You Don't Need 20 Years To Change

Krishna Avalon uses the iceberg analogy: the small tip above the waterline is your conscious mind, logic and reasoning, while everything below the surface, your habits, patterns, memories, and beliefs, is the subconscious, and that is where almost everything actually gets decided. Talk therapy mostly works the visible tip, which is why you can fully understand a pattern intellectually and still repeat it. Real change, she argues, requires working directly with what is stored below the surface, not just narrating it. We mapped the same architecture in Your Subconscious Runs 95% of Your Life.

Krishna's answer is that most talk therapy works by retelling the story from the conscious mind, the small visible tip of the iceberg, rather than reprogramming the belief stored underneath it. She uses Psych-K, a muscle-testing method built on Bruce Lipton's research, to shift a limiting belief directly, without hypnosis and without years of sessions. The subconscious, she says, does not require the conscious mind to relive an event in order to release it. We unpacked this same remembering-versus-rewiring distinction in 97% of Your Mind Runs on Autopilot, Plant Medicine Shows You Why.

In the episode, Krishna describes a doctor she works with who understands her own burnout completely and still comes home most nights to binge Netflix and drink half a bottle of wine, then wakes up criticizing herself for it. Her explanation is that conscious insight and subconscious programming run on separate tracks. Understanding a pattern does not rewrite the belief actually running it, in this case, one about not deserving the energy for the things that inspire her. The real work was reprogramming that specific belief, not analyzing the behavior further. We traced the same insight-without-change trap in Why Your Burnout Has Nothing to Do With Working Too Hard.

Ale raises this directly in the conversation: founders and high achievers often internalize that pain equals growth, and will distrust a method that feels too easy or fast. Krishna pushes back hard. Effective subconscious work, she says, can be simple, quick, and still profound, and some of the most "enduring and brutal" therapies do not actually work better, they are just harder. If a fast, direct shift is what you are after, that is exactly the terrain of a Quantum Diagnostic Session, or a deeper container across a full cohort of The Science of Healing & Enlightenment.

Below is the complete transcript of "You Don't Need 20 Years To Change," the main conversation with Krishna Avalon. Read it if you prefer text, or want to search a specific point we covered.

And I'm very passionate to ask you already the very first question. How did you get here? What's your story? I mean acupuncture was my first love in this life. It is the first thing that I trusted and followed and just did not doubt. I trusted it with all my heart and followed it and it has been a beautiful career for me. It is miraculous medicine. But like so many people when pandemic hit I needed to pivot and I had already been studying, learning, researching the subconscious mind. And for me, this was the missing piece in my own healing. I didn't understand why so many people could create their lives in a way that seems so easy in these ways that for me were such a struggle.

And when you start to learn that the subconscious creates 97% of your life and it's where our behaviors and our habits and our beliefs and our patterns are stored. It made sense when I learned that my own beliefs about what I deserved and what I thought was possible was very limited and contracted. And what I find is that everyone has limited or self sabotaging beliefs in some way in some areas of their life. And it's just based on what we were shown and what we experienced while we were growing up. So well your conscious mind might try to tell you oh you deserve this this and and the other. If your subconscious programming is like no you don't.

You deserve this much love or this much money or this much happiness or this much peace that is what you will keep creating over and over again. Or maybe you'll start to get a sense of something bigger but then you'll self-sabotage in some way that's usually unconscious for people to kind of knock you back down to what is familiar to keep you safe. So you ask how I got here and I would really say that God put me in the training of psyche and internal family systems because I really didn't know what either of those modalities were was when I got into them. But then when I was in the trainings I was like oh it's because this is the healing that the world is asking for.

And so psyche doesn't mean to be spiritually bypassing, but psyche is the process that I was trained in for the subconscious. And the reason that I love it is because for one, it's very simple. For two, you are not hypnotized. You are like very conscious. It's a very quick process and you not only get to peacefully unattach from stressful behaviors or events, but you also get to reprogram. And there is no other modality that I've come across that helps you do those things so quickly and simply and beautifully. And simple is deep and simple is elegant. And so for a lot of people, they think they need to endure and work hard to heal, but it's really actually not true.

And then internal family systems came into my consciousness because some amazing people that I met from various places were therapists doing IFS. And I landed into that training immediately when there's normally like a three-year wait list to get in. I got in right away. And again, I didn't know what it really was. I was just following the yeses. And it's it's just like that deeper inquiry for people who want to be with the parts of themselves that need their attention. And so it's really beautiful when I get to combine those two things together because a lot of I mean most people do need both of those things. So you ask how I got here. God led me.

I needed to pivot. It was time to grow. Growth is really important to me. And while acupuncture was my first love in this life, I wouldn't say I was burned out, but I was definitely ready to grow. And I wanted to serve. I mean, not from an egoomaniacal place of being like special, but like I had been doing acupuncture for 17 years. Like I just that is my zone of like excellence. I could do it forever with a blindfold, but like really my genius right now I think is in helping people with their subconscious stress and helping them be with the parts of them that really need their attention so that they can be in a more embodied experience in their life.

Amazing. I I love this story and I love the fact that you rightly started on on the subconscious topic and I it took it took me a lot of time and to be honest also a lot of science to understand how all of this works because for some I mean I don't come from the the spiritual kind of world or like the kind of like inner confidence per se. I I actually had to get to connect a lot of the dots of of the hard facts to then finally allow myself to to kind of like lean into these these conversations. I'm for anyone that doesn't really get it yet. What does it really mean that the subconscious drives 97% of your actions? Yeah, great question. I So, I'll offer this visually and I'll offer it like in an analogy.

So if you imagine an iceberg, this is the common visual people have heard of. The iceberg, right, that you see poking out of the top sticks out. That's your conscious mind. That's your logic. That's your reasoning. Underneath, beneath the surface, that's where the most of the iceberg is. That's the density, the depth, the intensity, the girth, right? And so that's that's where all of our behaviors and our habits and our patterns and our memories are stored. So while you can do he some healing in the conscious mind, it takes so much longer and some things might not even be possible. You will intellectually understand why things are the way they are, maybe with a good talk therapist, traditional talk therapist.

But if you don't have the ways of working with your subconscious mind, it's going to be really hard, if not impossible, to make changes in your life. And that's really what I would like people to know is that you don't need to work so hard to heal. It doesn't need to take 20 years of talk therapy to be able to make changes. You can actually make change right now. And some of the reprogramming I get to do with people is around that. Like you deserve ease. You deserve to feel joy and peace in your life. Like you already are deserving and worthy of that. You don't have to earn it by a bunch of, you know, some of the therapies out there are really enduring and brutal and they don't often work.

So, while talk therapy does save lives, things like exposure therapy or CBT, yes, they work for some people, but for other people is very brutal and harsh to like have to retell stuff over and over and go through the memories and go through the the storytelling often perpetuating the same stuff over and over again. Okay, so that's the visual, the iceberg. Bruce Lipton, who is one of my teachers, right? He's one of the reasons why people know about Psych K is because he wrote the biology of beliefs and he was friends with the creator of Psych K Rob Williams. And Psych K was is Bruce's like favorite way of working with the subconscious and it helped him finish the book biology of beliefs.

Like he really thought he was going to get chastised and shut down for being a scientist who brought spirituality into his work. And so yeah, he says that, you know, if we're computers, and I don't love comparing us to technology, but the keyboard is like the conscious mind. That's where you're typing and the information. Again, the logic and the reasoning, but the programs, those are stored in the hard drive and you can't function without either, but the hard drive is really the like the guts of it. So, love it. I I resonate a lot when you say that healing doesn't take a lot of time, doesn't need to take a lot of work. And I often have the conversation with fellow friends, fellow founders, fellow entrepreneurs that they are so used to grind and so used to the hard work that now they kind of like internalize that pain equals growth.

And so they actively seek pain and if something isn't painful then they're not working enough on on this topic. And and when I was telling them about about these methods I also practice something relatively similar. I don't know if you're familiar with the emotion codes. So we still work with the subconscious on that level and and they always say oh yeah but this isn't a hack. This is like a shortcut. It's like that. So, so what? That exactly. And I love emotion code. I I really like emotion code. It's great to clear things past, present, future from other people. But it didn't offer me the way to like reprogram. And so I thought about training in emotion coach just cuz I'm an emotional being and I love that that work.

But yeah, psych for me is super special. It's a dumb name. I don't love it, but it stands for psychology plus kinesiology. Rob Williams is a psychologist. He created this work. It's science-based. We do muscle testing. We go through what's called a balance to get your brain in a whole brain state is what it's called. Very simple stuff from something called brain gym. And then we muscle test after the balance just to make sure there's been a shift. And this work can be done virtually or in person. It's surprising that it's so effective as effective virtually. And for anyone who knows what muscle testing is, like I would just be asking to muscle test on your behalf.

And I don't know how it's so simple and easy, but it really is. I guess the power of quantum entanglement can reach everywhere and and everyone any time. Yeah, it's so true. And it's and even people with like the biggest, deepest, darkest traumas, all of a sudden they're just able to like go in a new direction and move forward when they hadn't been able to before. And so that's really the power of this work that I've seen is people who just haven't been able to find that thing that helps them move on. And I find that really inspiring. So you not only get to unattach in a very peaceful way from very stressful things or just really annoying things that you can't stop thinking about, but the way I would see that is it takes up a lot of your energetic or psychic space.

Let's help you move on from that so we can create space for what you want. And I love working then with like what do you want?

And let's come up with your favorite words as I reflect back to you what you really want and let's create a program so that you can start having that perception because if that perception doesn't exist in your subconscious mind if the program doesn't exist in the subconscious it won't happen for you might keep trying but it's going to be so hard you're going to hit so much resistance and it probably won't happen yeah I I've seen it for myself and to be honest I was one of those people read so much accustomed to hard work so much even like I've been meditating and doing prostration meditation for the from the Buddhist lineages for over seven years every single morning frustration frustration and he he helped me a lot for sure but but then I there were many times that I were actually I was actually burned out from from the pain and from the energy of that meditation rather than the actual day at at my company and my work.

You talk a lot about energy and how this connects with the psychic energy and and the subconscious and so on. Help me out a little bit. Connect the dots here. What does it mean? How do you intended for anyone that still thinks that energy is a woo conversation? Like how how can we make them understand better what are we actually talking about? Science-based also. Yeah. I mean, you could think about it from a physics standpoint. Everything is energy. Everything. So, if I meet you and you are angry, that's a different energy than if you are peaceful or if you are anxious or if you are exhausted or scared or sick. Everything is frequency. Everything is energy.

And that really is and can be proven and shown through physics. Contribute. It's been been shown in the neuroscience, it's shown in epigenetics. So for me in my experience like I read energy, I always feel it. Sometimes I see it. I can definitely sense it in in various ways. Our nervous systems for instance take in information, sight, sound, touch, right? Even like our intuition. And so even from that standpoint, it's like you can think about like those things are real and those can be proved by science. But that is how we can sense energy. We know that it's real. You can't fake energy often, right? Like you can't really I know you mentioned when we were talking before that you liked how I said like you really can't fake a frequency and you can't.

So, even if somebody's putting on a face or they're smiling or they're saying these things to you, you can sense, right, if something feels off, if you pay attention to your own intuition, maybe if your gut is like clenched, but someone's smiling and you're like a little bit like, why is this happening? You know how to listen to those signs, right? That's energy. Yeah, absolutely. I don't know that that answered your question, but I would say think about it from a physics standard. No, I think I I I believe making people understand that frequencies are everywhere and our conscious ability to detect them through our senses is very very limited.

And of course, if you look at any science book, I mean, you know that Wi-Fi exists because it sends you the the 4K movie of Netflix on your computer, but you definitely can sense it, but you still know as a fact that it's there. There are so many other frequencies that clearly we as human beings and every other being or thing emits. So when we talk about frequencies, we're talking about that.

And I love trying to push this topic into kind of like a business conversation because I think we're getting more and more to a new era of of being a conscious leader and especially when when when you understand that you're an energy being and that you emit certain frequencies and as you rightly say you can't fake your frequency then how does it all affect what you do, what you say, what you think the people around you, the company and the products that you build and so on and so forth. I think that it all matters. I think our thoughts matter, our intentions matter, our beliefs matter, our devotional practices matter, our self-care matters, what we eat matters.

I mean, I have non-negotiables in my own life at this point because I know how it feels to feel resourced. I know how it feels to feel the way I want to feel when I'm showing up for people or even being with my daughter, being with myself. So, you talk a lot about technology in the or actually kind of like anti-technology in the sense of reconnecting with our sense of of self and and and like our own intuition. I I'm just curious to kind of connect a little bit the dots here in we are kind of outsourcing so much of our understanding about our health for instance through the trackers through whatever other smartphone application and so on. You you clearly have a different perspective on this and I'm very curious for for everyone to understand a little bit better on it.

Well, I don't always pay attention to what's going on in the news or what's going on in the world, but I do read energy. And I read energy based on what I feel and all of the people who come to me. And I have a teenage daughter, so she also shows me the world and what's going on. And that for me is about what I can handle. And that's about what I can do. I am often with all of the people that come to see me helping them do less to get more. So when we are anxious, when we are stressed, when we can't sleep, it's not about like what supplements can I throw at it, what app can I use, what this that gadget can I get? No, it's really about like what are you doing that's causing you stress?

Are you on your phone until bedtime? Are you sleeping with technology in your bedroom? Are you sleeping with a device on your body? Those are not things that are going to help you rest. And a thing on your body might give you data, but like what is that really doing for you? You should really be able to wake up in the morning and go, "How do I feel? Did I sleep well?" Not look at your watch and be like, "How did I sleep?" No, it's teaching you to look outside of yourself, look at an app and data. And that's that's what these companies really want, right? They want you to buy their their services and their devices, but it's it's taking you outside of yourself.

And so what I'm often teaching people is like less is more. Turn your phone off an hour before bed if you want to sleep. If you want to feel less anxious, drink 32 ounces of lemon water in the morning or plain water or a little bit of salted water first thing in the morning. Even if you forget all day, at least you've started and then maybe you won't have your headaches. Then maybe your digestion will be better. And so really it's just like yeah getting rid of the caffeine, getting rid of some of the things in your life that are causing stress instead of adding more because people are being taught and they're buying into it, right? Like more more more how can I look outside of myself?

Where's the solution? It's the solution is within yourself and it's often really like less do less of the stuff that's causing you the stress. So yeah, I do I do have a different perspective. And it's not that I don't use technology. I mean, I I do I'm about to make an app for my business, right? And so it's like I do use that stuff cuz I know it's going to help me scale, but I just think that people have gone overboard and they forget their connection to nature and they forget like who they are. Yeah. How do you So I I feel like that all of these habits that we take with technology, they definitely have something to do with our subconscious mind, right?

It's like how do you how do you connect and eventually how do how do you unlock the connection between being so stubborn at looking outside of you because it became a habit versus doing the work that actually is needed to rebalance yourself. I do think that working with your subconscious beliefs around you are more than enough or you can trust yourself or you have clear boundaries. Those three things right there can change your life and that will apply to all areas of your life. Your habits, your behaviors, your relationships, your practices of self-care. So, I could wrap it back to that. You know, how is our relationship with technology related to our limited beliefs about like who we are?

I mean, I we could definitely work work with that and it would it does it changes people's behaviors and habits even when it's really hard. Like today I had she's the doctor and she wishes that she had this energy for the things that like inspire her and help her feel creative in her life. She remembers how she was when she was doing those things, but instead she'll come home and she'll just sit on the couch and binge Netflix and drink, you know, half a bottle of wine. And then she wakes up and she has this like criticism of herself and she feels bad. And so, you know, we we did some balances around what that stress is like for her in the morning when she's feeling crappy about herself and then we created new programs around like I have energy to do the things I love.

That's going to change her life. Yeah. Yeah. Profoundly. Let me let me wrap up the conversation. And I'm curious to to ask you one last question as as a business owner yourself like as a leader. How like what would be your best intention or guidance for anyone out there still struggling becoming like really understanding first of all what does it mean being the best version of yourself and how to get there in in in like beside everything that of course we already talked and and the subconscious work like if you have an image of the leader of tomorrow of the entrepreneur of tomorrow inspiring people to be really achieving the highest possible potential or as a human being and not as a machine.

What would that look like? Oh gosh. For me, it's like definitely about being peaceful, about being connected to myself and God that flows through me. It's about trusting who I am. It's about being able to deeply rest and pause and like have absolutely nothing to do. It's about healthy relationships. And so for a piece, you know, for a leader, I feel like for me, even as a leader in my practice or my family, cuz I'm definitely like the matriarch of my family, doing your own inner work is really important because it broadcasts a frequency when you are doing what you need to do inside of yourself to tend to your own wounding, to do your own healing, to spend time with your own thoughts.

It helps people feel safe when you stay connected to your own energy. And when you have these practices built up, doesn't really matter how somebody shows up. If they're in chaos, if they're angry, if they're this, that, and the other, if they're ranting, if you know how to stay in your own energy, and you've done those things to build your own capacity, that helps other people feel safe. It's like being a tuning fork for the everybody around you. And so when you say what is the like most optimal expression or like the optimal leader, I mean that's what I want. You know what I mean? Even just like with past political things going on, I am not a political person.

Like I said, I really don't read the news. If I look at somebody that's trying to rule this, that, and the other, and they look terribly unhealthy and dead in their eyes, am I going to really listen to what they're saying about certain things? Probably not. Probably not. Yeah, it it's funny. It's funny how some research showed that like over three quarters of the leaders in in any given industry, any given area of expertise, they're they're sleepd deprived. And it just this is just like one thing of the many things, right, of of looking around you and really understanding who can really inspires you as a good example. And and you said something about standing your own place and energy and and being able to to to head.

You say let's say kind of like deal with with everyone's energy around you without being so much like always shaken up and down by the by the wind of the others. It just reminded me my my Buddhist llama always used to say big dogs don't bark when you are centered and when you know who you are for real you you don't need to bark the people that are barking are showing you that there's something off that they need to protect something that they cannot handle. Exactly. They're coming from fear as well, right? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, thanks so much, Krishna. This has been a lovely conversation.

I hope our our audience out there is is slowly getting closer and closer not just to the healing journey, but also to understanding that there are very very powerful techniques such as the ones that you practice that can really transform your life very very drastically. Just a quick kind of closing example. I've been gluten intolerant for many many years and I actually stopped gluten after COVID because I realized it was causing me chronic depression. Since I started working with these techniques of the subconscious mind, I was finally able to heal it and now I can eat everything without problems. And if I think about it backwards, without the understanding of how energy works, some people could have said that that's a miracle.

Yeah, it is. It is a miracle.