No need to find a Guru, everything is your Guru

When you know how to listen, everybody is the guru. -Ram Dass

We’ve all sought out teachers, mentors, coaches, or maybe even a Guru. This is a great way of seeking personal and professional development but I think the next step is to realize that everything is our Guru (our teacher).

Usually, when we find ourselves unsatisfied with something externally, it is more a reflection of ourselves rather than the thing we are blaming.

Therefore, these dissatisfactions can be our teachings instead of our suffering.

When we allow the outside world to strongly influence us, it can break us. Even if we don’t allow it, it can break us unknowingly. Our dissatisfactions — irritation, anxiety, frustrations, annoyances, emotions, bitterness, etc — can sneak up over time and eventually be too much to handle.

2,000 years ago, Epictetus, a famous Greek Philosopher, explained:

Any person capable of angering you becomes your master. They can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by them.

How do we become our own master, as Epictetus suggests? I think we create order on the inside to manage the uncertainty on the outside.

There’s a great billboard from the Marine Corps I’ve started seeing recently on my long drives through the Midwest that says, “The battle to fight is within.”

What a beautiful and succinct piece of philosophy.

If we solidify and win our internal battles, the outside world can begin to have less control over us. We can begin building a fortified wall, or as Ryan Holiday calls the “inner citadel.”

This inner citadel is our preparation for all things external. It’s built from the teachings of everything you experience in life — adversity, relationships, viruses, exercise, and the many dissatisfactions we discussed earlier.

For a virus, it’s an easy concept. If your body is exposed to adversity (virus), it protects itself (antibodies) from future exposure. Parents used to throw Chicken Pox parties as an exaggeration of this concept. Vaccines use the same strategy. This virus is a teacher for our future self.

How about exercise? If you slowly increase your efforts day after day, it prepares your body for what’s to come. This exercise is a teacher for our physiological growth.

How about relationships? Research shows that the later you decide to marry, the less likely it is to end in divorce. I think this suggests that — when a better “you” is presented to the world, the more likely a better match will find you. These unsuccessful relationships are our teachers. (But, don’t wait too long because you may begin to compromise)

How about the many dissatisfactions in our lives? Ram Dass explains again,

“I think that the work is on oneself. And if you are doing things that irritate me. Or that don’t treat my needs the way I would like them. My inclination is to see that as my problem. Not yours.”

Working on oneself is extremely difficult because we have to somehow notice it and also admit there’s work to do. There is an ancient proverb that says, “It’s more difficult to rule yourself than rule a city.”

I wholeheartedly believe this.

You may even have to rule yourself like a city. Because our city is constantly at siege. It’s constantly being overthrown by its peasants. It’s constantly disrupted by its environment.

Every day you wake up, in order to rule your city, you have to seek out teachings to fortify that wall.

Sheryl Sandberg, in her book Lean In, describes these teachings as internal obstacles:

“Internal obstacles are rarely discussed and often underplayed. Throughout my life, I was told over and over about inequalities in the workplace and how hard it would be to have a career and a family. I rarely heard anything, however, about the ways I might hold myself back. These internal obstacles deserve a lot more attention, in part because they are under our own control. We can dismantle the hurdles in ourselves today. We can start this very moment.”

And, to belabor the point, there is a fascinating autobiography by David Goggins that tells a story of his young black self growing up in a world of chaos starting at age 4 and onward, and after many years of pointing fingers to external circumstances out of his control, he finally comes to the epiphany that there will always be chaos on the outside. To handle this chaos, he went internally.

The bottom line is that life is one big mind game. The only person you are playing against is yourself.

He went inside and won those battles. Now, he is an inspiring and motivational human being for millions of people.

If we want to improve our circumstances, we have to look deeply at ourselves, and this looking is a never-ending journey.

“People are anxious to improve their circumstances but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound.” — James Allen

Don’t remain bound. Everything is our teacher. Everything is our Guru.