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When does the subconscious mind programming start? Actually, it’s much early than your expectation. Yes, it all starts in the uterus (womb) for the unborn child. But before moving to further detail on this, let’s first understand the subconscious mind and how it’s different than the conscious mind.
The subconscious mind is associated with the neural activity of a much larger part of the brain (approximately 90 percent) than the conscious mind. It’s a profoundly more powerful influence on our behavior than the conscious mind. The conscious mind’s prefrontal cortex can process and manage relatively 40 nerve impulses per second. In contrast, the subconscious mind’s platform can process 40 million nerve impulses per second. That makes the subconscious mind’s processor 1 million times more powerful than the conscious mind’s.
As subconscious mind controls and influences the majority part of your life. When you are not getting the desired outcomes in spite of putting in your best efforts, then the root cause is linked to the subconscious mind programming. Criticizing your subconscious mind for that is like screaming at your television. Is your television good or bad? Neither. What are you watching? Don’t blame the television set, blame the programming! Is your subconscious mind good or bad? Neither.
The subconscious mind is primarily an amazing record/playback mechanism that expresses little creativity and has no sense of time. It is always in the present moment, doesn’t see a future, and certainly doesn’t listen or care when you yell at it! So, rather than criticizing or battling with your subconscious over its bothersome behavioral programs, it’s best to acknowledge its power.
Conventional Thought & New Research
Doctors used to think (and some still do) that all pregnant women can do to support their babies’ health is eat well, take vitamins and minerals, and exercise; according to conventional thought, gene programs will manage the rest. But more recent research has laid to rest the myth that the unborn child is not sophisticated enough to react to anything other than its nutritional environment. The researchers realize that the fetal and infant nervous system has vast sensory and learning capabilities.
“The truth is, much of what we have traditionally believed about babies is false. We have misunderstood and underestimated their abilities. They are not simple beings but complex and ageless—small creatures with unexpectedly large thoughts,” writes David Chamberlain in his book ‘The Mind of Your Newborn Baby’.
In a world based on genetic control, where genes determine an organism’s fate, science only needed to focus on the influence of the maternal blood’s nutritional contribution in supporting fetal development. However, in the wake of the epigenetic revolution and new science revealing that behavior & environmental signals control gene expression. We now know that the developing fetus is influenced by more than just the nutrients in the mother’s blood. Maternal blood also contains a vast array of “information” molecules, such as the chemicals, hormones, and growth factors that influence and control the mother’s emotional and physical health.
“A new baby is like the beginning of all things: wonder, hope, a dream of possibilities.”– Eda J. LeShan
Effect of Environment on Fetus
The developing fetus, bathed in the same blood chemistry as the mother, experiences the same emotions and physiology as the mother. The fetus, for example, absorbs cortisol and other stress hormones if the mother is chronically anxious. If the child is unwanted for any reason, the fetus is bathed in the chemicals of rejection. If the mother is wildly in love with her baby and her partner, the fetus is bathed in the love potions. And if the mother is furious with the father, who has abandoned her during the pregnancy, the unborn child is bathed in the chemicals of anger.
In his lectures, Bruce H. Lipton shows a VIDEO from the Associazione Nazionale Educazione Prenatale because it graphically portrays the interdependent relationship between parents and their unborn child. In the video, a mother and father engage in a loud argument while the woman is undergoing a sonogram. You can see the fetus jump when the argument starts. When the argument escalates with the sound of shattering glass and even higher-pitched screaming, the fetus is fearful—it arches its body in a shock response and jumps higher as if it were on a trampoline.
The Newborn is Not a Blank Slate
The above sonogram and other research make it clear that fetuses react strongly to the environment provided by the mother and are influenced by the father. Says Dr. Thomas R. Verny, whose pioneering 1981 book, ‘The Secret Life of the Unborn Child’, first laid out the case for the influence parents have even in the womb, “In fact, the great weight of the scientific evidence that has emerged over the last decade demands that we reevaluate the mental and emotional abilities of unborn children. Awake or asleep, the studies show, [unborn children] are constantly tuned in to their mother’s every action, thought, and feeling. From the moment of conception, the experience in the womb shapes the brain and lays the groundwork for personality, emotional temperament, and the power of higher thought.”
The developing fetal brain not only responds to the chemical messengers in maternal blood; it also acquires a memory of these chemical cascades that define it’s in utero experiences. By the time a child is born, she or he has already downloaded the emotional “music” of behavior, a tune that will endure throughout the child’s life. The child is born whistling a specific tune because he or she has already been programmed with the patterns of emotional chemicals experienced within the mother in the womb.
The nature of this programming is important for adoptive parents. These parents are often unaware that even when they adopted a child as an infant, their child may have already downloaded a pattern of dysfunctional emotional chemistry that becomes the “music” for a less than positive behavioral song—the child is not a blank slate. Adoptive parents shower attention on their children and are then shocked when the children they so lovingly nurtured start manifesting the behavior of their dysfunctional birth parents.
What they don’t realize is that the foundation of a child’s personality has already developed by the time of her or his birth.
Baby Under Construction
A new field of study known as fetal origins asserts that prenatal development constitutes the most significant period of our lives, permanently influencing the wiring of the brain and shaping our intelligence and temperament. In her cover story for Time magazine, Annie Murphy Paul acknowledges, “… a pregnant woman’s mental state can shape her offspring’s psyche.” The nine months in the womb are so fundamental to human development in every area of life that Dr. Verny says he would like pregnant women to wear “Baby Under Construction” T-shirts to broadcast this crucial fact.
In truth, the mother (and by extension her relationship with the father) serves as nature’s Head Start program. Through the mother’s physiology, and especially her blood that crosses into the placenta, the unborn child is indirectly learning about the world it will be born into and actively adjusting its behavior and genetics to survive in his or her parents’ world. (Excerpt is from ‘The Honeymoon Effect: The Science of Creating Heaven on Earth’ by Bruce H. Lipton)
