The other day I was on a radio show when a caller phoned in. She said she had suffered from feelings of scarcity and lack for more than 20 years, and she had tried every therapy under the sun to rid herself of these feelings, which were clearly holding her back. Nothing had worked for her.
There’s no doubt that the therapies help many people. However, the therapist—and the client—hold to a few assumptions that make true and lasting healing difficult to achieve.
The first is that ‘you’ are different from the problem being worked on. There’s you and there’s the problem, which you don’t want to have (such as the feeling of scarcity or lack).
The second assumption is that this ‘you’ can work on the problem. This is the basis of anger management programmes, for example.
The third assumption is that ‘you’ can learn to control or overcome the problem through expert guidance.
I call this dynamic the ‘therapist triangle’: there’s you, there’s the problem and there’s the therapist.
None of these assumptions is true. Feelings of lack or scarcity (in the case of the caller) are the emotional extraction from incidents in her life. As these emotions build—as they will while they remain unobserved—so we interpret more incidents as a vindication that there is scarcity.
The emotional extracts are energetic, and they are interpreted as feelings or thoughts, and will find expression in the world, which is why so many people see patterns appear.
In this process, the thinker (or feeler) is created. The thinker, that thinks it is independent, is in fact the offspring of the problem itself. Any attempt by ‘you’ to rid yourself of the problem, therefore, merely strengthens it.
So is there nothing we can do? Of course there is, but it begins by seeing the process of thoughts and feelings as they rise up and give birth to ‘you’. Once seen that way, the feelings and thoughts lose their energy as there’s no thinker or feeler owning them.
Finally, the problem is seen for what it is. All of our feelings and thoughts have their origins in the past, an energetic force that is formed from partially-observed experiences. A partially-observed experience is one that is witnessed entirely from our body-centred centre. Although experiences in our life may be true, they are not the truth, because truth is found in the 360 degree perspective.
When all this is seen clearly, true healing begins.