The 3 Steps That Lead to Wisdom
Have you ever noticed that the moments of deepest insight in life rarely come from solving a problem, but from staying with it long enough to understand what it’s really asking of you?
We often come to self-work, relationship repair, or spiritual practice wanting answers. Yet what actually transforms us is not finding a fix—it’s learning how to meet our own experience with awareness, curiosity, and compassion.
Over years of walking with people through change, I’ve seen that every genuine insight, every moment when understanding becomes wisdom, follows a similar rhythm. It unfolds in three essential steps.
Step 1: The Pause: Learning to Feel Before You Think
Most of us are trained to solve before we sense. When something hurts or feels uncertain, the mind rushes in with questions: What should I do? How do I make this stop?
But wisdom doesn’t come from the rush; it comes from the pause.
To pause is to breathe, to notice the body, to allow the sensations and emotions that are already here. This is not passivity, it is presence.
When we slow down enough to feel what’s actually happening, we interrupt the reflex to fix. We step out of reaction and into relationship: with our own nervous system, our own truth.
In this space, the body becomes the compass. It speaks in signals rather than sentences.
Tightness, warmth, trembling, tears, all of these are invitations. They tell us where life is moving, what matters most, and what we’ve been carrying alone for too long.
Wisdom begins not with knowing, but with noticing.
Step 2: The Inquiry: Listening Beneath the Story
Once we’ve paused long enough to feel, we shift from asking “what’s wrong with me?” to a deeper question, “what is this really about?”
This is where curiosity becomes our teacher.
Beneath every reaction lies a story: a memory, a wound, a pattern that once kept us safe. When we meet a recurring frustration or fear, it’s rarely about the surface situation. It’s about something older that’s asking to be seen.
Maybe anger is a boundary that was never honoured. Maybe the anxiety is an old longing to be safe. Maybe numbness is how the heart learned to survive.
When we turn inward and ask, What does this remind me of? What part of me is speaking right now?, we begin to recognize that our “problems” are really parts of us seeking relationships, not secrecy/elimination.
This is the heart of emotional processing: not explaining the story, but understanding what it’s trying to protect. When we listen deeply, meaning starts to replace confusion.
Step 3: The Integration: Sitting With What Cannot Be Fixed
This is the hardest step, and the most transformative.
After we’ve felt and inquired, the mind still wants to close the loop, such as to solve, to decide, to move on. But true wisdom often arrives only after we stop insisting on resolution.
Integration means staying with what’s uncomfortable long enough to let it reshape us.
It’s the quiet courage of saying, I don’t need to fix this right now. I’m here to understand it.
When we resist the urge to control the outcome, something softens. The parts of us that have been bracing finally exhale. In that surrender, insight becomes embodied.
We begin to see not only why we’ve struggled, but how those struggles have been guiding us toward authenticity.
It’s in this space beyond fixing, where wisdom lives. It’s less about having the right answers, and more about developing the right relationships: with our emotions, our history, and life unfolding in real time.
The Path to Wisdom Is Not Linear
We move through these three steps (Pause, Inquiry, Integration) again and again, like waves.
Each cycle brings a deeper humility and a fuller capacity to hold paradox: joy and pain, strength and tenderness, clarity and confusion.
Wisdom is not an achievement. It’s a posture of being, one that grows each time we choose to pause, feel, ask, and stay.
When we do, we find that the wisdom we were searching for was never outside of us. It was waiting patiently in the quiet space beneath the noise, ready to be remembered.
WALLACE MURRAY
Psychotherapy | Coaching | Facilitation | Educator | Urban Shamanism | Psychedelic Assisted Therapy
