How to Stop Focusing on Lack?

Posted on by Sen.



Your “focus” is highly powerful because anything you focus on starts amplifying in your experience. Focus means to give “belief” and interest. Focus means to take the awareness in your brain and concentrate it on something – an event, a thought or a feeling. Focus means to be engrossed, to participate, to join in or to concentrate. This is how focus happens in physical beings. Your focus is “creative” because that’s the nature of the life-energy that you are – anything you focus on starts getting “created”, starts getting attracted towards you, or starts amplifying.

The brain has a limited capacity for focus– you will notice that you cannot naturally focus on something (like one thought or one feeling) steadily for more than a few minutes, because the brain by its nature is dynamic and always moving (unless you are unnaturally trying to force the focus). When you try to focus the brain forcibly on something, it always feels like an effort and struggle, because that’s not its natural way of being. When you are aligned, a lot of inspired actions happen in short bursts of focus where you are able to get quality work done in a short span.

It’s a good thing that the brain has a limited capacity for focus because if it had a strong capacity it would create a lot of heavy negative realities, when it’s unconsciously lost in believing in negativity. But even with this limited capacity for focus, it has managed to create a lot of negativity because many of us seem to be engrossed with negative thoughts for most part of the day – causing out focus to be always on something negative. When you let go of your focus on negativity, you automatically fall in alignment with your life-stream which is always focused on your true desired reality and your natural expression – what I call the pull of your life-stream. When you stay as open awareness, it’s like releasing the focus (not as an effort, but just simple release), and thus the negativity can start dissolving, now that you are not fueling it through your focus – this dissolution does take time (depending on the past momentum of the negativity), and you have to allow for this time and stay as open awareness while it’s happening.

How to stop focusing on negativity?

When you gain an understanding that your focus on negativity is the cause of it not leaving your reality, the natural question is how to stop focusing on it when the negative reality is in your face. That’s where it’s important to understand what “open awareness” means – it just means to literally relax your focus so that you are not “actively” holding a negative subject. The mind obviously will keep running the negative thoughts for a while, due to its past momentum, but when you are not actively holding it, these thoughts soon die away in intensity, and with them the realities they were supporting also dissolve.

Is it easy to just stay in open awareness in the middle of a lot of negativity in the mind? Actually it’s not, because you feel as if you need to “do” something to stop the thoughts. You feel like reacting to these thoughts. But once you understand that these thoughts are just running from past momentum, you stop trying to react to them, and just allow them to dissolve – you learn to “wait” until it dissolves instead of looking for a temporary relief mechanism of some form of suppression. To wait while the negativity ebbs away in momentum is what “stability” is all about and you become more stable as you learn to just let go of the need to react to a negative momentum in the mind. The more you react the more you fuel it, the more you stay open the easier it is for negative momentum to dissolve.

It’s natural to want to come to a place of stable positivity in quick time, and hence people start looking for “short cuts” to somehow erase their negative momentum, gathered in their brain from their past unconscious attention, so that they can start afresh. But there are no shortcuts, no instant techniques, no drugs that can erase your brain’s negative momentum and clear up the negative energy that has been accumulated in the body over the past. Techniques can surely give temporary relief by silencing or numbing the brain for a while, but it’s not really useful in the long run. The real deal is to just allow the negativity to dissolve by staying as a space of open awareness, if you are not focused on a negativity it has no fuel and it will dissolve. Remember that focus means belief, attachment and strong interest – awareness is just open, it’s like a space which is not contracting on anything neither is it trying to escape anything.

Efforted Focus vs Letting Go

A lot of law of attraction books talk about using the “focusing” power of your brain to create your realities. They talk about, using your focus to concentrate on the desired reality you think you want, and thus manifest it. The first flaw in this approach is that, basically, you can’t know the exact specifics of the right reality for you – for example, your brain might have an imagination that a particular girl/guy is right for you, and you choose to focus on them to attract them into your reality, the problem is that you can’t really know if they are right for you because the brain has a very limited vision (it doesn’t know the whole picture). Another example would be that you are focused on getting a particular job in a particular company because your brain imagines that it will get a good status and good money from the job, the only problem is that you can’t really know if the job environment will be right for you. Instead, if you stop trying to stay focused on the specifics (that you imagine are right for you) and let life orchestrate the events, it allows for a harmonious reality.

The second flaw in this approach of forcing focus is that you try to suppress the negative thoughts. When you suppress the negative thoughts you are basically “fueling” then with your fear/hatred towards them. This suppression becomes a solid resistance in your being – like a pent up block. Also, usually we focus out of a feeling of lack – we feel deeply lackful of our present reality and hence use this “focus technique” to force create some reality that we hope will remove this feeling of lack. The truth is that the lack is “within”, so no matter what realities you create outside, this lack continues to be felt. If you want to be free of this feeling of lack, you need to let go of it from within you and stop trying to imagine that some reality outside will somehow remove your inner lack – because it can’t, it’s just a delusion of the mind to imagine something like that.

We desire a positive reality, inherently. Nobody desires a negative reality. We desire a reality where we feel at peace, where we feel joy and ease, where we feel fulfillment in our creative expression and find abundance to meet our desired lifestyle. Your life-stream has the bigger picture and knows how to create a reality which meets these inherent desires in you, in a wholesome manner. Your brain does not have the bigger picture and all it can do is “guess” that a certain “specific” reality will feel right – like a certain specific person, specific circumstances, specific job or specific flow of events. The question is can you trust the brain’s limited vision or would you just trust your life-stream which has the bigger picture? When you trust your brain’s specifics, you start feeling bad everytime those specifics are not being met, without knowing that it’s for your own good – it’s only later that some of us realize why things happened the way they did, and see the bigger picture.

Also the paradox is that when you let go of your lack induced focus, it clears up a lot of resistance and conflicts, and gets you more in touch with your heart or inner guidance. In this place you develop a clear mindedness about what you really want and what was just an “egoic” craving (created through some deluded thinking) – I talk about this clear mindedness in this post – Clear Minded Focus. There is a lot of clarity and understanding that comes into your brain when you let go of the focus that’s stemming from an inner lack. When you are focused from a place of wholeness its feels completely different than when you are focused from a place of lack. The phase of letting go of this lack based focus is needed so that you can come into a wholeness, and thus move into a wholeness based focus (which actually does not feel like an efforted focus, but just feels like its coming from within as an inspiration).


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6 Comments

  1. Ritu

    Sen, when you refer to “suppression” of negative thoughts, are you pointing to denial of thoughts? How do we identify / what constitutes suppression of negative thoughts?

    1. Sen Post author

      Ritu, there are so many suppression techniques people use when ever some negative feeling or thought pops up – the immediate reaction to try and suppress it by distracting ourselves, or by trying to change thoughts, or trying to silence the mind etc All these are suppression techniques. Even to try and deny thoughts is also a form of suppression, if you are truly letting go you will just allow the negativity to arises, let it move in the space of your awareness and let it dissolve on its own, because it will dissolve if you stay in this space of allowing.

  2. Noch Noch

    Hi Sen

    That’s a great article, I esp resonate with the bit on focus vs letting go – to give away in order to receive/ achieve. I focused too hard on things in the past, now I would like to let go of my lack of focus on things that do matter

    Noch Noch

  3. Gerard

    Dear Sen,

    I’m having serious problems with loneliness at the moment. Basically, I’m in a situation where I’m not ready to socialise, and have been in this situation for many years due to personal issues. I’m 25, and I’m watching the world around me, and its people, pass me by. I feel terribly left behind, I have horrible feelings of isolation and abandonment. It’s making me really depressed, it’s messing me up and sometimes I get suicidal. I feel inadequate, sometimes worthless. I do believe that if I can sort things out in myself it will get better, but the whole situation can seem so hopeless and frightening at times.

    I’m allowing myself to feel all this, doing my best to stay as an open space of awareness without resistance (although I also have trouble with constant negative thoughts that simply will not go away). I’m sorry to ramble on, but I really just wanted to ask you how I can deal with these feelings better? I read your stuff and it helps, but do you have any advice on how I can cope better? Also… although I believe that the negativity will clear away, it’s hard to believe it sometimes. I’m kind of in a black hole and need some perspective on it.

    Also, I wanted to ask: what is your view on prayer? If we are to say that “God” is consciousness… when someone prays, are they heard? I find that I often feel more “aware” when I do so.

    1. Sen Post author

      Gerard, when you are not happy being alone, you won’t be happy even in a relationship. If you are not happy being alone, it’s an indication that you are not at peace within yourself and require an outside presence for you to feel secure. From such a state of inner lack, any relationship you attract will only serve to “amplify” it making you feel worse at some point. Instead of comparing yourself with others, understand that you have unique journey to live out. The easiest way to align with your inner wholeness is to let go of the mind’s negative pull and just rest in your being – I understand that the mind has a lot of momentum and hence keeps tormenting you with its intensity, especially when its fearful, but this process of letting go and staying in the space of your being is so that the mind’s momentum can come down, so that it loses loses its vice hold on your being, or else you just feel like a prisoner to your mind.

      It’s normal to feel that the negativity won’t clear away, because right now you are in the midst of it clearing away – it’s like being in the middle of sand storm, one doesn’t know when it will end, but it always ends. Just think about, if you can’t be at rest with yourself, how can you ever feel at peace? No matter what you achieve in life, no matter how many friends or relationships you have, if you are not at rest with yourself, you are always going to feel agitated, lackful and insecure. The more you rest as a space of relaxed being, the more this space grows until it comes into the foreground, and the mind’s pull becomes more and more passive. In this space of wholeness you automatically attract congruent realities, the right relationship will come along at the right time, you are no longer totally “needy” of having it to feel whole.

      If prayer makes you feel relaxed, it’s serving a purpose for you in that it’s allowing you to reduce your resistance for a while (due to trust in a higher power) and hence allowing the natural well-being of your life-stream to flow in with ease. Instead of prayer, you can also simply just let go into a trust in life, and relax, it’s one and the same.

  4. Gerard

    Thank you Sen, that helped me a lot. 🙂

    Regarding prayer, it does help me, but often when I feel helpless about a situation, I’ll say to myself “it’s in God’s hands”, which basically means that I’m putting my trust in life. I often feel a great sense of relief from letting go in that way.

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