Have you ever had a problem where you keep trying a variety of different solutions, but none of them seems to work properly, or for any length of time?

A good example of this kind of issue, for many people-including myself, is weight loss. For ages, I darted around between sorting out the emotional causes, diet, exercise, changing my habits of thought and belief, even energy work. Then I finally realised that the problem existed on all of the levels at once, even though its most obvious manifestation was my big fat tummy.

Once I began doing all of the above at the same time, pounds began to shift,(though still not as fast as my big-chunking, fast-moving mind might have liked .

But tackling a multi-causal problem by means of a multi-causal solution did work (and is continuing to do so). So if you have a seemingly intractable problem, consider approaching it on many levels at the same time too.

How?

These questions are likely to target the different aspects of a problem, and can be asked in any order, so long as the solutions they yield are then blended together and put into action together, in a manageable way:

1. What needs to change on a physical level here?

2. How do feel about this change, and if the feeling were transformed, what would be the result?

3. What do I/we believe about this situation?

4. Which habits do I/we need to change in order to move forward with this?

5. How do I/we perceive the energy behind this situation, and how do I/we want to change that?  (Less abstractly, you could also ask yourself, “If this situation were a thing, what would it look, sound and feel like, and change the resulting metaphor).

“But…”

“But”, you may be saying,” this isn’t new. It sounds like you might just being applying things like logical levels, Maslow’s heirachy”.

If you’re so inclined, these might also seem like the more esoteric idea  that everyone has physical bodies, but also energetic, emotional, mental and spiritual ones, vibrating away on unseen frequencies.

And you’d be right. The point here though, is that even these well known psychological and esoteric frameworks usually approach problems in a fairly linear way. The approachtends to be, “Upon which level is this problem occuring?,” rather than, “The obvious signs of this are on level X, but let’s check all of them, to be sure that we’ve sorted out every aspect of the real cause.”

When you think about it, it stands to reason. We are all complex individual with many facets. So it stands to reason that, in order for our experiences to challenge us properly, they would need to be multi-faceted too.

In other words, employing an, “holistic approach”,  isn’t just a fluffy way to give yourself good PR and a nice warm glow. In fact, it’s the most thorough, realistic and sure-fire path ot a solid, multi-causal, solution.