How much of your attention and energy do you spend on an injury, illness or disease you have?
Do you spend time praying about it or seeking remedies or talking about it? By doing so you focus your energies on the condition. You are focusing, not on what you what, but on what you don’t want. Your attention is on the condition, the affliction, the disease. Your energy – and it is so powerful – is directed towards what you wish to disappear.
You get what you focus on.
Try to lighten your attention and your concern. It’s not about ignoring the condition, it’s about reducing your attention and your view of its importance.
You will maintain the condition for as long as it serves you. It is serving you now. It may be a challenge for you to identify its purpose. One way to uncover the message is to consider what you are able or unable to do because of the condition. Remember it is just a message.
You may conciously not like the condition, but you keep manifesting it. How can you stop it?
You can stop it by first decreasing its importance. Give up and accept that you’ve chosen this form of expression. Accept it. Realize it is not you, but your creative expression. It is okay. Then let it go. Shift the focus.
Notice and and accept the feelings when they show up. Pretend it is a pesky little dog that comes by and begs for your attention. You can try to yell and chase it away, but that never works. It craves your attention. It is your focus that powers it.
Instead, acknowledge and accept the little mutt. Know it is neither good or bad. It is just your way of communicating something to you. It just is. Go about your business. You have so much more to do in your life. This little mutt was once your focus, but at least for the moment (and many more to come) don’t give it your energy. Turn your attention elsewhere – to what you want.
If your condition has been around for a while, you’ve likely created a comfortable habit with it. You’ve set up a comfortable expression that works for you.
Emotion, expressed as feelings and as symptoms, are anchors that resist change. You are comfortable with what got you here. By changing you are trying to rock the boat.
The trick is not to fight the emotion or the condition but to give into it. That is your choice and your power. Fighting gives what you fight your energy. To win a fight withdraw the energy and focus.
Notice the amount of attention you pay to the condition. Your attention level corresponds to the importance you assign to the condition and how much reinforcing energy you generate. Importance and attention are key. It is not just what you think, but what you do that reinforces the condition. It takes focus and discipline to change what is important to you and to change what you focus on.
I’ve had numerous opportunities to use these lessons in my life including when I broke my arm in a bike accident this past fall. While the pain and recovery work were intense, I did my best to focus on where I was headed and not on my current condition. I’m not completely healed, but I’m much farther along than my surgeon expected! One particularly powerful tool I use is to spend 5 or 10 minutes each day in a relaxed setting thinking about the change I want – to be able to bend and straighten my arm without constraint. I designated that as the time to think about my condition in a positive way, and for the rest of the day try my best to live my life without emphasizing the pain in my arm. When pain does show up, I try to accept the feeling and then immediately shifted my thoughts to something I prefer – like my writing.
Remember your body is a reflection of your thoughts. Not a mirror, but a reflection. You have the condition because your body is telling you something. It wants you to realize this and do something about it. The pain and discomfort make certain you pay attention.
There is a message behind the condition. You can figure it out, but you don’t need to focus on the discomfort to do so.
It’s like an alarm clock going off. Your initial attention is on the sound coming from the alarm, but that is not the point. It is just a symbol to wake up for there is a reason to do so. You set the alarm not to focus on the loud uncomfortable noise or even the clock making it, but to get up and start your day or for whatever reason you set it.
You are more likely to discover the message behind the condition when you are less focused on the symptoms. Release the feelings of the symptoms to feel the message. Lessen the intensity of the feeling to reduce the energy which can allow you to move in a direction you prefer.
Move in the direction of letting go. Stop fighting. Give up. Once you truly give up, miracles can happen.
