The Flamekeeping Series Part 3: Find Your Way
- Jan 19
- 8 min read
This is the third in a four-part series on flamekeeping— the practice of noticing and tending our inner flame, and allowing it to illuminate our path. Each post includes a practical exercise.
Imagine holding up a lantern to look at the paths before you. You can see just enough to understand what walking down them might be like, which allows you to pick the best way forward. This is the magic of flamekeeping.
Here, I use the plural word, paths intentionally. Usually, there is not one "right" decision or move: we face several viable alternatives with different pros and cons. Instead of bearing the pressure to make the "right" choice, I recommend reframing to making the best choice for now.
With tender attention to our inner flame, we see the trade-offs of each path and how we, in all our uniqueness, might experience them. We sense the insights of our inner wisdom and feelings, an invaluable counterpart to mental analysis.
A Flamekeeping Framework for Decision-Making
Is there a decision that has been on your mind?
What follows is a step-by-step method to work with your inner flame when choosing your next big move. Don't miss this week's practical exercise.
Step 6: Take a small action
Step 1: Create Inner Calm
At its core, listening to the inner flame is about connecting to your intuition. It's hard to hear when we are rushed, flooded, or dysregulated.
Therefore, our first task is settling down. This might look like stepping away from the decision for an hour or a few days, slowing your breathing, going for a walk, exercising, or simply getting enough rest. When we try to decide from inside the hurricane, everything feels murky.
Importantly: I'm not asking us to eliminate or avoid emotion. Rather, I suggest generating space or objectivity around the emotion with some self-regulation.
Practical tips:
If everything feels urgent or catastrophic, or if your body feels tense and braced, you are not in the right space to decide.
If it feels like you are observing the gravity of the decision from a little distance, you're close to ready.
Step 2: Lay Out the Paths Without Judgment
Once you are calm, name the paths available to you.
Writing down thoughts is useful for many things, and it's a tool I use to help people end rumination. Flamekeeping works best when the options are visible and concrete, not swirling abstractly in your head.
Include the obvious benefits and trade offs, as well as the quieter ones or hard truths you may be tempted to dismiss. These should be high level facts -- not speculative worries -- based on what you know to be true about yourself, your research, financial calculations, or the other analytical sources of information specific to your situation.
At this stage, don’t rank, justify, or judge. If you need to calm yourself back down before moving to the next step, do so.
Practical tips:
If you find yourself saying “that’s not really an option,” write it down anyway and keep going.
If after listing, your paths seem really black and white, reconsider: are there grey areas you might be missing?
If you notice yourself defending or dismissing an option, you may be judging too early.
Step 3: Feel into the Trade-Offs. Don't Just Analyze Them
This might be the most important step. Flamekeeping shows us how each path will feel to live on, which allows us to make the best decision we can.
As you weigh your options, let your inner flame take you on a journey. Use all the senses that come intuitively to you to feel into the emotion and physicality of each potential future. It's important to do this from a place of calm, so that the journey you're going on stems from inner wisdom, not anxiety. Allow the visualization to come to you. It may be slow or fragmented. This week's exercise walks through how to do this step-by-step.
I'll give you a personal example.
Once, I had only two days to choose between two job offers.
One role was joyously aligned with my soul. Talking to the hiring manager, I experienced the warmest connection I had ever felt in an interview process. The job offered immense flexibility and a very manageable workload. The growth prospects were tremendous. The downside: mediocre health benefits at a time things felt personally precarious.
The other role was in my industry, with a lovely manager, but the work seemed dryer. The job required longer hours, and the pay was lower. The upside: truly remarkable health benefits that I desperately wanted.
After getting as much information about each work environment as I could through conversations with other employees, I quieted down..
In meditative silence, I sat steady in my inner flame. I felt into each future, using both my imaginative capacity and my senses.
I could immediately feel the joy of job #1. But as I held my health/home life in the light of my flame, I felt the somberness and fragility of my personal situation.
I did the same exercise for the second job. I could feel some mundaneness in my day-to-day, but it was better than expected. As I cast the light on the personal health situation, I suddenly felt immense relief and joy knowing I had benefits I could rely on.
I took job #2. This visualization exercise, armed with factual research about the trade offs of each role, sent me into my new position feeling alive in the positivity of why I chose it. Later, the frustrations of less interesting work and lower pay were softened because in a way, I had already experienced them.
Of course, flamekeeping can't guarantee certainty, and isn't fortune-telling, but it does shed light on how we might uniquely experience the choices we are making.
Practical tips:
As you imagine, slowly turn your lantern to various parts of your life and feel them -- your social activities, health, career prospects, family.
Visualize yourself bearing the costs of each downside. How does it feel?
If you find yourself engaging in this activity in a hypervigilant, clinging, or narrowly focused way, you're likely to miss the quiet voice of your flame. Try zooming out or taking a break.
Step 4: Notice Your Body’s Response
In Steps 4 and 5, we engage in discernment based on our sensory meditation and the logical trade offs we've analyzed thus far.
What happened in your body as you thought of each path? Did your breath deepen or shorten? Did you feel more settled, or more restless? The body often registers alignment or misalignment before the mind can articulate why. How it communicates can be unique to each individual.
Practical tips:
A better path might feel like it has some steadiness, grounding, or quiet relief -- even if mixed with other emotions.
Misalignment often shows up as contraction, heaviness, agitation, frantic energy, or even dullness.
No path is perfect.
Step 5: Discern Anxiety from Intuition
As we interpret both our factual research and intuitive experience, it's important to ensure we distinguish between anxious and intuitive thoughts. Our decision should be grounded in objectivity and wisdom.
To be clear, in decision-making, fear is a life-saving and important human emotion, which we should absolutely take into consideration. However, when fear is in the driver's seat, or becomes distorted into anxiety, it can cloud the wisdom of the inner flame.
This discernment is especially critical if you believe in hearing spiritual messages from within. In my personal experience, here's how I recognize the differences:
Intuition / Inner Flame Wisdom | Anxious Thoughts / Past Conditioning |
Feels like a calm inner knowing. | Feels like mental thoughts coming from your head. |
Slow and grounded. Even if our intuition is to do something immediately or urgently, it has a stability, strength, or decisiveness to it. | Rushed and frazzling. |
Speaks objectively from the present moment. | Often stews over our past or barrels towards the future. |
Tends to be quieter. It does not argue or catastrophize. It paints an unfiltered, honest picture. | Tends to be loud, fixating on extremes, perfection, justifying evidence, and/or external validation. |
Feels self-assured and spacious even if difficult emotions are present. It may seem wise or older. | Feels self-conscious, small, and nervous. |
Practical tips:
If a signal becomes clearer as you feel calmer, it is more likely coming from the flame.
Anxiety urgently demands certainty; the flame tolerates ambiguity better.
Step 6: Take a Small Action
By now, in doing your logical homework and attuning to your inner flame, you probably have a clue as to which direction feels best to pursue. It might help to write down why you've landed here, while you're still feeling centered.
Now, if it feels right, go forward by the light of your flame. Take a small step. This could be a conversation, a boundary, a trial period, an email, or whatever gets the ball rolling in your new path. See how it feels.
And well done. You don’t need perfect clarity to make a move. The practice is in attuning and trusting that the path emerges through attention and action, not force.
Practical tips:
If a choice still feels overwhelming, it may be asking for a smaller step or slower pace.
Writing or action often bring clarity more effectively than remaining in your head.
Final Thoughts
Self-trust is built through repeated cycles of listening, responding, and learning. As you keep practicing, you can move through these steps much more quickly, or simply intuit your answer right away.
Also, there may be times when your flame feels dim. This does not mean you are totally disconnected. When I have trouble connecting to my inner flame, I find it useful to examine whether my physical needs for rest and de-stimulation have been met.
The inner flame isn't a crystal ball for the future, but attuning to it gives you insights that pure analytical thinking doesn't.
Practical Exercise: A Meditative Visualization
Step 3, feeling into decisions, is hard for a lot of people, especially those who feel stuck in cognitive mode. So let's practice.
Think of a low-stakes decision you’re facing today or this week. For example: Do I respond to this message now or tomorrow? Do I attend this social plan or decline gently? Do I close my laptop early today?
Set yourself up for visualization. Once you've picked a question, find a quiet moment. Take a few slow breaths. Let your body soften. Feel free to lay down or close your eyes.
Imagine and feel. Picture your inner flame in your abdomen: steady, warm, not urgent. Let the light grow a little.
Bring the first option to mind. Don’t justify it. Just place it in the light. Feel yourself living this. As you stay with this option, slowly turn your lantern toward different areas that feel relevant: e.g. impact on mood or energy for today, how your body will feel, or impact on a relationship.
Now release the first image and bring the second option into the light. Again, allow the visualization to come to you rather than forcing it. It may be subtle. It may arrive more as a bodily tone than a picture or thought. Gently scan the same areas for impact.
Intuit. Did you feel pulled towards one option or the other? Did one feel heavier or harder?
If nothing emerges, that’s okay too. This takes practice. If you notice yourself becoming hypervigilant, e.g. trying to extract a perfect answer, or replaying the visualization repeatedly, take a break and try to find a way to soothe yourself.
Don't hesitate to reach out if you'd like help with this type of visualization.
Stay tuned.
In the rest of the series, I share my framework for:
common pitfalls along the journey
