Way Sooner than Soon

What are some of the assumptions of traditional psychotherapy that Field training does not make?

Well, psychotherapy assumes that there is something wrong with the client, that the therapist is an expert whose training and experience endow him or her with the ability to solve the problem, and that this process will take time—generally many weeks or months, if not years.

It’s important to note here that these assumptions, which Field training calls intentions (beliefs about what’s real) do work.

They work precisely to the extent that both the client and therapist believe they do.

Field training, on the other hand, makes assumptions of a different sort—that there is nothing wrong, since the problem really is a solution, and everything is always working perfectly through the law of correspondence; that each person is his or her own expert; and that the process of shifting from contradiction to alignment takes no time at all.

This doesn’t mean that it takes just a little time. It means no time. 

The paradoxes built in to Field training render any shift into a more fulfilling identity something that’s always “already done” and available. So, while it may take a little time (usually minutes) to become aware of and choose to appropriate this more fulfilling identity, we are aware of and choosing something that, in terms of time, preceded our awareness and choosing.

Along these lines, I’ve often sat with and soon was laughing with students who were choosing to postpone some desired shift on the grounds that it was “coming soon.”

In Field practice, soon is never.

The fulfilled state is not even as far off in the future as to be “soon.”

As Christianity tells us, “The Kingdom of Heaven [fulfillment] is at hand,” and in Field training terms, the only way to have what you want is to already have it by being the self that corresponds to it.

This is a very different assumption than the one that presumes a process taking weeks, months, or years.

It, too, is self-fulfilling.

Which path one chooses may well come down to a question of whether one wishes to experience the desired version of self and corresponding reality now or “soon.”

For some, the slower route is the preferred one.

Now, there are some forms of psychotherapy—non-traditional ones—whose methods more closely approximate the methods, if they can be called that, of Field training.

The work of Milton Erikson is a great example. Erikson used subtle induction techniques to blow the client’s mind. Transformation in such cases takes no more time than it takes to believe something new.

This explains at least somewhat why deliberate creating is much more a feeling than a thinking art.

Thinking the new reality without feeling it will not work; feeling it without thinking it will.

In order to become consciously the creators we already are, we have to learn to move from the heart, and forego the lesser benefits of analyzing, figuring out, and otherwise remaining in the attic of the mind.

Like the student of Zen, we answer the answerless koan, something the mind cannot do, since the answer must be a willingness to be more than we have been, and not merely a logical or rational formulation.

The moment we’re willing to examine all of our assumptions, including our professional ones, ask ourselves whether or not we wish to continue believing in them, and answer from the heart of what’s most true and beautiful for us, we are already in that wonderful, quiet place that D.T. Suzuki called “beginner’s mind,” a place the Field finds irresistible.

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source: field project dot net