The Grail I Have Given Up

If you’ve been reading some of what I’ve written lately, you’ve probably realised I’ve been doing some fairly serious soul-searching.

Some things have changed for me.

Not everything. Not even close.

I haven’t suddenly decided that thirty years of experience, exploration, healing work, strange happenings, synchronicities, energetic phenomena and watching people change is all rubbish.

But I have given something up.

I’ve been calling it the Grail.

And I realised it might be useful to explain what I actually mean by that.

Because the Grail isn’t spirituality.

It isn’t healing.

It isn’t religion, psychology, science, manifestation, personal development or any particular belief system.

The Grail is something that can hide inside all of them.

It is the promise that somewhere there is an answer.

A system.

A teaching.

A piece of knowledge.

A hidden architecture.

A way of understanding ourselves and life that, if we can just find it and understand it properly, will tell us what to do to get the outcome we want.

Do the right thing.

Heal the right thing.

Understand the right thing.

Believe the right thing.

Clear the right thing.

Become sufficiently aligned, regulated, conscious, successful, healthy, disciplined, spiritual or knowledgeable.

And eventually we will get the result.

Underneath all of that, I think, is an extraordinarily human hope:

If I can understand enough about how life works, perhaps I can make myself safer in it.

That is the Grail I have given up.

Cause, effect and the promise of certainty

Humans are very good at noticing patterns.

We have survived partly because of it.

If I eat that and become sick, perhaps I shouldn’t eat it again.

If clouds gather in a particular way, perhaps a storm is coming.

If I do this and something useful happens, perhaps doing this influenced what happened.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that.

Cause and effect exist.

Patterns exist.

We can influence things.

We can learn.

The difficulty begins when we move from:

“This appears to influence that”

to:

“Now I know how this works.”

And then, sometimes without even noticing we have done it:

“Therefore this is how it works for everybody.”

That is quite a leap.

An experience is not automatically an explanation.

An explanation is not automatically a cause.

A cause does not automatically tell us what something means.

And something having meaning for me does not make that meaning a universal law.

Yet we humans are remarkably good at bundling those things together.

I experienced X.

I understand X this way.

Therefore this is why X happened.

Therefore this is what X means.

Therefore this is what you need to do if X happens to you.

And somewhere along that road, a useful observation can become a prescription.

But what happens to the person who doesn’t fit?

This is the part I could no longer ignore.

What happens when somebody follows the system and gets the promised result?

Very often we say:

See? It works.

But what happens when another person follows the same system and the promised result doesn’t happen?

That is where things become interesting.

Because remarkably often, instead of questioning the system, we question the person.

Perhaps you didn’t believe enough.

Perhaps you have another block.

Perhaps you’re resisting.

Perhaps you haven’t healed enough.

Perhaps you aren’t sufficiently aligned.

Perhaps there is another layer.

Perhaps your unconscious mind is preventing it.

Perhaps it isn’t divine timing.

Perhaps your soul chose something else.

Perhaps you secretly don’t want the thing you say you want.

There is always somewhere else to look.

And eventually I realised what was happening.

The person who didn’t fit the system had become the problem required to keep the system true.

Success belonged to the method.

Failure belonged to the individual.

That bothered me.

Actually, it did considerably more than bother me.

Because I know that treadmill.

There must be something else

There must be something I haven’t understood yet.

Another layer.

Another wound.

Another belief.

Another energetic pattern.

Another piece of information.

Another key.

And sometimes there genuinely is another piece.

That’s what makes this so complicated.

Sometimes another treatment helps.

Another conversation changes something.

Another piece of information matters.

Another approach works where the first one didn’t.

I have spent decades watching things work.

I have watched people change.

I have experienced things myself that I still cannot adequately explain.

I am not willing to throw all of that away simply because I am no longer willing to claim certainty about why it happened.

But there is a profound difference between:

“There may be something else worth exploring.”

and:

“There must be something wrong with you because my system says this should have worked.”

One is curiosity.

The other protects the system at the expense of the person.

The endless treadmill

Once I saw this, I started noticing versions of it everywhere.

Religion can do it.

Spirituality can do it.

Healing can do it.

Psychology can do it.

Business can do it.

Relationships can do it.

Health and wellness can certainly do it.

Self-development has practically built an industry around it.

Do the work.

Become the right kind of person.

Receive the result.

And when the result doesn’t arrive?

Do more work.

There is always another book, course, practitioner, supplement, secret, level, technique, block, belief or piece of hidden knowledge.

And please understand: many of those things may genuinely be useful.

The problem isn’t the book.

It isn’t the therapy.

It isn’t the meditation.

It isn’t the spiritual practice.

It isn’t the business strategy.

It isn’t even necessarily the belief.

The problem is the extra clause quietly attached to it:

If I do this correctly, I should get the outcome.

Because life keeps producing inconvenient counterexamples.

The careful person who has an accident.

The healthy person who becomes ill.

The loving person whose relationship ends.

The talented person whose business fails.

The person who does years of inner work and still encounters pain.

And when reality refuses to cooperate with the prescription, we have a choice.

We can question whether our model adequately explains reality.

Or we can find something wrong with the person.

Far too often, we choose the person.

Success stories are seductive

There is another wrinkle in this.

We love success stories.

Someone reaches the summit and we ask:

What did you do?

They tell us.

Seven habits.

Five principles.

Three secrets.

One morning routine.

And because they succeeded, what they did begins to look like the explanation for their success.

But we rarely ask:

How many people did exactly the same things and didn’t end up here?

What about timing?

Circumstances?

Other people?

Starting conditions?

Opportunity?

Resources?

Biology?

Culture?

Chance?

Luck?

And the enormous number of variables we simply cannot see?

The successful person may have genuinely learned useful things.

Their way may genuinely help somebody else.

But their success does not automatically prove that their explanation of their success is universally true.

Sometimes we confuse a path that worked with the reason it worked.

And then we sell the reason.

Making ourselves wrong

Perhaps the part of this that matters most to me is what happens inside the person who keeps trying.

Because if I believe the system is correct, and the promised outcome hasn’t happened, eventually there is only one place left to look.

Me.

What am I doing wrong?

What haven’t I healed?

What am I unconsciously creating?

Why can’t I manifest this?

Why am I still sick?

Why hasn’t my relationship changed?

Why am I not successful?

Why am I not enlightened, regulated, aligned, abundant, happy or whatever the promised destination happens to be?

The search for freedom can quietly become another way of making ourselves wrong.

And I am no longer willing to do that to myself.

More importantly, I am no longer willing to do it to somebody else.

A way does not have to be THE way

This may be the simplest thing I have arrived at through all of this:

My way may help you.

It may help enormously.

And if it doesn’t, that does not automatically make you wrong.

It doesn’t necessarily make me wrong either.

Perhaps this particular way simply did not produce that particular outcome for this particular person in these particular circumstances.

And that is information too.

A system that can receive that information can learn.

A system that cannot receive it has to protect itself.

Which gives me a rather useful question whenever I encounter a system claiming to explain human experience:

What does this system do with the person who doesn’t fit?

Does it become curious?

Does it admit that its explanation may be incomplete?

Can it say:

This seems to help some people.

We have some ideas about why.

Those ideas may be incomplete.

It didn’t help you.

That matters too.

Or does it immediately begin searching for what is wrong with the person so that the system can remain right?

That question has become one of my favourite Grail detectors.

So what have I actually given up?

I haven’t given up curiosity.

God knows, that would be unlikely.

I haven’t given up mystery.

I haven’t given up healing.

I haven’t given up exploring consciousness, energy, patterns, human behaviour or the strange things that sometimes happen in this world.

I haven’t given up the possibility that life is profoundly interconnected.

I haven’t even necessarily given up many of the ideas I have worked with for decades.

What I have given up is something much more specific.

The promise of certainty.

The promise that if I understand enough, heal enough, know enough, believe correctly enough or do enough of the right things, I will eventually discover the operating manual that tells me what will happen next and how to make life obey.

I can influence life.

I can participate in it.

I can learn.

I can make choices.

I can recognise patterns.

I can change my behaviour.

I can heal things.

I can become more capable of meeting what comes.

But none of those things forms a contract requiring life to produce the outcome I wanted.

Influence is not control.

Connection is not proof of purpose.

Pattern is not necessarily prescription.

Meaning does not prove orchestration.

And uncertainty does not mean there is something wrong with me.

Giving up the Grail

Strangely, giving up the Grail hasn’t left me with nothing.

Quite the opposite.

It means I can allow something to be useful without requiring it to be universally true.

I can explore something without having to believe it.

I can experience something extraordinary without immediately deciding what caused it.

I can find meaning without claiming the event happened in order to give me that meaning.

I can say:

I don’t know.

And I no longer have to treat those three words as evidence that I simply haven’t searched hard enough.

Perhaps there are things we will understand tomorrow that we cannot understand today.

Perhaps some things I currently believe will survive everything I throw at them.

Perhaps others won’t.

That is okay.

I would rather live with an honest unknown than fill the space with somebody else’s certainty simply because uncertainty makes me uncomfortable.

So yes.

I have given up the Grail.

Not the mystery.

Not the exploration.

Not the possibility.

Not the wonder.

Just the promise that somewhere there is one final key which, if I can only find it, will make uncertain existence predictable.

A way does not have to be THE way to have value.

And I will no longer make myself — or another human being — the problem simply because reality failed to obey somebody’s prescription.

Explore my work through –  Shamarie’s Body & Mind Therapies. and evolvecourses.shamarie.com.au

Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram @ShamarieFlavelEnergy,
listen to my podcast Journeys Beyond with Shamarie on Kajabi
or on Apple Podcasts

With steadiness and wonder,
Shamarie