“What is here, when there is no problem to solve?” About a year ago Michael Ashcroft dropped this prompt when he was leading an Alexander Technique workshop. “If you’re still too much in your head about this stuff, try out this phrase from Loch Kelly to drop that excessive thinking and just be here.” It was such a weirdly powerful little experience shift for me that I kept playing around with it for months.
I once tried to explain it to one of my best friends when we were exceptionally baked. After the first few times where he thought he just needed to give an actual answer to the question, something pretty clear happened for him too. It was like for a moment the way the weed tangled time together got all unknotted. There were a few seconds of clear present experience.
For some reason I can’t recall prompting sober friends on this; I think I explained the concept but never tried it. Since it’s fairly simple and only takes half a second, you could do it right now. Ask yourself the question in your head, don’t answer, just observe and be in the response.
“What is here, when there is no problem to solve?”
Potentially this was a tiny bit psychoactive for you. And quite possibly this made you extremely anxious because now you had the very clear problem of not knowing how to solve the prompt that supposedly could have a psychoactive effect and now you’re missing out big time on a significant human experience.
What you could see once you drop the fixation on problem-solving is that there’s more around you, like the room your sitting in, some sounds in the background, the fact that you have a body, that, actually, maybe, you feel pretty chill, and whatever else is going on for you. You were just overprioritizing the problem in your mental bandwidth.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter that much, this all isn’t really about that prompt in particular. What I actually wanted to tell you is that you can do something similar for a longer period of time. And it’s quite potent.
A couple of months ago, in May, I was worrying for weeks what the actual fuck I wanted to do with my life. It was in the period I lost a big design client and the anticipated hole in my bank account was the perfect space for a grim existential crisis. Should I focus on getting more design clients? Is that what I actually want? Do I focus on my speaking coaching? Become a writer? Find a part time day job? Or am I, perhaps, just bullshit?
It was overshadowing my days. Thinking back to that time I immediately get a big frown on my face and start looking down somberly to the ground.
Surprisingly enough, there was a sharp turning point in this all. I can track it down to the minute it happened, because I tweeted about it.
It instantly shifted my experience. I remember distinctly I felt carefree, uplifted, and joyful for the first time in a while. It nostalgically felt like the last day of school was over and holiday started.
I was completely fixated on solving my struggle, or at least worrying about it. It filled up the major part of my overal attention, leaving very little for the rest of life. And because this was happening for days in a row, this was my life. My life was mainly about worrying, while in actuallity there was so much more going on. Ceasing to solve this problem for a while freed up that mental space and reprioritized the rest of life for me.
In the two weeks after that there were, of course, a lot of moments where my mind initiated the worry-loop again. But the instant I realized what was happening I just laughed about it and point myself back to this silly commitment. Not now, my friend, June is your month!
Some reason this works so ridiculously well is that it’s time bound and honest. I don’t say to myself, “This is stupid, I shouldn’t worry about this anymore.” That would be an evident lie and clearly ignorant. I acknowledge there is a time for worrying, or at least strategizing, because the problem is important to me. But for this specific trouble it won’t hurt anyone or anything if I take two weeks off now.
But mostly this works because it’s giving you the space to, again, appreciate all the other things you have going on in your life.
A colleague of mine once told me his therapist recommended something similar for him. He had trouble falling asleep because he kept worrying, so he got the advice to block out fifteen minutes of worry-time somewhere at night. Worrying was boxed into that time-frame and not outside. Back then it sounded a bit stupid to me. But it kinda helped, I believe. I can’t really remember, it just felt relevant that regular psychology prescribes some similar structure as well.
Somewhere else I’ve heard a similar experiment before is where Joe Hudson prescribes people to ‘actively try to not improve for a week’. Especially when people are stuck in thinking they really, really, really need to improve. I personally never tried this, I guess because I do feel resistance, there are always things going on in my life where I feel I want or even need to improve. This feels kind of silly. I think I’ll go do this for a week now. (*opens calendar to check whether I can ‘afford’ to do this*.)
What I know for sure is that the second half of May was a surprisingly chill month for me, and the first half was quite uncomfortable to say the least. And when June came along, I honestly wasn’t thinking about this so much anymore, things changed. Every now and then it came up again, in a way that was fine to me. Sometimes I do like to think about what to do with my life for a little while. It’s just the intensely anxious and involuntary looping over the same thought process over and over again that I’m not too big of a fan of.
It was never my intention to erase the struggle, on the contrary, I wanted to come back to it fresh and motivated. But sometimes, so it seems, struggles just expire or reshape to a size that’s more in line with reality while you’re not looking. Maybe even especially when you’re not looking.
P.S. One of the ways in which I currently seem to “know what I want to do with my life” is that I taking on more speaking coaching clients. This is mostly about coaching people who feel like a “locked in extroverts”, to feel more alive and joyful in social interaction, which, if this seems of interest to you, you could check out here.