Here’s something that sounds like a riddle but is actually incredibly practical:
The solution has nothing to do with the problem.
Think about the different aspects of yourself:
Your mind: your thoughts and beliefs.
Your heart: your emotions and feelings.
Your body: your physical state and the actions you take.
Your spirit: your energy and connection to something larger.
When you’re trying to change one of these aspects of yourself, the easiest way in is often through the back door.
What I mean is that if you want to change how you’re thinking, sitting there and forcing yourself to think differently is probably not going to work very well.
In the same way, if you’re feeling anxious or sad or stressed out and you want to feel different…how do you actually do that?
Willing yourself to feel better usually doesn’t do much either. (If it did, none of us would ever feel like shit for more than five minutes.)
But you might be able to reach your emotions through a different aspect of yourself, through the back door. So you might be able to change your emotional state by entering through your body: going for a walk, watching a movie, calling a friend, all the things. Simply doing something that gives your attention somewhere else to go.
You could also enter through your mind by deliberately choosing thoughts that soothe or encourage you.
Or you could work energetically, through ritual, prayer, breath, movement, or whatever helps shift the energy you’re carrying.
The point is that you don’t always have to attack the problem where it lives. It’s often easier to create a shift within ourselves through a place that seems to have nothing to do with the thing we’re trying to shift.
Let’s make this very concrete.
Let’s say you need to finish something important, but every time you sit down to do it, nothing happens.
You stare at the screen. You move papers around. You suddenly remember six other things you could be doing.
So you decide the problem is that you need more discipline. You make a schedule. You block off the time. You turn off your phone. You try to force yourself to sit down and fucking do it.
And you still can’t get yourself moving.
So what if you stop trying to push directly at the work?
What if, instead, you treat the stuckness as an energetic state?
You might take a walk and let movement wake up the energy that has gone stagnant.
You might light a candle and ask for clarity about the first step.
You might clean your desk, open a window, change the music, or move to a different room so the physical space is no longer holding the same stuck energy.
You might pull a card and ask, "What energy does this work need from me right now?"
You might reconnect with the larger purpose behind the work: who it serves, what it makes possible, or why it came to you in the first place.
You might even decide that the energy is simply not available today and deliberately choose rest instead of spending four hours pretending to work while getting nothing done.
None of those things are the work itself.
And yet, any one of them might be the thing that allows the work to happen.
You haven’t forced yourself into action. You’ve changed the conditions surrounding the action. You’ve moved the energy, and now the action has somewhere to come from.
That’s magic.
What looks like an action problem may need an energetic solution. What looks like an emotional problem may need a physical one.
It’s all connected.
Now, my usual caveat: I genuinely believe we participate in creating our reality. How we think, feel, behave, and work with energy affects what becomes possible for us.
I also believe we live inside systems and circumstances we did not personally create and cannot simply wish away.
This is not “love and light” bullshit. You cannot affirm your way out of capitalism, racism, illness, grief, or every other reality you did not choose.
But you can work with the places where you do have agency.
So the next time you’re stuck, stop pushing directly against the stuck place.
Ask yourself:
Which part of me is stuck, and which other part of me could help?
If your thoughts won’t change, try changing your actions.
If your emotions won’t move, try working with your body.
If your body feels heavy, call in your spirit. Give the action meaning. Connect it to something larger than the task itself.
If your energy feels stagnant, change your surroundings, move your body, speak the truth, perform a ritual, or do one concrete thing that restores your sense of power.
In magic, sheer force of will is rarely the best approach.
Sometimes, the more fiercely you push at the thing you want to change, the more resistance you create around it.
So try the back door.
Work on something that appears unrelated and see what begins to move.
Because it was never actually unrelated.
Courage, truth, and infinite love,
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I don’t believe in magic, but I know that it works!
Magic is not a belief system, it’s a practice that works. Don’t believe me? Come try it out. If it doesn’t work, you lose nothing. But if it does… your dream life is about to begin!
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