Simple In Principle, Maybe Not In Practice

Here's the principle: you can experience whatever you want to, if only you'll focus your "consciousness" on that, or "put it" there.

Example: if you want to experience the ever present energy of love, you only need to choose to focus your consciousness on that energy within yourself, instead of on whatever else you may be experiencing, like fear, or anger, or sadness, or any train of thought. As long as you're focusing on the thoughts, or the feelings other than love, you won't be able to experience the love. So it becomes a matter of desire, and of re-focusing whenever you move off track.

Sounds simple enough, in principle. And I agree that it is simple. So what is it that prevents people from being able to do it easily? Is it, simply, a matter of different desires? If I'm depressed, and struggling with hopelessness, and an overwhelming sense of powerlessness to change anything, is it simply that I don't want to change this strongly enough? Are there other operative factors?

I'm quite certain that there are other factors in operation as well, and yet there may be a way in which it is possible to consider the simplicity of this principle as real. One factor that I come across with some frequency in my work is just that people don't understand that the changes they're after will come about in steps, over time, and not all-at-once in a flash of transformation. This implies that it will be necessary to "practice" certain new ways of understanding and of doing things, until a new experience is stabilized, or learned, or established. An obstacle that can then present itself is that people don't "want" to have to make that kind of effort, and so don't, and so don't experience the changes they say they "want".

Disappointment may then follow, and a belief that therapy doesn't work, and resentment may develop on top of that, or a client may come to believe that they themselves are just not good enough, not deserving enough, not strong enough, not capable enough, etc. It can become quite complex, whereas the principle we started with remains in itself, pretty simple.

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