The Forces that Govern Our Bodies

Written by Eugene Morgan

“Human beings, once they have learned anything, transfer this learning to the forces that govern their bodies,” Milton Erickson.

The ‘forces’ that govern our bodies, Erickson is referring to our unconscious minds. Therefore, our unconscious minds are what govern our bodies.  Our unconscious minds are storehouses where everything learned are sent and retrieved.  We’re constantly retrieving from our unconscious minds.

For example, as you’re reading this sentence, you’re retrieving information.  In fact, for you to understand this sentence you’re reading now, your mind has automatically taken information from your unconscious mind without your awareness.  You become aware of this only when you come to an unfamiliar word that you haven’t learned yet.  But once you’ve learned it, that too, is transferred and stored away in your unconscious mind.

There are countless things that we learn that we don’t know we’ve learned.  Another example, would be speaking a native language.   When our parents were teaching us how to say “dad, dad” and/or “ma, ma,” we didn’t know we were learning.  It’s amazing how much our senses involved in the process of learning a language.  We as infants had to learn to hear specific and distinctive sounds, we also saw the expressions on the faces of grownups on how the words were expressed.

So, if we have the ability to retrieve, such as, symbols like letters and words, we can also retrieve other learned experiences to help us get through hot spots in our lives.