Working as an Innate Health coach, people generally come to me to help them solve problems.
Whether it's a habit or behaviour that's limiting their life, a feeling of being stuck; having trouble sleeping or inter-personal difficulties; being overwhelmed by strong emotions; chronically over-thinking; struggling with workload or productivity or just life in general, the question always boils down to:
“How do I change this, Giles?”
And I'm pretty certain I can indeed help, whatever the problem is.
Not because I know what the solution is—I honestly don't have a clue, and shy away from offering advice at all costs!—but rather because of what problems actually are, and where solutions come from.
What are problems?
If we take a trip to dictionary corner and look up the etymology of the word ‘problem’, we find this:
So, at the most fundamental level, a problem is the mind, observing a situation (let's call this ‘A’), measuring it up against all of its conditioned beliefs about how things ‘should’ (🚩) be (we'll call this ‘B’), finding it lacking, then fishing around in the past to ‘throw, or reach’ that old data into a future that, naturally, it can't control.
But that it thinks it has to arrange in a particular way, ‘in order’ for you to be ok.
(When you're already ok.)
It doesn't know how you're going to get from ‘A’ to ‘B’, it thinks that it has to do it all, and hey presto, you've got yourself a ‘problem’.
🤷🏻♂️
Where do solutions come from?
Keeping it really simple and remembering that our entire experience, from birth to death, consists of moments, where we're either:
- in the flow of life and present to that, or
- in the flow of life and at the same time being distracted from that, by what the mind is saying about life
…then the answer to that question becomes a bit clearer.
Because we've established that the solutions don't come from ‘what the mind is saying’ (that's old, stale, very limited data) so, logically, the solutions we seek can not lie in thinking analytically about our problems.
They therefore must come from being present to life itself, without the distraction of the mind's commentary.
But we can't just not think, can we?!
Ugh, minds and their ceaseless objections to what they don't understand! 🙄
(It's ok, I've got one too.)
Of course we can't not think. Thought is one of the necessary 3 Principles of experience. Without thought there is no experience to be had!!
But (and this is such a big ‘but’, I'm going to give it a little box of its own)…
The true source of solutions, is life-energy itself (‘Universal Mind’ in 3 Principles terms); ‘wisdom’, ‘common sense’, ‘intuition’, ‘grace’, or ‘insight’ if we're really into using labels today.
So we solve our problems by going back to basic principles. By knowing where to look. By using the right tool for the job; something I wrote about in a previous Daily Reminder that I'll link to below.
💟
Giles
Related
Giles P Croft
‘Problem-solving’ / ‘Decision-making’, same-same.