Imagine for a moment that you completely unlearned your biggest psychological problem. Might stretch your imagination a bit but just imagine that you clicked your fingers and ‘hey presto’ it was gone, exposed as an illusion, as if by magic.
If that was possible and you stepped into the space beyond, what do you think would naturally be there without you having to do a single thing?
Chances are you’d be massively relieved and just pleased that you don’t have to feel bad any more but once the dust had settled what would you notice to be there without you necessarily having to create something new?
A sense of peace, purity, happiness, freedom, pure potentiality perhaps?
It’s funny, we often think that we have to create positive alternatives to our problems from scratch – ‘Out with the old and in with the new’ so to speak. The assumption being that, when we change, we always have to create something new to put in the old problem’s place.
Well have you ever considered that there is already something special and pure sitting behind the problem, in the background, only you can’t see or experience it yet because you’re too pre-occupied with all the turbulence?
What if you were to go beyond and catch a glimpse? What if you stepped fully into it and then looked back at the problem…how do you think that might change things?
I know this probably sounds a little strange and possibly a bit esoteric but stop and fully consider it for a moment…
If your problem was to suddenly be exposed as an illusion and you stepped beyond, what would naturally be there without you having to create or do anything other than simply notice?
I think when you honestly do this you start to get an appreciation of your truth.
When I first learned NLP I was told that when you quote ‘remove’ a limitation you are left with a void that needs to be filled. If not then the client (or you) would be left confused and may end up falling back into their old ways of thinking.
Unless you strongly suggest this to them then I don’t think this is what actually happens when we resolve a problem. I think, in the absence of the problem, something pure exists behind and it’s more a case of ‘unblocking’ things to allow the natural energy and emotion to flow.
That change is often more a case of ‘unlearning the not so useful stuff’ so that we can ‘re-tune into’ our natural sense of pure potentiality rather than ‘removing limitations’ and ‘installing new stuff’.
Sure, sometimes we need new strategies and learning brand new ways of looking at ourselves and the world is an essentially part of being Human but to suggest that change is always about creating something entirely new is a bit of an insult to human nature.
It’s a bit of a trick of the left hemisphere really, creating a kind of narrow focus, spotlight type thinking that stops us from having an appreciation of the layers behind.
It operates from the utterly false assumption that we are born as complete blank slates and that without our ‘learnings’ our ability to experience the world would completely collapse. It’s just not the case and there is plenty of beauty naturally there that we start to re-connect with in the absence of our problems.
I remember talking to a Yoga teacher who told me that, throughout his training as his body gradually returned to something resembling its default form, he started to experience pure, positive emotions he hadn’t felt since he was a child. He wasn’t even really doing anything other than getting his body back into a healthy place, human nature did the rest.
There’s something about the process of unblocking the body that allows you to experience a once felt purity that you perhaps haven’t felt for some time and I think a similar thing happens with psychological change. When you resolve a big issue and then step beyond, it feels different but it also feels kind of familiar, like you’re recapturing some of the purity of what it felt like when you were a kid. At least that’s what it feels like for me and I know from talking to people that it’s also like that for many others.
So have a think about it again as you rarely get the full appreciation of it on first reflection –
If you snapped your fingers and suddenly realised that your deepest psychological issue (and we all have one!) was an illusion, what would naturally be there in its place without you having to create or do anything other than simply notice?
Because when you honestly step beyond into this place, what’s naturally already there is most likely your truth.
All the best
Steve
