Part One of the Living From Your Higher Self series introduced the journey, the map from a life weighed down by fear and sadness to one of peace and purpose. This is where the map came from: two questions, asked nearly thirty years apart.
I must have been about eight years old the first time I truly became aware of myself questioning suffering. I was in my family’s living room, watching my much older, adult sister sobbing as she talked to my Dad about her latest disaster, pushing away tears of deep sadness and sorrow. My Dad responded with a despair of his own, pleading to no one in particular: “What did I do wrong?” “Why is this happening?”
I remember feeling helpless, recognising the pain I was witnessing even though I couldn’t have named it. And then something interrupted the scene, a small, insistent voice, quiet but unmistakable.
Why can’t they just be happy?
This is so unnecessary. They could choose again.
I didn’t say it out loud. Eight-year-olds don’t announce things like that in rooms full of adult grief. I had no idea what to do with it, so I did what most of us do with quiet inner promptings: nothing. But the question never left.
A Question Everyone Hears
I’ve come to believe that everyone hears a version of that voice. Yours may have asked something different: Does it have to be this way? Is this really me? Surely there’s more to life than this? It tends to arrive uninvited, in the middle of an ordinary scene, and it is very easy to talk over.
Even before that day, the sadness I had witnessed in that room was a feature of my own experience. So, when that question arose, I knew on a level it was not only about the sadness I was seeing around me, but my own inner sadness. My sadness felt so ingrained that I assumed it was simply who I was. My identity. Perhaps you carry something similar: an anxiety, a flatness, a low hum of dread that has been there so long you’ve filed it under “personality”. So when the question arose in me, I remembered it, all my life.
The Day I Finally Began Investigating
I was always anxious, right up until my mid-thirties. I bit my nails; my foot tapped whenever I was uncomfortable. I had never questioned any of it; it was just an irreconcilable part of me. Then one day, without quite meaning to, I asked: “Why do I feel this way?” For the first time, instead of experiencing the daily anxiety, I looked at it. I really saw it as an entity in its own right.
It doesn’t sound like much. But self-inquiry had never occurred to me before, and that small, honest question set something in motion. I was a voracious reader, hundreds of novels, mostly as escapism, so the library was already my second home. Soon after asking, I found myself drawn to the psychology section, where I picked up a little book about anxiety. It introduced me to a few simple ideas and exercises, and after working through them, revelation upon revelation, my anxiety was gone. Not managed. Gone. I stopped biting my nails. Life improved.
At the time it felt like a miracle. I now think it was something better than a miracle: it was repeatable. One honestly asked question, followed by one small step, had healed something I’d assumed was permanent. It reconnected me to my own power, the sense that I could steer my life rather than be dragged along by it. I didn’t have the language for it then, but that was my introduction to self-awareness, and to the quiet inner guide this series is named for.
That is the pattern I want you to take from this article, because it is yours to use as much as mine: the question opens the door, and the answers turn out to be closer than you think.
Why An Ordinary Life Is The Perfect Classroom
If you’re like me, most of the people I have come across, writing a series like this has lived an unusual life. They’ve hosted retreats, been teachers, and had some dramatic awakenings. So let me be plain. I have lived what many would call an ordinary one. I was born in the Northeast of England to working-class parents, the last of five children. Money was short, and poverty stayed with me as a shadow for years. I married very young, which I realised later helped me escape an unhappy childhood and find myself, on autopilot, recreating the sadness I had experienced all my life. I have spent my working life in ordinary jobs, learning these lessons slowly, in real and often difficult circumstances. I didn’t even begin the search in earnest until well into my forties.
I share this not because the details matter, but because the ordinariness does. If peace of mind required a monastery, a windfall or a special gift, most of us would be disqualified before we began. An ordinary life is not an obstacle to this journey. It is the classroom; every challenge, every setback, every difficult relationship turns out to be part of the curriculum.
Pain, Suffering and The Other Path
As a child, I thought the depth of my pain was unique to me. Growing up cured me of that. Everyone is carrying pain of some kind, quietly or openly. We all can suffer and often do.
But somewhere along the way I learned something that changed everything: while pain touches us all, suffering is not required. There is another path, another perspective, which I have come to recognise as truth. It leads from fear to love, from confusion to clarity, and from despair to freedom.
What I promise you is that you, too, are on a course to light and joy; it was always there, waiting. But it is a choice you can make. This series is the result of that choice in my life: decades of reading, testing, discarding and refining, distilled into four foundations and five practical principles, arranged in the order I wish someone had handed them to me. It is not about me; it is about what I have learned, and those lessons, while they are mine, belong to us all. If my story holds a mirror to yours, I hope it serves as both mirror and guide.
Try This
You have a version of my living-room moment, and probably a version of my library moment waiting to happen. So, this week, do one thing. Find your question, the one that keeps interrupting your ordinary scenes. Does it have to be this way? Why do I feel like this? Take ten minutes and write it down, exactly as it comes. Don’t analyse it, argue with it, or rush to answer it. Just get it on paper and let it sit where you can see it.
That question is the thread. The whole journey is what happens when you pull it.
Where We Go Next
Perhaps you’ve already tried pulling threads before: the books, the courses, the resolutions, and nothing lasted. That isn’t because you failed. It’s because self-improvement was never quite the right tool for the job. That’s where we’re going next: Why Personal Growth Isn’t Enough.
Articles in The Journey
Living From Your Higher Self: The Journey to Your True Self; Introduction
- The Question That Changed My Life
- Why Personal Growth Isn’t Enough
- Your Teachers Are Closer Than You Think
- The Road Ahead: What to Expect When You Begin
- What’s Waiting on the Other Side? Discovering the Peace You Already Carry