33: Why Your Mind Rejects What Could Nourish You - What taste buds and subconscious reprogramming have in common.

What taste buds can teach us about subconscious reprogramming.

Have you ever hated a food as a child and loved it as an adult?

In this episode of (re)Parenting Radio, Lisa Watson explores the surprising parallel between taste buds and the subconscious mind—and why your nervous system often rejects the very things that could heal you.

Through a deeply relatable metaphor rooted in her childhood hatred of mushrooms (and eventual love affair with them—even mushroom ice cream in Genoa, Italy), Lisa unpacks how subconscious conditioning shapes what feels “safe,” familiar, and acceptable in your emotional life.

Inside this episode:

• Why the subconscious prefers familiar pain over unfamiliar peace
• How repeated exposure rewires emotional preferences
• Why we crave patterns that may not actually nourish us
• How nervous system conditioning shapes relationships, love, rest, and boundaries
• What emotional palate cleansing looks like in real life

Sometimes what feels uncomfortable is not wrong.
Sometimes it is simply unfamiliar nourishment.

This episode will help you ask a powerful question:
What have I rejected simply because it has never felt familiar before?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to Reparenting Radio. I'm Lisa Watson, architect of human transformation. This is a space for leaders, parents, and anyone ready to break old patterns, regulate their nervous system, and show up in their life with clarity and self-trust. If you're ready to change the way you lead, love, and live, you're in the right place. Let's begin. Hello and welcome back to Reparenting Radio. Today we are going to talk about what taste buds can teach us about reprogramming the subconscious mind, and we're going to start with mushrooms. And yes, this will go somewhere deeper than dinner, I promise. When I was about eight years old, I remember sitting at the table with my mom, and she was eating mushrooms, probably with liver and onions or something, which I really didn't like, and she seemed to love. And she really wanted me to try these mushrooms. And I agreed. And so I tried the mushrooms, and oh my gosh, I can still remember the experience in my body and how it felt on my tongue. The second that mushroom touched my tongue, I had this immediate visceral reaction. My whole system rejected it. I just I actually thought it was gonna throw up. I think I may have run to the bathroom. That flavor, it just felt invasive and like almost offensive to me. You know, slimy and earthy and blough strange. And I was certain in that moment that mushrooms were disgusting. End of story. I didn't like mushrooms and I didn't believe that I ever would. Lo and behold, mushrooms are one of my favorite foods in the world today. I love mushroom soup, I love sauteed mushrooms, wild mushrooms, truffled mushroom pasta. I even once went to a restaurant in Geneva, Italy, where they were celebrating mushrooms for the evening, and every single course of this six-course dinner featured mushrooms in some way. Even dessert. There was mushroom ice cream, and I loved it. So what changed? Did the mushroom change or was it me? That question is exactly what I want to talk about today because our subconscious mind works in almost the exact same way as our taste buds work. And once you're able to understand that, you begin to understand why your nervous system rejects things that could actually heal you or be more to your benefit. Your subconscious mind is constantly scanning for what feels familiar, not what is healthiest, not what is most loving or most aligned, but what is familiar. And this is one of the most misunderstood truths about healing work, because often we think that if something feels uncomfortable, it must be wrong. But if you've been sticking with me for a little while, you know that everything happens outside the disc, you know, the comfort zone. The discomfort zone is your friend. And it's not always danger. Sometimes discomfort is simply unfamiliar nourishment, just like mushrooms were to my eight-year-old self. My taste buds had no framework for mushrooms. They were outside my conditioned preference map, basically. And our subconscious mind works exactly like that. If your system has been conditioned by chaos, criticism, scarcity, fear-based programming, emotional unpredictability, then peace may feel suspicious and healthy love may feel boring. Rest may feel unsafe, and boundaries may even feel cruel. Not because they're bad for you, but because they are unfamiliar to your internal palate that you developed early in life. This is the subconscious mind. The subconscious prefers familiar pain over unfamiliar peace. Let that land. The subconscious mind prefers familiar pain over unfamiliar peace. So we may say, Oh, I want a healthy relationship, but when healthy love arrives that's steady and calm and emotionally available, our nervous systems may recoil and reject it. Come up with some excuse why, you know, we really don't want this. Why? And our system says, This is unfamiliar. I don't know this flavor. Reject it. And suddenly we end up sabotaging ourselves with drawing, maybe we pick fights, we lose interest. Not because we don't want healthy love, but because our subconscious palate has not yet adapted to receive it. It doesn't feel familiar. And this happens everywhere within our programming and our conditioning. It happens in money, it happens with success, with parenting, with friendships, in leadership. Sometimes people reject the very thing that they have prayed for because it tastes too different from what they've known. But here's the hopeful part. Taste buds evolve, and so does the subconscious. Many foods only become enjoyable after repeated exposure. And you know, I I came up with the idea for this podcast while I was uh watching some children the other day, and I wanted to teach them about their taste buds. And as I started digging into how taste buds worked, it just clicked in me that, oh my gosh, they work the exact same way that the subconscious mind works. Many foods only become enjoyable after repeated exposure. Studies have been done proving that sometimes it takes eight, ten, or even fifteen exposures before the brain stops treating a food as foreign. And emotional rewiring, it works the same way. We don't get new taste buds. We there's what happens with taste buds is there's like synaptic pruning, like what you don't lose, you use, what you the foods that you eat all the time become very familiar to your taste buds. The ones that you don't have very often aren't familiar at all. That's why children don't like a lot of foods because their taste buds simply aren't used to them. The more and more, the more they try these foods, they may find up, they find out that they do end up liking them. So it's really important if you don't like a food that you just continue to try it because you can change and adapt your taste buds. And emotional wiring works the same way. The first time you say no without guilt, or you start to rest without feeling like you really earned it, or maybe you ask for help without overexplaining, or you speak a hard truth, it may feel deeply uncomfortable, not safe, scary. I mean, your subconscious mind is saying, I don't like this flavor. But repetition teaches safety. Repetition creates familiarity. And the more often you experience something new without danger, the more your nervous system will update. And this is how reprogramming is done. Not through force, but through repeated safe exposure. I always say that we heal in safe relationships, meaning w if we can practice our new skills within a relationship where we're safe to do that, this promotes healing. So let's let's talk a minute about cravings. People often assume cravings are telling the truth. You know, that a craving is something that we really want and need and should have, right? But cravings are often just conditioned loops. And we know this when it comes to things like, you know, we we crave alcohol or we crave a certain drug or something that we know isn't good for us, you know, we we have the conscious awareness to say, maybe this isn't good for me, but I'm craving it anyway. But with other things, like when it comes to relationships or business decisions, we're not making that same, we're not seeing it as clearly as we are with something like a craving for a drug or a habit that we absolutely know is bad for us. Cravings, as I said, they're just conditioned loops. If someone grows up in an emotion in emotional chaos in an environment where their nervous system is now wired to emotional chaos, they may unconsciously crave relationships with emotional volatility. Not because volatility is healthy, but because it's familiar. The body says, you know, I know this flavor. And the same thing happens with overworking, with people pleasing or emotionally unavailable partners or drama cycles, whatever it may be. Sometimes what we crave emotionally is simply that we what we were trained to feel, and it's what we know. Just because you crave something does not mean that it's nourishing you. Just because something does nourish you does not mean that your subconscious will crave it immediately. I mean, let's let's take this back to food. Think about food that most children reject. They're gonna reject coffee, um, oftentimes dark chocolate, arugula, blue cheese, you know, anything with a real strong or bitter flavor. Why? Because development changes perception. What once felt bitter later becomes desirable. As many adults love these things, coffee and dark chocolate and arugula and blue cheese, but children typically don't. Because developmental changes perception. And the same is true emotionally. Emotional development will change your perception. What once felt intolerable, silence, solitude, accountability, stillness can later become sacred nourishment. There was probably a time in your life when being alone with yourself was unbearable. Now perhaps solitude feels restorative. That's an emotional palate maturing. That is subconscious evolution, and it is one of the clearest signs that healing is occurring. Taste is not only about the tongue. Smell influences flavor dramatically. And if your nose is blocked, food may taste different. Likewise, your emotional state shapes how your reality is interpreted. Two people can experience the exact same event and perceive it completely differently, based on their own subconscious programming and the filters that they're seeing their world through. One person may hear feedback and think, huh, well, that really helps me grow, you know, thank you for that feedback. And another may hear, oh God, I'm failing again and I'm being rejected. Same event, same comment, but different internal chemistry. Because perception is filtered through emotional imprinting. This is why healing your subconscious changes your entire lived reality. Not because the world changes, but because your filters have changed. And your interpretations of that reality have changed because in reality everything is neutral and we give it all the meaning that it has for us. Between courses in fine dining, the palate is cleansed. It's done with certain foods. You know, they may bring you something to cleanse your palate, like a sorbet or the smell of a coffee, or, you know, a drink of something. To remove the lingering residue from previous flavors. So if you're in a taste, the wine taste test, you know, you're always clearing your palate. If you're smelling colognes, you're breathing coffee in between to clear your nasal passages and start fresh again. Your nervous system needs this too. Without emotional palate cleansing, old experiences contaminate the new ones. And this is why we do practices like deep breathing, movement, meditation, sitting in silence, being out in nature, walking outdoors. All of these things matter so much because they reset the system. They're your emotional palate cleansers, and they help your body to stop reacting to today through yesterday's lens. You know, the residue that was on your lens from yesterday. We can clear that and start fresh each day. If you never clear an emotional flavor, so to speak, everything new can get distorted through those old beliefs, that though that old imprinting and conditioning. Like the eight-year-old version of me. Truly believed that mushrooms were disgusting. And you know what? She wasn't wrong. That was just my honest experience at the time. But it was incomplete because I had not yet developed the palate to receive the mushrooms. So what I'm offering you here today is to observe yourself, to ask yourself a deeper question. What if the things that you're rejecting in your life right now, setting those boundaries, healthy love, slowing down, asking for more support, giving yourself more love? What if those things they're not wrong for you, but what if they just simply haven't become familiar yet? It's not that you can't, it's not that your life's not set up for you to be able to take these steps and do these things. It's just that if you don't believe, if there's this internal rejection, your brain is going to find excuses and reasons to tell you why it can't be, why you can't do it and it's not possible. It's trying to protect you from the unfamiliar. So in these cases, I say do not listen to your brain. Just go ahead and do it anyway. Move through the fear, move through the discomfort. Try new foods that you don't like. Don't reject them, eat them. Even if you don't like them. Just keep trying, keep giving yourself unfamiliar things. Back in the day, I think I've mentioned this on a couple different podcasts when I early in my uh healing journey here over the last 10 years, I did a challenge to do something different, new and different every day for 365 days. And I learned this from this gentleman who did a keynote speech that I watched named Ken Hughes. And so I challenged myself to do something new and different every single day for a whole year. Now I only made it 175 days because I started at the end of 2019. But when COVID hit, it just became really, really challenging to do something new and different locked in my house. So I only made it 175 days, which is pretty awesome still. But I did something different, like tried a food that I hated. I I ate a whole avocado, including the seed and the skin. I ate whole limes, I cracked eggs into my mouth. Um, I also did lots of different sort of activities, things that I had never tried before, whether it be Krav McGraw or I don't know, like I took so many different crazy classes and walked backwards to the grocery store one day, brushed my teeth with my left hand, I tied my right hand to my my right leg one day, and could only use my left hand, and I tied my left hand one day, I blindfolded myself another day. And I did all these things because I knew that the programs that I was running were not serving my highest self, and I knew I needed to clean the slate, I needed to throw a bunch of new stuff in there in a way that I felt safe because we heal in safe relationships. And I'll tell you, it was the best exercise I've ever done of my life. I did uh post it all on Instagram. It's you know nearly six years ago, so it's way back there on my Instagram. But you can see every challenge I did. And I started off by doing a snow angel in the snow day one, and I think I did a s face down and I did a snow angel in the snow on my back on another day, or maybe I started on my back and then I did another one later face down. They're all pretty funny, actually. So you can check out my Instagram if you want to see some really funny videos. I went to the grocery store in my robe holding a selfie stick like really extended throughout the whole store. I had a robe on and slippers. Just because it was uncomfortable, I did it. And I got some stares, but it I'll tell you it was worth it. It was it was too funny. So I want to leave you with this question. What in your life have you rejected simply because it was unfamiliar? Or you said, Well, I just don't like that, so I'm not gonna do it. What if with time and gentleness and repeated safe exposure, whatever that thing is, could actually become something that you do love. Or maybe like. Like mushrooms. And honestly, if my nervous system can evolve all the way to mushroom ice cream in Genova, Italy, then there's hope for all of us. Thank you for being here with me today. And I would love to hear from you. Tell me what you hate and how you're going to start trying to integrate it and maybe change your mind, or just try something new. Let me know. You can send me an email, Lisa at Lisa Watson.com or info at reparentyourself.com. I would love to hear your comments. And if you would like a free download on a reparenting guide, a conscious parenting guide, or a leadership guide, you can find all those free downloads in the show notes here. So thank you all for joining me, and I will see you next. Thank you for listening to Reparenting Radio. If today's conversation supported you, take a moment to subscribe, leave a review, or share it with someone who knows they were made for more than the patterns that they inherited. If you're ready for serious inner work and real transformation, personally or professionally, you can explore my leadership pathways at Lisa-Watson.com. And if you're raising little ones alongside your own healing, you'll find my children's books at awakenthewone.org. Until next time, stay grounded, stay open, and keep reparenting the parts of you that are ready to come home to their authenticity.