A thought on its own is just a rope; a straight line with a clear path from start to finish. The rope becomes a knot when our thoughts meet fear or desire. What could have been a feeling that lasts no more than 90 seconds ends up being a rumination loop lasting years if not decades above or under the surface, subtly morphing to remain embedded in our psyche.
Our triggers, insecurities, and worries create mental knots.
Most of my experience untying knots comes from arriving at my doorstep after a long walk, needing to pee and having to untie a double knot in my shoes. The harder I try to untangle a knot, the more tangled it gets. The more force I exert, the tighter the knot gets.
This is the paradox of change. Whenever I’ve grasped for transformation as an escape from my current shortcomings, I often strengthen the very patterns I’m trying to escape.
I used to meet my mental tangles with resistance, then anger and hatred, then eventually hopelessness and despair. They kept getting stronger and more reinforced.
“The unconscious is not a demoniacal monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgment go, is completely neutral. It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases.” — Carl Jung
One particularly stubborn mental knot has been my relationship with creative work. Since embarking on the journey of creating my coaching practice, I’ve resorted to the insecure pathway of comparing myself to other coaches in my space, leading me to undervalue my lived experience, earned insights, and wisdom gained through years of meditation and integrating east-Asian philosophy. I ended up feeling inferior, which drove me to follow their blueprints instead of staying true to my creative path.
The harder I pushed myself to create in an inauthentic way, the more paralyzed I became. It wasn’t until I acknowledged my own rhythm—giving myself permission to create on my timeline, to study and write about stuff with me as the student and audience—that the work began flowing again.
A curious thing happens when we meet mental knots with nondoing (observation without judgment): they unravel on their own. Knots are most effectively resolved by applying little force and lots of understanding.
In other words, wu-wei: flowing with the stream instead of fighting it enables us to essentially ride the wave that is the current reality, the present moment in front of us. We go from efforting our way through life, to surfing our way through life. It’s an art, not a science, so yes it can be that easy, but you gotta get good at it. I’ve had some moments where I feel like I’m cruising and things are coming to me like I’m a magnet for goodness. I entered the stream. But those moments are rare and present their own challenge: craving to stay in the flow is what knocks us out of it.
This comes back to the core visual of Buddhism and Taoism: a river flowing around a boulder rather than trying to push through it. Our awareness can navigate around our mental obstacles when we stop fighting their existence. The untangling happens not through force but through curiosity and understanding, intimately learning the knot’s intricacies creates the space for transformation for the Self to lean into its inherent wisdom.
