Your Need for Answers Might Be the Problem
Chandra Eden, The True Me Yogi
The Sedona Method
Author: Hale Dwoskin
"Wanting to understand or figure out why, or from where, problems arise can also be a major obstacle to letting them go. For we have to hold on to our problems in order to figure them out. Interestingly, if there is something that's important to you to understand, letting go of wanting to understand often brings the understanding that you've been seeking with a lot less effort. Ask yourself a question: Would I rather understand my problems or just be free of them? If you would rather be free, I highly recommend letting go of wanting to figure them out.
The reason this is so important is that, in order to figure out a problem, we must leave the present moment, which is the only place we can truly solve anything. In addition, we only truly need to understand a problem if we are planning to have it occur again or are plainning in some way to maintain it."
Your Need for Answers Might Be the Problem
Most people think understanding is the cure. If they can just trace the problem back to its origin, decode its meaning, and diagram its psychological ancestry, then relief will follow. Insight first. Freedom later.
Except that’s not how it usually works.
Trying to understand a problem often becomes the most sophisticated way of keeping it alive. You can’t dissect something without holding it steady. You can’t analyze pain without keeping it close. The moment you decide you must figure it out, you’ve quietly agreed to keep carrying it around a while longer.
This is where self awareness turns into self entanglement.
Understanding feels productive. Noble, even. It gives the mind something to chew on. “Why am I like this?” “Where did this start?” “What’s the root cause?” These questions sound wise, but they pull you out of the present moment and into a mental archive that can’t actually resolve anything. The body stays tense while the mind goes on a scavenger hunt.
And the present moment is inconveniently the only place change happens.
When you leave the now to analyze the past, you’re no longer available for release. You’re rehearsing the problem instead of letting it dissolve. That’s why some people can explain their struggles with breathtaking clarity and still feel completely stuck. Insight has become a holding pattern.
There’s also a quieter truth hiding underneath the urge to understand. If you’re planning to keep a problem, understanding it makes sense. Maintenance requires knowledge. Patterns need explanation to be preserved. But if you’re not planning to keep it, if your actual goal is freedom, then prolonged analysis is unnecessary.
You don’t need to fully understand a knot to untie it. You need to stop pulling it tighter.
Interestingly, when people let go of the demand to understand, clarity often shows up anyway. Not as a ten point explanation, but as a felt sense. An “oh” instead of an essay. Understanding arrives sideways, with far less effort, once the nervous system stops gripping the question like a lifeline.
This is deeply uncomfortable for the mind, which loves control and coherence. The idea of releasing something without a full explanation feels reckless. But freedom is rarely linear. It doesn’t wait for intellectual permission slips.
There’s a powerful question hidden in all of this. Do you want to understand your problems, or do you want to be free of them? You can have moments of both, but when forced to choose, most people unconsciously choose understanding because it feels safer. Familiar. Respectable.
Freedom feels ambiguous.
Letting go of the need to figure things out doesn’t mean abandoning curiosity or self reflection. It means recognizing when curiosity has turned into fixation. When reflection has become rumination. When insight is no longer opening doors but circling the same locked room.
You don’t solve life by standing outside it thinking harder. You solve it by being here, now, available for something new to happen.
Sometimes the most radical move isn’t understanding more. It’s releasing the problem before your mind finishes explaining why it existed at all.