This is my response to an email from a friend complaining about her life. Nothing was right, nothing was good enough, the past was awful, and she was pinning all her hopes on a glorious new future that would redeem her and free her from all her limitations.

Hi [Correspondent]

Thanks for your messages. I feel a powerful desire in you to move forward in your life, and this impetus is creating a surge of energy and awareness that is helping you to identify and sort through some limiting ideas about yourself. This is all good news, even though what comes up sometimes is not very pretty. [Never mind, it’s all good!]

When you think about it, all we really have for sure is our ability to move our attention. Never mind all the other magical powers we’re supposed to have. We often cry about all the things in our lives we cannot control, meanwhile not bothering even to try to control this one thing that is always in our power. Our attention.

Yes, you cannot change your hair color, or the weather, or the job market, or the economy, or your past, or other people, or even yourself! None of these things can be changed in the outside world. This present moment is a done deal, in so many words, a fait accompli. It cannot be changed in any way, only experienced [and transformed into the next present moment - but that’s another story.]

Where you focus your attention though, is completely in your control at all times. Even if you are being dismembered by an angry mob, you still have the ability to move your attention. This is the god power inside us that so often we squander on contradictory, limiting and even self-destructive thoughts, words and imagery.

Of course, the big secret is that by controlling our attention, we CAN change our hair color, the weather, the job market, the economy, our past, other people and even ourselves. But all this comes only when we have taken responsibility for and start controlling, what we are focusing on. Because what we focus on creates all of those other things.

How sad and even funny it is sometimes, to see someone railing against the outside world without paying any attention to what they focus on inwardly. This only perpetuates all the things we don’t want! It is like the person who looks in the mirror and seeing that their hair is messy, tries to comb the mirror! And gets more and more irritated at not achieving anything!

What do I mean by controlling our attention? This is simple and in actuality everybody does it all the time. Stop reading this right now and close your eyes for a moment.

That is moving your attention. Now think about what your left hand is doing. Now think about what you had for dinner last night. In these examples you moved your attention because I told you to. But you are actually the one in control. You can move your attention ANYwhere, ANYtime, and nobody can interfere with this unique power of yours.

You might say, "So what! How does this help me in my difficult situation?" The answer is that your reality creation mechanisms automatically form your reality, based on - you guessed it - what you are focusing on! Our attention turns out to be an incredibly powerful reality creation tool. [This is rooted in our Divinity. We create universes by perceiving them.]

Think of your attention like a magic wand, or the replicator on Star Trek. Whatever you desire, simply place your attention on it long enough and it becomes real. The reason it takes a while for these things to manifest is purposeful in this dimension.

We designed it this way to give ourselves more opportunities to learn about this astonishing process, and also refine our desired outcomes along the way towards manifesting them. [If we all got exactly what we were thinking about instantly, there would be a lot of unnecessary confusion, to say the least.]

Where you focus your attention is where you are directing your divine creative energies to flow. And as they flow in the direction you have decreed, they leave in their wake actual realities for us to experience and explore.

This is our power, to autonomically create a dynamic pathway of possible and probable realities in whatever direction we choose to focus the creative beam of our attention. [see labyrinth]

- - - - -

Example - The Sore Foot

As an illustration of moving our attention, imagine you have a sore foot, or pick some physical ailment actually bothering you right now.

Because we didn’t know any better, in the past we may have focused our attention simply on the pain in our foot and on feeling bad about the situation. [Or irritated, cowed, shamed, frightened, or any number of other feelings we don’t like.]

Because of the creative power of our attention described above, this movement of our attention automatically produces a huge array of pathways towards more pain in that foot. Our neo-conscious self is sent off to busily summon up a bunch of likelihoods for manifesting exactly what we are pointing at with our attention.

Our new way of understanding this gives a different meaning to a pain in the foot. This is a signal from our body consciousness alerting us to something needing our attention. [‘Attention’ seems to be the ‘lingua franca’ within consciousness, you can’t leave home without it.]

Responsively and purposefully, we move our attention to our foot and thank it for capturing our attention. Next we engage the energy being expressed in this pain. “What is this signal exactly? Where is the pain, what size, shape, texture?” And moving on, “What is the message behind this signal?”

Understanding that the body consciousness speaks metaphorically, how does the image ‘sore foot’ figure in this message. Are we entertaining ‘lame’ ideas, not putting our ‘best foot forward’, or are we perhaps about to ‘put our foot in it’? There is literally no limit to where these ideas can lead us, and our best strategy is usually to follow-up on wherever these explorations lead. [Can’t hurt!]

As we engage in these absorbing inner explorations, we cannot help but marvel at the intricacies of our reality creation mechanisms. Our sore foot is the result of truly spectacular autonomic reality creation processes that we direct with our conscious mind! The foot in question is a miracle comprised of trillions of unique individual cells, all acting seamlessly together to create our experience of a foot. [it’s all alive and fresh, and created by us anew in every nano-second, which is what freedom is really all about.]

Add to this, from the focal perspective, the fact that the pain in the foot is a message from our neo-conscious telling us something meaningful - allegorically meaningful! - in relation to the wider realms of our expressions in this focus. This built-in feedback in our reality creation mechanisms is extremely valuable, and proves, in execution, to be nothing short of pure genius!

As we marvel at the glory of ourselves [no joke!], it may occur to us to put that miraculous foot into action, just to see such magnificence ‘on the hoof’ so to speak. In fact we might resolve to ‘step out’ at the next opportunity, or take that fated 'first step', or the necessary 'next step' towards some dream, or even that ‘final step’ that releases something unneeded or unwanted. [And on the metaphors go...]

But back to our theme, where are we focusing our creative attention in these kinds of explorations? And how does this compare to what we were focusing on before?