Appreciative Inquiry
A friend just sent me an article on this "new" method of problem-solving, a subject I've been thinking alot about lately. I've been contemplating the whole idea of having "problems" and "solving them" intuitively instead of just with the head. In my meditation the other day, I heard, "Don't solve problems with the mind." I understood that when we are in the heart, merged with the Field, problems only occur when we stop the Flow. But back to "Appreciative Inquiry," the method my friend was telling me about. . . Here's an excerpt from the article you can download with the link, above:

"Appreciative Inquiry is about the coevolutionary search for the best in people, their organizations, and the relevant world around them. In its broadest focus, it involves systematic discovery of what gives life to a living system when it is most alive, most effective, and most constructively capable in economic, ecological, and human terms. AI involves, in a central way, the art and practice of asking questions that strengthen a system’s capacity to apprehend, anticipate, and heighten positive potential. It centrally involves the mobilization of inquiry through the crafting of the “unconditional positive question” often-involving hundreds or sometimes thousands of people. In AI the arduous task of intervention gives way to the speed of imagination and innovation; instead of negation, criticism, and spiraling diagnosis, there is discovery, dream, and design.

"AI seeks, fundamentally, to build a constructive union between a whole people and the massive entirety of what people talk about as past and present capacities: achievements, assets, unexplored potentials, innovations, strengths, elevated thoughts, opportunities, benchmarks, high point moments, lived values, traditions, strategic competencies, stories, expressions of wisdom, insights into the deeper corporate spirit or soul — and visions of valued and possible futures. Taking all of these together as a gestalt, AI deliberately, in everything it does, seeks to work from accounts of this “positive change core” — and it assumes that every living system has many untapped and rich and inspiring accounts of the positive. Link the energy of this core directly to any change agenda and changes never thought possible are suddenly and democratically mobilized."

Problems are points of focus, calling our attention to how we may be off-purpose, where Spirit wants us to go next — remembering that we are ALL "Spirit," cocreating each other. By willing a problem to be gone, we may miss a deep lesson the soul is trying to bring us.