The two choices of focus
I listened to a great piece from Abraham yesterday. A lady had recently left a relationship and she was pleased about it, but at the same time her thoughts kept drifting back to thoughts about the relationship. This was a great opportunity for Abraham to chime in with what might be their most important advice - all to do with focus.
Abraham isn’t the only teacher who emphasises the importance of focus. My weekend at Unleash the Power Within with Tony Robbins was also all about cultivating and intentionally choosing your focus. In the latest chapter of Living with Joy entitled “Opening to Receive”, there is much emphasis on how where you choose to focus is what amplifies in your life. And definitely Dr Joe Dispenza also points us towards changing the way we focus and what we focus on, and he encourages us to break our usual habits of focus.
But what does it really mean? What is focus? It’s far more than concentrating on a task or ensuring we’re not distracted. It’s about being a guard at the gates of our thoughts, as Tony Robbins put it, to ensure that what we’re thinking is in alignment with the life we want to attract and manifest.
Let’s get back to the lady at the Abraham seminar. She’s aware that she is having unwanted thoughts and often. The guard at the gates of her thoughts feels helpless to stop the flow of thoughts about her ex. So is that it? She’s failed to cultivate her focus and her evolution is doomed?
This is where Abraham’s advice about the two choices of focus is so helpful.
Abraham tells us that we can either put our focus elsewhere, or we can choose to elevate our feelings around the subject we’re currently focusing on.
The first one truly is akin to what our parents told us when we were young - “Ignore it and it will go away”. It’s true, but it means also ignore it in your thoughts. Where you focus is where your energy goes. Where your energy goes becomes your focal point of attraction and manifestation. So, if you have 10 things in your life, and 9 of them are good, but you focus on the one that is bad, the other 9 become contaminated and start to get worse because all of your focus is attracting the same energy as what you’re focusing on, the one bad aspect. It works in reverse too. If you have 10 things in your life and 9 of them aren’t going well, and you only focus on the one good one, then the other 9 also begin to improve without you lifting a finger in terms of action.
For this lady at the Abraham seminar, she had the choice of constantly and consistently steering her focus to other thought streams. What should she choose to think about instead? Anything else that is either neutral in feeling or something that feels good. That’s why Abraham is always going on about the blue glass! Thinking about something mundane that doesn’t hold any particular emotional charge is better than thinking thoughts that put you in lower forms of emotional energy and feeling.
The second choice of focus is to work on getting yourself up the emotional scale on the particular subject you’re thinking about. In this case the woman was feeling angry about her ex, so Abraham advised that she could get to the next emotion on the scale, hope, within a few sentences. Abraham, as always, gave some great and humorous examples! They said she could start with “I hope that my next boyfriend is better than this one”. The idea is to start to play with the next feeling on the emotional scale and try and massage yourself into feeling this new feeling with the thoughts and phrases you recite to yourself. Even making it to the next level of the emotional scale, without going all the way to the top, will change the energy around your point of focus significantly.
Personally I prefer option one, changing what I’m thinking about completely. When I do this I try to flip the way I’m seeing something in my life that I otherwise might take for granted. It might be total awe and appreciation for the speed at which I can buy something and have it delivered to my door. It might be for the beauty of watching the seasons change outside my window. Or the abundance of delicious food choices here in Italy. Or the abundance of choices I have in my life in general. Something that I can truly enjoy thinking about and truly feel a high vibrating emotion around.
But the first choice has to be that you are committed to doing this at all. You have to really want to be the cultivator and curator of your focus and to make the decision that doing so is the single most powerful thing you can do for yourself in each and every moment.
