Facing the Wrong Way

“You’ve got to ride the horse in the direction it’s going.”

My meditation teacher said this to me, often daily, for years before I finally got it.

I nodded every time, but if I really understood her, she wouldn't have repeated it again the next day.

Instead, I was sitting on my horse, facing backward. And complaining about the view.

I was so focused on exactly how I'd got there, who was responsible, what was done to me, and how unfair it all was. What I wasn't doing was looking where the horse was going. Or holding the reins.

It took four years and lots of repetition for that to land.

A pattern I see constantly

Clients often arrive with remarkable understanding of what happened to them.

In therapeutic language: it’s the family system, attachment patterns, the mechanisms of wounding.

In spiritual language: it’s the past life, soul contracts, all the reasons they are being attacked, thwarted, or kept stuck. Sometimes both, in the same session.

The detail is often accurate. That's not the problem.

The problem is that “knowing better doesn't mean you feel or act better”. I've known people with an extraordinarily sophisticated map of their own suffering who still wake up tomorrow doing exactly what they did yesterday.

The map doesn't move the horse. Only riding does.

Why we do it anyway

To be fair, this instinct has a purpose.

The person who stayed at the back of the cave was often the one who didn't get eaten by the tiger outside. Watching and working out exactly where the danger came from helped keep you alive. That instinct is old, and it’s not wrong to have it.

And sometimes what looks like resistance or procrastination is also helpful — it can mean you unconsciously know you're not ready to act yet.

So this isn't about shaming the search for understanding. It's about noticing when the search has quietly become the destination . When "I need to understand this properly" has replaced "I need to do something about this."

A different question

In the work I do, helping requests often fall into two kinds: divination, asking for information, or healing, asking for change.

Given the choice, most people — understandably — lean toward information. It's what our data-driven, logic-first culture has trained us to reach for.

As if understanding is the same thing as resolution. As if enough insight eventually tips over into change on its own.

It doesn't, in my experience. Not reliably. Sometimes it just becomes a very well-furnished room to stay in.

Given the choice, I nearly always lean toward a healing request.

And I've come to a way of framing the request, one I use often enough that clients say it to me before I've said it to them:

“What needs to happen for this (result) to be accomplished?”

Not "why is this happening." Not "what does this mean." What needs to happen.

It leaves room for information, if information is genuinely what's missing. But it doesn't stop there. It's already asking for the larger thing — for movement, not just for a better view of where you're standing.

As a recovering insight junkie, I know how seductive a beautifully coherent explanation can be. And how that satisfaction can be mistaken for progress.

So when I work with someone, I won’t settle for the smaller request. We ask for the largest thing possible. Understanding, if it's needed. Change, if it's ready.

But never understanding instead of change, offered as a consolation prize.

The horse is already moving

Here's what took me years to get.

The horse doesn't wait for you to stop looking backward.

It's already going somewhere, with or without your attention. The only real choice is whether you turn around and take the reins, or stay stuck on the view you've already left.

Most of us don't need more understanding of how we ended up facing the wrong way. We need to turn around.

If you recognise this pattern — the pull to understand more and more before asking what actually needs to change — I’ve made a private, self-paced Sanctuary Experience to begin practising a different kind of question.

A place to sit with your own larger awareness and notice, for yourself, what it feels like to ask for movement, not just more insight.