Podcast intro
Hello and welcome to Journeys Beyond with Shamarie.
This week I want to talk about something that has been very real and very personal for me lately β what happens when you begin questioning the beliefs that have helped organise your life.
Not just the beliefs we consciously choose, but the deeper structural ones: beliefs about who we are, why we're here, what we're responsible for, what makes us safe, and how life itself is supposed to work.
I've been doing quite a lot of that questioning recently, and I can tell you it isn't always a comfortable process.
It can be painful. It can be disorientating. And sometimes one question pulls on a thread that turns out to be connected to half the bloody jumper.
So today I'm not speaking to you from the other side with a shiny new set of answers.
I'm speaking from somewhere inside the process.
And perhaps that's the best place to have this conversation.
There are beliefs we know we haveβ¦
When the Beliefs That Built Your Life Begin to Move
There are beliefs we know we have.
We can name them.
We might say, βI believe in God,β or βI believe everything happens for a reason,β or βI believe we create our own reality.β
And then there are other beliefs.
The ones we don't really think of as beliefs at all.
They are simply how life works.
They are structural.
They became part of the architecture through which we understand ourselves, other people and the world.
And those are much harder to see.
I have been discovering that rather dramatically lately.
For most of my life, I have asked questions.
Big questions, irritating questions, questions that don't always have convenient answers.
Why are we here?
What is a soul?
Is there a God or some greater intelligence?
Why does suffering happen?
Are there rules beneath life that we simply haven't understood yet?
What are we responsible for?
What are we capable of influencing?
What is purpose?
What does it actually mean to live well?
I've explored those questions through Christianity, New Age thinking, metaphysics, Wicca, healing traditions, energy systems, psychology, philosophy and probably a few things I've forgotten along the way.
And I have found valuable things in many of them.
I'm not now standing here declaring that everything I learned was rubbish.
Far from it.
Some ideas changed my life.
Some practices changed my life.
Some experiences remain deeply meaningful to me even though I cannot prove exactly what they were or what caused them.
But recently something has shifted.
I have stopped asking only:
βWhat is the answer?β
And I've started asking:
βWhy have I needed there to be an answer?β
That is a very different question.
The beliefs underneath the beliefs
When I look back, I can see that some of my beliefs were consciously adopted.
Others were inherited.
Some came through family.
Some through religion.
Some through culture.
Some developed because they seemed to explain experiences I'd had.
And some simply became part of my structure without me ever really deciding whether I believed them.
That's one of the difficulties with structural beliefs.
You don't stand outside them examining them.
You stand inside them looking out.
So when you encounter something that doesn't fit, you may not initially question the structure.
You question yourself.
For much of my life, if I encountered a contradiction or an unanswered question, my response was often something like:
I must not understand this properly yet.
There must be another piece.
I need to read another book.
Study another system.
Ask another question.
Have another experience.
Look deeper.
Surely, somewhere, there is an answer that will make the whole thing coherent.
And when you believe you should be able to answer a question, not being able to answer it can feel strangely personal.
Perhaps I'm not wise enough yet.
Perhaps I haven't developed enough.
Perhaps I'm missing something obvious.
Perhaps I haven't healed something.
Perhaps I need another piece of secret knowledge.
Perhaps I'm not spiritually evolved enough.
Humans are very inventive when a belief is load-bearing.
We can build extraordinary extensions onto the house rather than admit that one of the original beams may not actually fit.
Sometimes the inconsistency is information
This is something I'm beginning to appreciate much more.
If I believe life works according to X, but I continually encounter Y, then eventually I have to decide what I'm going to do with that inconsistency.
I can keep explaining Y away.
Or I can examine X.
Religions do this.
Spiritual systems do it.
Families do it.
Political systems do it.
Healing systems do it.
And individual humans certainly do it.
We create explanations that allow the structure to remain standing.
Sometimes those explanations are valid.
Sometimes there genuinely is something we haven't understood yet.
But sometimes the inconsistency itself is worth paying attention to.
Maybe the question isn't failing.
Maybe the framework simply cannot answer it.
That possibility has been enormously freeing for me.
Because I have carried questions for decades that I could not resolve.
And somewhere underneath that, I believed I ought to be able to.
Now I can say:
I don't have to know the answer in order to recognise that an answer doesn't satisfy me.
That sounds almost ridiculously simple.
It has not felt simple.
When a belief is holding up more than an idea
Part of the reason this can be so difficult is that a structural belief rarely holds up only one thing.
It may be supporting your identity.
Your morality.
Your relationships.
Your sense of belonging.
Your understanding of suffering.
Your purpose.
Your idea of what makes you a good person.
Your understanding of what you owe others.
Your sense of safety.
Your explanation for why things happen.
Pull on one belief and suddenly six other things start wobbling.
That's why evaluating deeply held beliefs can be painful and incredibly disorientating.
It isn't necessarily because you are doing something wrong.
Sometimes you feel disorientated because the belief itself used to provide your orientation.
If I no longer believe I am here for the purpose I once thought I was here for, what happens to purpose?
If I no longer believe capability automatically creates responsibility, what am I actually responsible for?
If I don't know whether suffering has an assigned spiritual meaning, how do I meet suffering?
If I no longer believe that understanding enough will eventually give me control over life's uncertainty, then what do I stand on instead?
These are not small questions.
And I have had moments recently where I've thought:
Well, shit. What exactly is left?
Which, I suspect, is a perfectly reasonable response when several internal load-bearing walls are being inspected at once.
The little girl looking for the rules
There is another layer to this that has become particularly clear to me.
I have always wanted to understand how things work.
That is partly curiosity.
It is simply part of who I am.
But I'm beginning to see that it wasn't only curiosity.
There was also a little girl who wanted to understand the rules.
How do people work?
What makes someone happy?
What makes them angry?
What am I supposed to do?
What should I avoid doing?
How do I make the people around me behave in ways that keep me safe?
For a child, understanding can become a form of protection.
If I can understand the system, perhaps I can predict it.
If I can predict it, perhaps I can influence it.
And if I can influence it, perhaps I can reduce my vulnerability.
Later, those questions became much more sophisticated.
I wasn't merely studying people anymore.
I was studying consciousness, healing, spirituality, energy, psychology, God, soul, purpose and the structure of reality itself.
But somewhere underneath all those enormous questions may still have been a very old hope:
If I can understand how life works, perhaps I can know how to live safely within it.
That has been a painful thing to recognise.
Not because there was anything shameful about it.
It makes enormous sense.
But because there is no system I have found that removes vulnerability from being alive.
There is no amount of knowledge that guarantees nothing unwanted will happen.
There is no spiritual architecture that makes us invulnerable.
And perhaps I have spent a lifetime asking knowledge to give me something knowledge cannot actually provide.
She has me now
The beautiful thing is that the little girl doesn't have to solve the universe anymore.
She has an adult now.
She has me.
I cannot promise her that nothing painful will happen.
I cannot guarantee that nobody will disappoint us, betray us, misunderstand us or leave.
I cannot guarantee health.
I cannot guarantee certainty.
I cannot tell her exactly what happens after death or whether every experience has some divine purpose attached to it.
But I can promise something else.
I can pay attention.
I can listen when something doesn't feel right.
I can say no.
I can change my mind.
I can ask questions.
I can leave.
I can stop trying to maintain something simply because I once believed I should.
I can recognise that just because I can do something doesn't mean I have to.
And when I don't know the answer, I don't have to invent one so that we can feel safe.
We can say:
I don't know.
And remain together there.
That feels very different.
The uncomfortable space of UNKNOWN
I think one of the hardest parts of changing structural beliefs is the urge to replace them immediately.
If I don't believe this anymore, what do I believe instead?
If this is no longer my purpose, what is my new purpose?
If this worldview no longer holds together for me, what new worldview am I going to adopt?
We are very uncomfortable with empty shelves.
Apparently every vacant space must be filled immediately with a new philosophy and perhaps a decorative crystal. π
But I'm beginning to wonder whether there is value in leaving the shelf empty for a while.
UNKNOWN does not necessarily mean failure.
It may simply mean:
I do not currently know.
And perhaps I don't need to.
At least not yet.
That doesn't mean I stop being curious.
Good luck with that.
I don't think curiosity is going anywhere.
But curiosity is different from requiring the mystery to surrender so that I can feel safe.
That's the part that is changing.
What are your beliefs creating?
This also connects with something we're exploring this month in my Quantum Soul Upgrade work around the Solar Plexus and the polarity of Pain and Joy.
Not pain as punishment.
Not joy as proof you've mastered life.
But as a question of identity, agency and how we direct our power.
What am I using my power to create and maintain?
And:
How does my whole system experience the life that results?
Because beliefs are not simply ideas.
They create behaviour.
They influence what we tolerate.
What we pursue.
What we sacrifice.
What we feel guilty about.
Who gets access to us.
How much responsibility we take on.
What we think we must fix.
What we think we must become.
So perhaps one of the most useful questions isn't simply:
What do I believe?
It might be:
What have I built around this belief?
What behaviour does it produce?
What responsibility does it give me?
What does it ask me to tolerate?
What does it make me afraid to question?
What identity is attached to it?
And what might happen if I no longer believed it?
Not because every old belief needs to be dismantled.
Not because questioning everything makes us clever.
And certainly not because I have now found a superior collection of beliefs that everyone else should adopt.
That would rather spectacularly miss the point.
I have not found The Way
The Grail Quest, as I wrote recently, is over.
I haven't found the single architecture that makes every part of life coherent.
I haven't discovered the secret operating manual.
There will almost certainly continue to be things I experience, things I believe, things I suspect, things I question and things I simply do not know.
Perhaps that is enough.
Perhaps I don't need to find The Way before I can find my way.
And perhaps part of finding my way is occasionally discovering that a belief which once helped orient me no longer does.
That can hurt.
It can be frightening.
It can feel like losing part of yourself.
But sometimes what remains after the structure moves isn't emptiness.
Sometimes it is room.
Room to listen.
Room to choose.
Room to change.
Room to live without having to explain every mystery first.
And, surprisingly, room for Joy.
Which is probably how I ended up making a song this week about clapping, dancing and shining after spending several days questioning God, purpose, identity, suffering and the nature of reality.
Apparently that's where the great spiritual quest has taken me.
And you know what?
I'm okay with that.
Because when the sun comes out, I no longer think I need to justify enjoying it.
I don't need the whole world to be okay before I am allowed to experience a moment in which I am okay.
And I don't need every question answered before I can live the life that is actually here.
Maybe that's not The Answer.
Maybe it doesn't need to be.
For now, it is enough.
