I run up against the disparity between thinking and knowing all the time when working with clients. I’ll be reading along in a book explaining in detail what they need to do to accomplish what they are asking to achieve and they will interrupt with, “But I’ve already done that. I think I’ve done exactly that when I did….” So setting aside that I just read in their book that they hadn’t and that they need to and the fact that it’s all irrelevant to me, I don’t have a vested interest in this game, I’m just here to read the Cliff Notes version of their life to them since they aren’t able, the key term to this is “Think.” Thinking is the brain, particularly the left/logical brain, trying to sort through facts, see patterns, and put things into an order which makes meaning and sense out of things. It doesn’t like to repeat a process if it doesn’t have to and it doesn’t make judgements on whether something is effective if it appears to meet the criteria on paper. So as I describe something that appears to be like something that they have already done, regardless of the fact that what they did hasn’t resolved things and they are still asking the same questions and in exactly the same place, they can say with surprise and a bit of indignation that they think they’ve already done that.
Knowing is a whole body, emotional/physical process that is many times disconnected from the mind and it’s thinking. In fact we struggle with this constantly by knowing that something is wrong when all the logical facts point to it being just fine. Or knowing that we should do something when all the logic and facts point to us needing to do something else. Thinking can come into harmony with knowing, that’s part of most all spiritual practices. It doesn’t go the other way around, usually, just FYI. 🙂 So when a client is having difficulty with the thinking vs. knowing of something I point out to them that having gone through a therapeutic process of some kind doesn’t mean that they’ve gotten the benefit out of it any more than working out with a workout tape set to high-speed gets you the benefits of the workout in half the time. It’s not just that you did something, it’s how you did it and how much you invested in it that makes a huge difference.
Many of my clients have gone through healing practices in this way, from writing their life stories to meditation, to therapy, to soul retrieval, and so much more and come out of it with great and uplifting experiences, but little material change to themselves or the issues at hand. They think they have done the work and they have done work, but they don’t know that they’ve done it and they do know that something else is necessary, hence they are speaking to me. So I’m not knocking the thinking thing. I’m all about being thinkee. However, if you think you’ve done something and you still aren’t getting where you want to be, stop and check in. What do you actually know? Your brain will say you don’t know and that’s usually wrong. You do know, your brain just hasn’t caught up yet. Give it a goose in the right direction. 🙂