time to open up those forgotten wounds, deal with them and move on. A memory without the emotional charge is wisdom. It is time for you to become wise – to deal with the unresolved emotions of your inner child and liberate it.

The answers lie inside, not outside.

As you meditate you calm your brain waves from beta to alpha to theta and enter the subconscious mind. Eventually, you simply listen and see the unresolved emotions that arise for what they are and liberate them from your body.

Can you take this as a sign to reconnect with your inner child?

Sometimes, love is just about paying attention. Can you please love yourself? By paying attention to yourself?

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INPUTS – DO NOT INCLUDE IN BLOG

Why? It’s because of those scars. You never looked

What separates the subconscious mind from the conscious mind is the veil of the neocortex or the analytical thinking mind. The analytical mind is fully formed by the time we’re in our teens. However, prior to that, the subconscious mind is wide open (in varying degrees depending upon the age). Every experience goes right in without it being filtered.

Whenever we have an emotionally charged experience, the mind takes a snapshot of the internal chemistry and the external stimulus that caused it. It stores this association deep inside the subconscious mind and that is how a long term memory is formed.

Epigenetics – the environment signals the genes and the quantum model of reality states that it is the mind that signals the environment. Thus the mind signals the genes.

You are laying the neural connections for the experience – good or bad. The body can not differentiate between

Parenthood

Final Thoughts

Whenever you feel being drawn into a reaction, understand 

I know for a fact that my mother will read this.

Personal example – attention seeking

No matter how you are, you are here. They did their best.

Can you take this as a sign to re-connect with your parents? To

Wouldn’t that be the best place to hide something? Because you would look everywhere, but never within yourself.

The mind is the brain in action. So while your brain sits between your ears and behind your eyes, your mind is spread across your entire body.

Say a child had to go through their parent’s divorce during his childhood. The end result of such an emotion

The subconscious mind is still impressionable through an emotionally charged event or through repetition (that’s how you drive a car).

“I want to achieve what I never achieved; I want you to be somebody in the eyes of the world so that I too can be somebody through you. Don’t disappoint me. I sacrificed so much for you. My disapproval of you is intended to make you feel so guilty and uncomfortable that you finally confirm my wishes. And it goes without saying that I know what is best for you. I love you and I will continue to love you if you do what I know is right for you.”