Everything you need to start solving your problems is already there, around you, within you. Somewhere. The difference is that when you are in the stage of ‘nothing seems to work’, you are looking to these things ‘externally’ to actually save you. But everything can start to work for you, and this begins when you begin to feel one hundred percent responsible for making it work within you.

There is a shift that happens, in the lives of those who really need help with something. Before this shift, you are looking for ‘other’ things that will help you, save you; after this shift, those same things can be used and accepted by you, but they aren’t relied upon, you don’t give them the responsibility of saving you, you give YOU the responsibility of saving you.

This is a difficult concept to grasp, when you’re in deep caca and you need help and are casting about and hoping something will help. But it’s a concept that, once you understand it and ‘live it’, begins to melt away large chunks of your problems.

Do you remember the saying, it goes something like this: ‘when the student is ready, the teacher appears’? This means that the answers are already around you and within you, but as long as you are placing the responsibility of saving you onto those answers, you’re not ready to listen to them. When you are truly ready to listen, understand, obey, actually change your life according to those answers, you’ll find they are all around you, you were just not willing to see them, or obey them, before.

I’ll illustrate this with a quick point: I remember reading a book called the Tao Te Ching when I was younger and deep in my pain and problems, reading books to try help solve my issues. The Tao was a famous book so I gave it a try. It didn’t help me at all, I thought it was just a ‘pleasant spiritual book’, kind of poetic, but not really relating to the reality of my circumstances at all, it didn’t seem to relate to the ‘real world’ of my immediate problems. Years later I read it again… and it actually made some sense, actually related a little, I gleaned a few little points from it that helped. And years later I read it again, and was astounded at how wise and clear it was, and how completely it related to any problem I could have, in the real world.

What changed? The book was always there, I’d read it… I just wasn’t ready enough, open enough in my earlier stages, for it to make sense. In my early stages I was reading books in hopes one of them would have a system, or some passage of wisdom, that would give me a huge ‘aha’ moment and save me, make sense of my problems, give me a sign, show me a path that would help. Then in my later years I was not looking for that at all… I was taking complete responsibility for my own healing, deciphering every happening and written word using my own wisdom and with the intent to find its wisdom from within myself.

Anyone who says ‘nothing works’… is simply not ready for it to work, yet. And by ‘not ready’, I don’t mean ‘not wanting’ for it to help; you may be screaming for help, begging for salvation, yearning with every desperate cell in your body, sick of the life problems tormenting you… and yet you can still be ‘not ready’ in the sense I’m talking about.

Something just ‘clicks’. Something deep within you DECIDES. It’s not a decision to force things, like where you get angry and are going to damn well make something happen. It’s not an ego-driven, anger-driven, frustration-driven, terror-driven decision like that.

It’s an opening-decision.

It’s when something inside you opens to seeing the help, the wisdom, in everything. Something in you opens even to all the things you’d previously tried and found ‘didn’t work’. You see them all in a new light, open to the deeper wisdom and help inherent within them. Where before you would have said, “I know that, I tried that, but it didn’t work!”, now each time you think, “Hmmmm….”

This shift, is you shifting who is responsible for your healing, your being helped, your being saved. Before, you were looking mostly to external things – people, money, events, changes – to help you. When they didn’t, when things just got worse, then to your mind those external sources ‘didn’t work’. So you kept casting about, trying different things, becoming even more frustrated, afraid, more abandoned, more bitter and resentful towards those people and things that ‘failed you’.

But when this shift happens… you move into entirely new territory. YOU territory. All of a sudden, there is no such thing as anyone or anything failing you. There is only you, and what YOU decipher from what the world, the people, the circumstances around you, are giving you.

This shift is nothing you can force, it’s not a thought or belief. It’s a feeling that runs through you. And though it’s a subtle, invisible shift, it’s a shift that resonates to every corner of your being. So many people never go through this shift, and become more and more miserable, more and more bitter towards the world and the people who are ‘failing them’.

This shift brings you a new amount of peace, energy, self-knowledge, openness, and ability to cope with whatever you are going through. You open, to everything. You become a sponge for whatever knowledge you need to help with your problems. You become entirely responsible for what works and what doesn’t, it’s no longer about ‘them’. As another wise saying goes, ‘The entire world becomes your classroom’.

Before, you were looking for someone, some book, some therapist, some life event, to alter your circumstances, make them better, or at least take away some of your pain and suffering. You wanted some large, external savior-thing to swoop in and lift up your plummeting life.

After this shift… even an ant fart means something to you. A speck of dust being blown an inch away on the countertop, triggers some meaning in you, some movement, some principle or concept you can apply to your healing, your problem-solving.

The ‘dumbest’ person, the most poorly-written book, the most unrelated event or knowledge… now means something to you, something that can directly help your problem. In a way, you’re no longer even thinking of external things as sources of help for you; what helps you, after this shift, is only what YOU glean from the world around you. The responsibility is not for other people and things to help you, but for you to accept and use that help properly. Nothing outside of you fails, only you can fail to allow it into yourself clearly enough, only you can fail to see and properly utilize the wisdom and help that is nudging to get inside you, from all sources around you. Only you can fail to open yourself wide enough to understand and utilize what wisdom and answers are already waiting there within you.

If you haven’t had this shift yet, much of this won’t make sense, and I’m sorry for that. I don’t want to waste your time here. This shift is a feeling that sinks through your entire consciousness, it isn’t an intellectual concept of words. You feel it, know it intrinsically, or you don’t.

But I wanted to at least make you aware of its existence and power, in hopes it might somehow trigger that shift happening in you, one day. When it happens it is magnificent, and things start to truly elevate within you, and with your problems. You change from being a person who thinks ‘nothing is working’, feeling maybe helpless, victimized, even hopeless and despairing, blaming the world around you for failing you… into a person who realizes that EVERYTHING is there for you. Everything has potential to ‘work’. You stop thinking of things as ‘working’ or ‘failing’, and they become just ‘there’, potentials for you to use or not use, understand or not understand, grasp or miss. The entire responsibility shifts to inside you.

Before this shift, you might have felt like you’re on your own, nothing is helping; after this shift, you might or might not still feel like you’re on your own, but you also feel that everything is there to help you, you just need to let it in openly, process it clearly, use it bravely.

There is no problem that cannot be helped to some measure, when you realize that there are already answers and help all around you and within you, and you just need to take full responsibility for seeing them, opening to them, understanding them, and utilizing them.