What happens when you stop needing to find The Way
I have spent a very large part of my life looking for answers.
Not little answers. Apparently, I couldn’t make things that easy for myself.
I wanted to understand how life worked. Why we are here. What makes people behave as they do. Whether there is a God, a greater intelligence, a soul, a purpose, a pattern. Why terrible things happen. Whether there are laws beneath the apparent chaos. Whether consciousness continues beyond the body. Whether we choose our lives, create our reality, inherit patterns, carry things from somewhere else, or are simply very complicated human beings trying to make sense of being alive.
You know. The light questions.
I have travelled through Christianity, New Age thought, Wicca, metaphysics, healing traditions, energy systems, philosophy and assorted other highways, back roads and interesting little goat tracks.
And I didn’t skim them simply looking for something to believe.
I questioned them.
I experimented.
I studied.
I experienced things I still cannot adequately explain.
I found ideas that were enormously useful to me and others that eventually fell apart under examination. Some became part of my own work. Some changed me. Some I discarded. Some remain in the large and growing box labelled:
UNKNOWN
For a very long time, however, I thought there must be a coherent system underneath it all.
A map.
If I just kept looking, perhaps eventually I would find it.
The Grail.
If you were waiting for me to find the answer…
I have some unfortunate news.
The Grail Quest is over.
Sorry.
If you’ve been waiting patiently for several decades for me to return from the wilderness carrying the Definitive Guide to Life, the Universe and Everything, you may wish to make alternative arrangements.
I haven’t found The Way.
I’ve found many ways.
I’ve found things I believe are probably true. Things I have experienced directly. Things I think are possible. Things I once believed and now question. Things other people are absolutely certain about that leave me unconvinced.
And I’ve discovered something that has been strangely liberating:
I don’t have to know the answer in order to recognise that someone else’s answer doesn’t satisfy me.
I can leave something UNKNOWN.
That may sound terribly simple.
For me, it isn’t.
Because recently I began to understand that my long search wasn’t driven by curiosity alone.
There was another traveller on the quest.
A little girl.
The little girl who wanted to know the rules
Children have very little power over their world.
They are dependent upon adults whose moods, beliefs, choices and behaviour can profoundly affect them.
And somewhere very early, a little girl began trying to understand.
How do people work?
What makes them happy?
What makes them angry?
What am I supposed to do?
What are the rules?
How do I make the people around me behave in ways that will keep me safe?
There is intelligence in that.
If you can understand the system, perhaps you can predict it.
If you can predict it, perhaps you can influence what happens.
If you can find the right thing to say, do, believe, become or understand, perhaps you can turn a NO into a YES.
Perhaps you can reduce your vulnerability.
Many years later, the questions became considerably more sophisticated.
They became questions about psychology, spirituality, energy, consciousness, healing, God, soul, purpose, manifestation, karma, human nature and the architecture of reality itself.
But recently I have had to wonder:
Was some part of me still looking for the rules?
If I could finally understand how reality worked, perhaps I would know how to live within it.
And perhaps, somewhere beneath even that, was the hope that enough understanding could make life safer.
That was a rather large penny to hear drop.
She doesn’t need to do that anymore
The beautiful thing is that I don’t need to tell that little girl she was foolish.
She wasn’t.
She was doing the best she could with the power and understanding available to her.
But she doesn’t have to do it anymore.
She has me.
She has the woman I have become and everything I have learned along the way.
I cannot promise her that nothing painful will happen.
I can’t promise that other people will always behave well.
I can’t promise that I will never be hurt, disappointed, frightened, ill, betrayed or lost.
I cannot make life invulnerable.
Nobody can.
But I can offer her something much more believable.
I will pay attention.
I will listen to you.
I won’t knowingly abandon you in order to preserve someone else’s comfort.
I can say no.
I can change my mind.
I can leave.
I can ask questions.
I can recognise when something no longer fits.
And when I genuinely don’t know what happens next, I don’t have to invent an answer so that we can feel safe.
We can stand together in:
I don’t know.
That’s quite different from being helpless.
And then there is identity
All of this has created something of an overhaul in my own life.
Because when you begin questioning the map, eventually you start questioning the identity you created while following it.
Who am I if some of the things I thought were my purpose are no longer certain?
Which responsibilities are actually mine?
Which roles still fit?
What have I continued doing because I am capable of doing it?
And when did capability quietly become obligation?
Just because I can doesn’t mean I have to.
That’s been an important one.
I don’t feel any particular urgency to replace the old answers with shiny new ones either.
Perhaps I don’t need another purpose immediately.
Perhaps I don’t need another cosmology.
Perhaps I don’t need to decide whether everything that has happened in my life was planned, meaningful, divinely orchestrated, karmically required or part of some enormous soul curriculum.
Perhaps some things can remain unanswered.
I am discovering that an empty space does not always need to be filled.
Sometimes it is simply room.
Pain and Joy
This month in Quantum Soul Upgrade, we are exploring the Solar Plexus, and my reprogramming polarity for this centre has always been:
Pain ↔ Joy
I mean both words much more broadly than their ordinary definitions.
Pain can be physical, emotional, intellectual, energetic or spiritual.
So can Joy.
And pain does not automatically mean wrong.
A congruent life still contains grief, illness, disappointment, difficulty, effort and loss.
Nor does Joy simply mean being cheerful.
Sometimes Joy is recognition.
Clarity.
Ease.
Aliveness.
That extraordinary moment when something within you says:
Yes. This.
The sun comes out.
So perhaps one of the questions I am asking now is not:
What is the correct way to live?
But:
What am I using my power to create and maintain, and how does my whole system experience the life that results?
That’s a very different question.
Are we allowed to be happy?
And then another old question wandered into the room.
How can I be happy when there is so much suffering in the world?
We Australians even have a rather famous song asking, in essence, how we can comfortably carry on while things are burning around us.
It’s a legitimate question.
There is terrible suffering in this world.
There are things that make me sad. Things that make me furious. Things I want to change. Things I can do something about and things I cannot.
Compassion matters.
Action matters.
Bearing witness matters.
But I have realised something else.
Being sad for someone does not reduce their sadness.
My unhappiness does not feed a hungry person, stop a war, comfort a frightened child or heal somebody’s grief.
If there is something useful I can do, I can do it.
If someone needs my presence, I can offer it.
If something genuinely makes me sad, I can be sad.
But I don’t have to suppress Joy because somebody else, somewhere, is suffering.
That doesn’t help them.
It simply creates one more unhappy person.
Perhaps there is another old childhood rule hidden there too.
If the people around me aren’t okay, am I allowed to be okay?
If someone else is angry, miserable, frightened or disappointed, do I have permission to remain myself?
Do I have permission to be happy?
These days my answer is increasingly:
Yes.
Being sad for them doesn’t change them.
Being happy changes me.
So I made a ridiculous little song
In the middle of all these enormous questions about identity, purpose, safety, God, reality, responsibility and the meaning of human existence, I spent part of today making a song with Pixie.
Because apparently this is also my life.
It’s called Be Happy — Celebrate It.
Pixie claps.
Pixie dances.
Pixie shines.
And the message is extraordinarily uncomplicated:
You don’t owe the world a frown.
Don’t shrink your happiness.
Don’t apologise for it.
When Joy arrives, let yourself experience it.
Celebrate it.
After decades spent searching for the mysteries of existence, perhaps that isn’t such a trivial thing to have made.
In fact, perhaps the timing is perfect.
Because the little girl who needed to understand everything before she could feel safe doesn’t have that job anymore.
She has me now.
And I don’t know everything.
Not even close.
But I know considerably more than she did.
I know how to listen.
I know how to question.
I know how to choose.
I know how to respond.
And increasingly, I know how to leave the things I cannot know alone.
There are many parts of this enormous overhaul that I want to explore more deeply, so I’ll return to different aspects of it in future blogs.
For today, though, this is enough.
If you’ve been waiting for me to find the Grail, you can stop waiting.
The quest is over.
I haven’t found The Way.
And perhaps I don’t need to.
Perhaps I don’t need to find The Way before I can find my way.
And sometimes, when the sun comes out along that way?
I intend to bloody well enjoy it. ☀️
You don’t have to know all the answers to find your own way.
With steadiness and wonder,
Shamarie Flavel | Field Explorer & Mystic Interpreter of Living Patterns
For more than 30 years, I’ve explored the patterns that connect body, emotion, energy, consciousness and lived experience — and the different ways we can work with them.
Explore my work through Biosenetics, the Somatic Spiral System (SSS), Quantum Spiral Praxis (QSP) and other pathways at Shamarie’s Body & Mind Therapies and evolvecourses.shamarie.com.au.
And because sometimes the appropriate response to all this serious questioning is simply to clap, dance and shine, you can watch Pixie’s little “Be Happy — Celebrate It” jig here:
▶ Watch Pixie — Be Happy, Celebrate It
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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
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