no solution

There’s no solution. Whenever you have a problem worth having, there’s no solution on the level of the problem. The solution is not a solution at all, not in the way we tend to look for one. It’s more like discovering the problem is irrelevant.

It takes a while for that discovery to come. Before it does, we tend to consider everything else instead. How serious the problem is determines how compulsively we think about it. When you have a big problem, your mind performs acrobatics.

Intense mind activity never arrives at satisfactory answers for a problem worth having, but serves to wear us out until we give up. Once we do, a new intelligence arises from a deeper dimension inside us, not by effort but by total surrender.

Surrender is usually the last thing we do and the one thing that works. We admit we don’t know and permit ourselves to feel more deeply. It is highly common for great waves of difficult emotion to arise at this time, and overpower us.

The important part is to feel them, not to think your way around them anymore, or deny they are happening. The excessive thinking phase is over, giving way to greater honesty about the state of your inner world, the grief in your heart.

Your problem wants you to release that grief through sincere contact with it. That’s what your problem is really about. That’s what makes it worth having. It’s always a masked opportunity to heal and transform. As a problem, it’s irrelevant.