So many of my patients ask me for urgent, hurried answers for their distress. As soon as we discover what the issue is, they want to know, "Ok, now how do I fix this?" "How do I stop being so afraid?" "How do I stop running and hiding?" "How do I open myself up to intimacy?" "Why can't I stop being so mean to myself?" The essence of the questions boil down to: how do I stop being the way I've been my whole life because I hate this thing about me and it causes me pain and suffering I so desperately need to be free of now!

Often the answer is actually very dissatisfying because it doesn't provide immediate relief and only lays out the road ahead. The answer to most of these questions is often a transformation and elaboration of the questions themselves. Why did this way of being come about in the first place? How did this way of being help you survive? How does this way of being help you today? What does it protect you from? What does it help you avoid? How can you be different in this very moment of asking your question? How are you treating yourself as you ask these questions? Is there love and compassion or irritation and renunciation? Can you savor the seed of change that buds within you right now? Then, once you do that well, how can you be open to doing it again in the next moment? And, how many repetitions of this are you willing to do? This moment is all there is and ever will be, again and again.

"I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
~ Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet