Healing the Subconscious Mind: Beyond Talk Therapy and Hypnosis

A doctor trained in conventional medicine, Ayurveda and Chinese medicine on how various negative emotions can be resolved at a deep level by targeting the subconscious as part of a multidimensional approach.

Dr Shehan Wijesingha

Dr Shehan Wijesingha MD, M.TCM, BMedSci, DipAP, CPT

Reviewed 15 August 2026 Reading time ~ 12 minutes

Key takeaways

  • Some Western therapies offer genuine benefits, but people suffering psychologically deserve more than an approach that masks the underlying issue or requires repeated sessions for months or years without deeper resolution.
  • In the East, we treat the deeper layers of the mind as part of the whole to transform anxiety, anger, fear and sadness into courage, creativity, self-confidence, joy, compassion, meaning, and purpose, and, most importantly, a return to who you are at the deepest level.
  • I believe that targeting the subconscious at a deep level, as part of a multidimensional approach, offers the best chance of resolving longstanding negative emotions quickly, deeply and lastingly.

Have you ever tried to logically reason your way out of a racing heartbeat, constant fear, the crushing weight of sadness, or a sudden surge of anger, only to find yourself feeling the exact same thing when triggered?

You may already know deeply that something is missing.

As a conventional doctor I was always looking for the most natural, effective, and lasting way to heal that works at a much deeper level. One reason for this was because, once upon a time, I only had 10 to 15 minutes with each patient and wanted to create the most effective change in that time.

The experience in this video was only the beginning; my thinking and approach as a holistic doctor have developed enormously since then.

An early patient encounter that changed how I thought about mental health and began a much wider inquiry into psychotherapy, Ayurveda and Chinese medicine.

People suffering psychologically deserve a genuine solution. More than something that masks the underlying issue, or multiple sessions every week for months or years without a deeper resolution. I was determined to find a better way.

Therefore, I immersed myself in every book and scientific paper I could find on as many different types of psychological therapies as possible. From CBT, gestalt therapy, and psychodynamic therapy to EMDR, clinical hypnosis, and somatic therapy, I wanted to understand how to create change in the most effective way that is genuinely long-lasting. The honest truth is that there are some genuine benefits to some of these Western therapies 1–3, and the scientific approach can add immense value, but I do believe a deeper solution is definitely needed 4–6.

However, when I studied Ayurveda and Chinese medicine in detail, I found two ancient medical traditions that understood health across the physical, psychological, energetic, and spiritual dimensions of a person at the same time 7–9. And whilst this is increasingly being recognised at the forefront of medical research 10–17, in practice the mind is largely left to psychiatrists and psychologists, treated as if it comes from a chemical reaction in the brain, faulty thinking or coping mechanisms.

If Ayurveda is unfamiliar to you, the clearest place to begin is why I believe it will shape the future of medicine. You can then see how I use it clinically in Malta or read my more detailed analysis of how Ayurveda’s model of reality is beginning to parallel some of the latest thinking in modern physics.

In the East, we treat the deeper layers of the mind as part of the whole to transform suffering into courage, creativity, self-confidence, joy, compassion, meaning, and purpose, and, most importantly, a return to who you are at the deepest level.

Taking all of this into account, I would like to ask the reader: why do you think practises rooted in Eastern traditions, like yoga, meditation, tai chi, and qigong, are rapidly gaining popularity in the West 18–21?

Is it purely due to a more stressed-out population, or is there something deeper that people are intuitively understanding they are missing?

The purpose of this article is to explain how, even when we go into the deeper aspects of our mind, we may be missing something fundamentally crucial. To explain this, I want to give you the following analogy.

The Jungle: The Anatomy of Our Armour

Imagine you were born in a dense jungle. There are lions, poisonous snakes, and harsh environmental pressures that can destroy your health. To survive, you build the thickest, heaviest armour around yourself, like a knight’s shield.

Over time, you learn to use your five senses to navigate this jungle. Every time you hear a certain rustle in the leaves, you react; every time you see a predator, you brace yourself. As you learn more, your methods become more sophisticated, and so does the physical and emotional shield that has allowed you to survive.

As children, in the same way, we enter the world in a state of profound purity, interacting through our physical body, our energy levels, and our five senses, with very little shield at all. Very quickly, however, we instinctively learn to build protective mechanisms to survive the modern world. We end up living with very heavy armour.

In this analogy, the jungle is the outside world and the armour is your subconscious mind. To put this into context: if you see a lion tomorrow, your sensory inputs reach the emotional centre of the brain before your conscious mind is even aware of what you have seen 22–26.

This is why you often cannot just “think” your way out of a trigger. It would be like bringing a calculator (your conscious mind) to a lion fight. Your subconscious armour is fast, it is powerful, and it is what genuinely keeps you alive 27–31.

These patterns do not always arrive under a mental health label. In one person they may appear as anxiety; in another as pain or fibromyalgia, fatigue, insomnia or a sensitive gut, while routine tests are normal and they still know something is wrong.

Ayurveda and the Subconscious Mind

This brings us to a second analogy. Imagine your stomach is weak and your body is full of toxic substances. What do you think is the logical solution?

Is it to just tell a person to stop being sick and repeat, “I am not sick, I am not sick, I am not sick”? Is it to give them a pill to numb the stomach ache? Or is the actual solution to find out why the stomach is weak in the first place, fix that issue so that the stomach can be strengthened so it can digest food properly, and to start clearing the toxic accumulations that have built up in the body?

We understand this perfectly when it comes to the body, at least from a holistic healing perspective. But even in holistic healing, we can often drop this logic completely when it comes to the mind.

The simplest way to understand the mind from an Ayurvedic perspective is to first ask a purely logical question: what is the mind?

In the conventional Western approach, we say it arises from the brain. But what is the brain? It is simply a large cluster of neurons. The truth is, we have other large clusters of neurons throughout the body. We have the inferior hypogastric plexus, the superior hypogastric plexus, the celiac plexus, the cardiac plexus, and the cervical plexus. If the mind is essentially a network of neurons, then you could argue that we have other minds in the body, operating at a deeper level than our conscious awareness. I have explored the neuroanatomy of this in more detail here.

In Ayurveda, we describe these different aspects of the mind, from the superficial to the intermediate to the deep, as summarised in the diagram opposite. We correlate these layers of the mind to these individual clusters of neurons in the physical body, which traditional systems have long mapped as energy centres. The honest truth is that these layers of the mind are so tangible that some individuals even report visually perceiving them as the aura, a field of energy seen not just around human beings, but around all living things.

Therefore, if the subconscious mind resides in various aspects of the physical body, it raises a critical question. What are you actually targeting with talk therapy?

Is even subconscious work, through methods like hypnotherapy, deep enough to reach these neural centres in the body? Is there a reason the founding fathers of modern psychotherapy, like Freud, eventually moved away from hypnosis?

When you understand this, do you genuinely believe it is better to talk yourself out of the situation on a conscious or a subconscious level? Or could there be an approach that could genuinely create a better result than either of these approaches alone?

So now I will take you back to the jungle. If I target your conscious or subconscious to let go of your armour and you now get eaten by a lion, did I do you more harm or good?

If you use the same jungle analogy, you need to have a strong physical body and mind that has a genuinely rational way to thrive in the jungle full of lions without the armour, knowing that on every level, that not only are you safe, but you can thrive in the jungle without that armour.

Think about that.

And to use a third analogy, just like the trees in this jungle, you are not just going to survive with the optimal amount of water, but you also need the equivalent of the right nutrients, the right soil, the right weather, and the right care. How do you make a tree optimal in its conditions? You give it everything it needs. The human mind is no different. You don’t only target one layer of the mind, but all layers of the mind, in combination with everything else the mind and body needs.

The seven layers

Superficial mind

1AnnamayaPhysical body
2PranamayaVital energy
3ManasFive senses

Intermediate mind

4BuddhiIntellect

Deeper mind Subconscious mind

5AhamkaraEgo
6AnandamayaBliss sheath
7ChittaConsciousness
Figure 1. A simplified map of the deeper mind.

Releasing Subconscious Emotions Once and For All

Therefore, taking all of this into account, targeting the subconscious is essential, but it cannot happen in a vacuum. Just like the tree in the jungle, you are not going to thrive with water alone. If you simply strip away the armour without giving the body and mind the foundational support they need, you leave someone vulnerable to the lions.

Depending on what the assessment finds, acupuncture may influence pain, mood and autonomic balance; nutrition may provide the raw materials for repair; IV support may help when deficiency, absorption or recovery demand justifies it; and red light therapy may support cellular energy in selected patients. When longer combined work is needed, this may lead to an Integrative Reset.

In cancer care, emotional work can support coping, sleep, stress regulation and quality of life.

This is why releasing subconscious emotions is never the only thing I do. It is one highly focused phase within a much wider, multi-dimensional plan to make the change lasting:

  1. Clearing the Physical and Energetic Body: Just as the body needs blockages to be cleared, so does the mind. Using everything modern science and ancient Eastern healing practices have to offer, energetic blockages are cleared (which in modern scientific terms might be described as improving autonomic regulation). Nothing deeper is reachable while the system is braced.
  2. Bypassing the Analytical Guard: If we stop at the body, the deeper layers of the mind that have been unhealed will create contractions again. So this is where the deeper layers of the mind are accessed to clear blockages at the level of the mind’s operating system.
  3. Digesting the Undigested: In this deep state, the old learning is brought live. We start properly digesting these negative thoughts, beliefs, traumas, and what traditional systems might describe as trapped emotional energy, which made the body feel like it is constantly trying to survive in a dangerous jungle.
  4. Connecting to the True Self: As the armour is released and the mental toxins are cleared, you naturally come into contact with your true nature.

When you look at it objectively, how else are you genuinely going to thrive in this jungle? You cannot just talk your way out of it, and you cannot just hypnotise the armour away without first ensuring the body is strong enough to stand without it. How this targeted subconscious work fits within a full, integrated medical plan is set out in how treatment works and the wider integrative medicine framework.

From Survival to Creation: Stepping Into the Unknown

If you honestly combine all of these factors together, I believe you move past the great majority of people who are living in some form of survival mode, burdened by their heavy armour. And you join the small minority who don’t need this armour to survive.

And when you no longer have this heavy armour weighing you down how do you think you experience it? You feel lighter. You feel clearer. But unlike a naive child, you have actual tools to be able to deal with anything in the jungle with 100% genuine confidence inside. You can create a new environment in the jungle where not only are you safe, but you are thriving. This is where you stop surviving, and start typically creating a life with your own unique gifts and talents to help others also thrive better in this jungle too.

And at this point, there may be a deep knowing, that you are connected to the unconditioned, joyful and creative inner child that was always there who can feel, that on a deep level, you know why you are here, and what you are meant to be doing.

If anything here genuinely resonates with you, I wish you all the best on your path.

And if you think this approach might help you, feel free to send a message.

Frequently asked questions

Why does fear keep coming back, even when you know you are safe?

I believe fear is a natural evolutionary survival response to danger, which is heavily exploited by various forms of media and marketing in the modern world. In Chinese medicine, fear maps to the kidneys 9, 32. At an energetic level, I think fear causes a contraction, which can manifest physically as tension in the muscles throughout your body. A deeper question to ask yourself is: when you carry persistent fear, how does it change what you notice, what you avoid, what you tolerate, and what you repeatedly choose? I believe that releasing the demoralising energy of fear naturally creates a more uplifting and inspiring energy of courage. By freeing this draining energy, the illusion of fear can often be exposed, allowing a deeper sense of courage and love to transpire.

How do you treat anxiety and worry differently from talk therapy?

I do not believe anxiety is just a thought. I believe anxiety can reside in the deeper layers of the mind and the physical structures of the body. In Chinese medicine, worry and overthinking are traditionally associated with the spleen and its paired organ, the stomach 9, 32. You can understand this when a person is worried or anxious: they physically feel it as butterflies in their stomach. It is quite interesting that in modern research, emotional states also seem to be experienced through highly reproducible patterns in the body 33–36. This physical tenseness in the muscles acts as a defence mechanism, accompanied by various forms of psychological avoidance. Energetically, this is a blockage clogging the muscles and nervous system. The solution to me is always a multi-dimensional approach: allowing the muscles to relax, the energy channels to open, and properly digesting any undigested mental traumas and toxins, so that a person can eventually, on a deep level, feel a grounded sense of calm and peace. I have written about the physiology behind this in more detail in when anxiety is more than anxiety.

What is the best way to release anger that keeps building up?

In my opinion, anger consumes the individual. But anger is usually just the bodyguard for a deeper, more vulnerable hurt. In Chinese medicine, anger and frustration map to the liver 9, 32. When somebody genuinely processes anger, there can be a physical discharge as muscle tension falls, with some people even describing a sensation of heat leaving the body. What I find interesting is that what seems to emerge on the other side is often a profound compassion and empathy with the suffering of others. And this makes sense to me, if anyone understands the hurt others could be going through, it is those that have felt the exact same wound in their own flesh.

Can depression be treated without medication, or without only talking about it?

I do not see depression as merely a chemical imbalance. It can involve a profound loss of hope, meaning, connection, and felt aliveness. For someone who experiences life spiritually, this can feel like a disconnection from spirit. In Chinese medicine, the spirit resides in the heart, whilst grief and sadness map to the lungs 9, 32. Therefore, when this is released, what seems to be restored is a greater sense of meaning, connection, and a sense of something larger than oneself. In this space, the heavy, disconnected energy of depression, which often feels random and punishing, can be transformed into the lighter, more comforting energy of hope.

How do you work with jealousy and envy?

I see jealousy as a fundamental issue of low self-esteem or a sense of lack, constantly comparing oneself to others. Low self-esteem maps to the solar plexus, which underlies this comparison 37. Therefore, the solution here, using a multi-dimensional approach, has to involve strengthening a person’s sense of self, as well as their interconnected nature with others. When this is released at a deeper level, not only should a person feel their individual value and worth, but also recognise that of others. This seems to culminate in the cultivation of an innate desire to root for the happiness of others, transforming jealousy into admiration, self-growth, and collective abundance.

What about frustration and disappointment?

I think frustration and disappointment can come from an immediate need to control a situation or control the future. But when this is released through accessing the deeper mind, there can be an innate trust in the deeper intelligence of the soul’s unfolding destiny, allowing a person to authentically live with patience.

Are you a hypnotherapist in Malta, and does hypnotherapy actually work?

Research suggests that hypnosis can benefit some people with mental and physical health concerns 3, although results vary. I am not a hypnotherapist. For people searching for hypnotherapy in Malta, the important distinction is that I am a medical doctor who draws on techniques used in hypnotherapy and meditation, amongst others, within a broader, multi-dimensional approach. Rather than using hypnotherapy techniques in isolation, my aim is to release longstanding negative thoughts, emotions and traumatic experiences at a deep subconscious level while working with the mind, body, spirit and energy together. This page explains how I approach subconscious work and why I believe it can reach beyond hypnotherapy alone. How it fits within a wider plan is explained further in how treatment works, integrative medicine and mind-body work.

How is this different from EMDR or somatic therapy in Malta?

I think EMDR and body-based therapies can be helpful and I do draw inspiration from these techniques amongst others. However there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Therefore in my personal opinion, it is ideal to understand how all these therapies work, as well as understand the diagnostic and treatment rationale behind ancient Eastern healing traditions, to create a truly effective multi-dimensional approach for the benefit of patients who truly deserve it after suffering for so long.

Do I have to believe in Ayurveda for this to work?

No. I do not require someone to believe in Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, or any particular spiritual framework for me to work with them. I have hopefully elaborated on my thinking about various aspects of my approach in articles such as this one, and I am always open to questions. I genuinely recommend that patients read as much as possible, so they are as informed as possible and can be more confident in whichever approach they choose, whether that is mine or anyone else’s.

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Medical disclaimerThis article is for educational and informational purposes. It is not a substitute for individual medical assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Do not alter or stop medication, or begin new treatment, based on this article alone. If there is an immediate threat to life, call 112 or go to Mater Dei A&E. If you are in mental health crisis or someone you know is at immediate risk, contact 1579, 9933 9966, or 179. For the full directory of crisis lines and support in Malta, see mental health supports. Consult a qualified clinician who can evaluate your specific situation.

Dr Shehan Wijesingha, MD, M.TCM, BMedSci, DipAP, CPT, practises at Serenity Holistic Medical Clinic, Malta. He is Vice President of the Association of Ayurvedic Professionals UK.