Life often requires that we do things in a less than ideal way along the journey to achieving our ideal. We simply do the best we can with what we have. It is challenging to balance the demands of the material world with our greater visions. It is difficult to work through our developmental stages when they are impacting some aspect of our life, especially when it is our work.

There are a number of ways people can get caught in this process, making the challenging even more difficult or at very least lengthy. One way is that we want things to be different than they are—we want more ease, flow, and joy—and we are frustrated with all the ways that we might not yet have accomplished this.

When we pit our ideal outcome against our current situation, we set up a dynamic that blocks forward movement. One might say, “I don\’t want it to be this way anymore, and so I’m really trying to create a different way of being.” The tension created between the “I don’t want” and the trying to have something different holds the problem in place. It is more helpful in these moments to release the tension than it is to strive toward the ideal.

There is not one solution for this in general, or for you over time. The key is to think creatively about how to release your tension—that will free you up to move forward. For example, you might persist in an action because “I\’ve got bills to pay and I need to get the job done.” If you have thoughts like this, you can explore their energetic impact on you. This increases your awareness, which helps to open the door to new opportunities. As a result of the awareness, you might have a moment, for whatever reason, where you experience some kind of breakthrough. Because of this breakthrough, you may suddenly be in the flow of things and show up to the task that you need to do. When you do this, you can feel that there\’s a totally different energy moving inside of you. And then you can attune to that energy and how that energy moves in you and start to learn about it.

This is one example of how to move through a block and create more of the ideal instead of creating the type of tension that impedes the process. There are numerous other ways, but the point is that you approach things from a new angle and pay attention to what is working or not working in a way that allows you to gain understanding about the problem and align with new solutions.

By working in ways like this, you eliminate or decrease disruption and move into a state of more neutrality. The more you can base yourself in this neutrality, the more you can set yourself up for realizing your ideal sense of flow or whatever you desire to bring into your life.

Once you’re working mostly from neutrality and less in feeding the tension, you will naturally break through into forward momentum. Once there, you pay attention to the qualities of what that is, what brought that into being, how it feels, what the difference is to your orientation. You attune so that this experience becomes like a compass. And the more you practice this, the easier it is to simply switch into that mode. But trying to force the new way of being—trying to process it out or using your mind to override what is with what you want—usually does not work. It will, however, increase the tension between where you want to go and where you are. So, it is most often most helpful to look for creative ways to release these tensions so that you can function more and more in a state of neutrality that is more welcoming to your ideal. Then use your awareness to learn everything you can about this new way.