Mary O’Malley - What’s in the Way Is the Way: A Practical Guide for Waking Up to Life

This book is dedicated to MarySue Brooks, my treasured friend and business partner.

Thank you for living this work and bringing your wisdom to it.

Your presence, your skills, your commitment, and your heart have been necessary in its unfolding.

Words cannot describe how grateful I am that we get to walk this path together.

Contents

Foreword

by Neale Donald Walsch

author of Conversations with God

W hen I was a boy, I used to go around saying, Life is so simple. Why does everyone keep making it so complicated?

I couldnt understand why all the kids in school would get so kerfuffled when a big test was coming up or when the end-of-year grades were due. I couldnt figure out (even when I was seven, eight, and nine) why Mom and Dad got into it so often at home or why Mom worried so much about stuff.

I was never clear about why anyone would be so concerned or worried about anything that theyd let themselves shift from cheerfulness to snippiness, from happiness to grouchiness, from inner peace to inward anxiety.

For some reason, I always knew things would work outand they always did. Maybe they didnt always work out the way I thought they would or exactly the way I wanted them to, but they always worked out in a way that brought me to my next highest goodand it didnt take me long to catch on to what was happening and to begin to depend on this being simply The Way Life Is.

Now, wonderful spiritual teacher Mary OMalley has written a whole book about thisexplaining it clearly and in wonderfully accessible terms.

Im so excited about this book! I consider it to be one of the most important pieces of writing to come our way in a very long time, and it absolutely will beof this I am sureone of the most beneficial books you have ever read.

This book talks about how to deal with life exactly as it is occurring, not just when its easy to do so, but when its the most difficultwhich, irony of ironies, makes it easy to do so.

And as much as I thought I knew about all this, boy could I have used this book when I was moving through the worst days of my personal journey. As with all of us, there have been some pretty tough ones. And in those moments we can easily forgetor at least I didwhatever we thought we knew about how to navigate the rocky shoals of life.

If in those moments I could have had something that I could turn to, something that could have helped me understand what was going on and how to get through it, I would have given anything. And if I had had something that I could refer to ahead of time so that I might have a specific approach to dealing with challenging moments, I would have considered it the biggest blessing of my life.

I can promise you that you will never find life more clearly explained than it is here, nor will you have placed in your hands more useful or powerful tools with which to negotiate its most difficult experiences.

It is true for me that as a child I seemed to know, intuitively, that life need not be as utterly discombobulating as I was observing people experiencing it, but I could not have told you why that was somuch less how to make it so. Mary OMalley has done both here and thus produced one of the greatest gifts one human being could offer to another.

If this is a challenging time in your life (or if someone you know and love is moving through a challenging moment in theirs), you could not have been led to a more perfect resource than this booknor to a more compassionate, understanding, spiritually aware, emotionally articulate, psychologically brilliant, and wonderfully able and capable messenger and teacher than its author.

Put simply, this book will show you the way to a better life, without needing a single thing to be different for you to retain your inner peace, your outer joy, and your overall well-being. Yet it is far from a theory book or a concept document. It is a practitioners guide. It is an easy-to-follow instruction book. It could easily have been titled Lifes Operating Manual.

Your soul knew exactly what it was doing when it brought you here. (You know, of course, that you did not stumble upon this book by chance.) Absorb it, then. Inhale it. Drink it in as the nectar of the gods. For it is surely from Divinity Itself that flows such wisdom as is here.

Thank you, Mary OMalley, for our days and nights are enriched by you and our wounded places are healed.

Introduction

Your Transformation Begins

I am inviting you on the most important journey you will ever take: the journey back to a heartfelt connection with yourself and a trust-filled connection with your life. This journey will show you that there is a sense of well-being with you always, no matter what is happening in your life.

If you are like most people, you have only sporadic glimpses of this well-being. This may be because you, like most everyone else, have a deep belief inside of you that says you are not enough. You may also have been conditioned to believe that if you just fix yourself or your life, you will be enough and thus know the peace and happiness you long for. You have become an ongoing project, and this causes you to struggle with your compulsions, your finances, your relationships, and your health. Rather than peace and joy, you may very well be living with a low-grade sense of unease that periodically flares up and plunges you into turmoil. Your life has become a series of problems to be solved rather than an adventure to be lived. If you are honest with yourself, you recognize that this fixing game has never brought you peace, well-being, or ease.

I too lived from this place of struggle for many years, so I intimately know the deep pain and heartache that comes from the fix-it mode. I was very compulsive, at times suicidal, and felt that I had no value. Most of the time, I experienced a sense of unease, and often it would flare up into dread, hopeless despair, and overall anxiousness. These feelings would show up as relentless struggles in my mind, knots in my stomach, and debilitating headaches that came from an intense longing to run away from my life. I gained a huge amount of weight, washed a lot of the food down with alcohol, and took every pill I could get my hands on.

Since I perceived myself as defective, I tried to get rid of the parts of me I didnt like and hold on to the ones I did. But these parts seemed to have a life of their own, appearing when I didnt want them and disappearing when I wanted them to stay. I also desperately tried to understand it all, but that just kept me caught in my head.

It wasnt until I discovered how to listen to myself that I began to open up again. Rather than always being in fix-it mode, I learned how to meet myself exactly as I am, opening into the place beyond judging, fixing, getting rid of, and trying to understand. I learned the art of being present for my own experience, no matter what it is, and the art of meeting myselfeven the so-called unacceptable, unmeetable parts of myselfin my own heart.

Slowly, just as the morning light dispels the dark, I came back to myself. I also discovered how to show up for the great adventure of Lifenot just life in the everyday sense, but the intelligent process unfolding in and through everyone and everything. Instead of always trying to create a better reality, I showed up for Reality with a capital R. (When capitalized, the words Life and Realityas well as Love, Intelligence, and Presenceall refer to the interconnected, intelligent field of being that is Life.)

Rather than being in a constant state of unease, I came to know more and more joy, trust, and love. Did this make all of my vulnerabilities go away? No. These feelings will always be a part of me, for vulnerability is an essential part of being human, and vulnerabilities are the doorways back into peace, joy, and love. Now mine are nestled in the spaciousness of my own heart. And when they get reawakened through this sometimes fierce process called Life, they dont take over any more. Instead, they open my heart even more.