Let me breakdown the words in the title. Why “Swiss army knife”? There are a lot of potential ways to start one’s inner journey. Based on my own experience and a lot of conversations I have had over the years, I have realized that there is no one size fits all philosophy or approach. My hope with this talk was to introduce the problem space and articulate how it manifests in every day life, reframe the challenge, delve into couple of different approaches to bootstrap this journey and end with a few suggestions on what this looks like if one were to practice these moment to moment in every day life. I will cover the first three items in this list as part of this post.

Before we go further, here is a working definition for “inner journey” or “inner progress”. (this was one of the questions from the audience as well). While I answered this question differently during the talk, one of the simplest analogies I have come across is a comparison with a biological characteristic - homeostasis - “any process that living things use to actively maintain fairly stable conditions necessary for survival.” Building on this idea, here is a working definition:

“Your inner journey/inner progress should take you to a place where you have a “fixed interior milieu” - think homeostasis for the psychological realm. Just like how the body is able to maintain a constant temperature whatever the temperature outside, irrespective of external ups and downs, you are able to act from a calm center.“

This should suffice for the discussion we are having. Ideally, Inner journey/Inner progress should lead to the discovery of one’s true nature. For the scope of this discussion though, let’s stay with our working definition. Good news is a fixed interior milieu is indeed a step towards removing the blur (caused by ignorance) around your true self.

With this as a backdrop let’s delve into the challenges of day to day living.

The Challenge Of Everyday Life

Pause and think about a typical day. If you are a founder, perhaps you have deep disagreement with your co-founder. Your partner insults you or so you feel. Road rage on and off. You feel you are not getting the attention you think you deserve. You have 1000s of followers on social media but you feel miserable and lonely. You have deep FOMO. And the list goes on. Sure, there are some moments of joy & contentment as well.

Count the number of moments where you felt total joy and happiness, moments when you felt complete and whole - moments that called for nothing more. Now count the number of moments where you felt anger, greed, jealousy, disappointment, fear, lust, and just general fuzzy unstoppable mental chatter. If you are like most, the latter far outnumbers the former.

Even if you were to conquer all of these, there is still this nagging sense of inadequacy. In the “The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant”, there is a quote attributed to Naval:

"When you’re finally wealthy, you’ll realize it wasn’t what you were seeking in the first place. But that is for another day." - Naval Ravikant

This feeling of inadequacy is not new. As a matter of fact this is one of the central themes of the Upanishads. Swami Dayananda, in his book “Introduction To Vedanta - Understanding the fundamental problem” says:

“A human being sees himself as a deficient person. His constant, compulsive pursuits make his sense of inadequacy evident.”

Forget Naval and Swami Dayananda for a minute. Isn’t this sense of inadequacy so true in many of our lives? Our hope that permanent happiness and fulfilment is just round the corner - that exit, that car, that yacht, another partner and what not, will deliver it. Like the curse of Sisyphus who keeps rolling the rock up the hill only to see it roll back down over and over and over again forever, we suffer from the same disappointment. This is not to say, ambition is bad. It just means we need to understand the landscape well and understand cause and effect.

I characterise this as the challenge of the twin peaks - inner and outer. You don’t expect to get to the summit of peak 2 by climbing peak 1 or vice versa. You need to climb both together. And this is not a part time, gig job - you can’t get there by focusing on your breath for 20 minutes everyday or listening to music on Headspace and living your life as usual. If that is the case, we need a reframing of the challenge to get a handle.

Reframe The Challenge

What if you look at all of life and work as a playground to practice inner progress? Every moment of your waking life, every interaction you have, every emotion that raises in the mind becomes an opportunity to practice - to iterate towards a “fixed interior milieu” - psychological homeostasis.

This is a powerful reframing of the the challenge - you now have a way of moving from being a gig meditation worker to making meditation a way of life.

Now what?

You will need practices to make this happen. Specifically, you will need to practice Awareness and Detachment. In Part 2, I will delve into both of these and bring it all together with some ideas on weaving these moment to moment in our lives.

Let’s remember: Pain is inevitable; Suffering is optional - Anonymous

When I don't do something and just sit, there are two things that bubble up - anxiety and boredom. For a change, I let them be this time around.

So the three of us, anxiety, boredom and I sat together quietly - clouds changing shape and butterflies chasing each other in the meantime. While I did some light reading on and off, for the most part I did nothing.

On another note, it is interesting how our work identities have become central to who we believe we are and how that in turn has appropriated a lot of other things in life - vacations to recharge for work, mindfulness to be more productive at work etc., Leisure is not something you do, to do something else better. It is a perennial undercurrent in our lives to tap into and perhaps stay centered in - vacation or otherwise.

Interestingly, the word vacation comes from vacare - 'to be empty', ‘to be unoccupied’. Our vacations are anything but this.

“Personality (centered in the ego) may be only one of nature’s methods, a convenient provisional delusion of considerable strategic value.”

To proclaim with such conviction that the “thing” (our personality) that seems so real, so close, so visceral and so central is a “provisional delusion” - temporary and unreal, is both bewildering and liberating at once. Not to say it does not have value - it definitely has utility in helping us grapple with day to day realities. It gives us and others who interact with us, a sense of continuity.

The struggle starts when we forget that it only “seems” to be real, close, visceral and central while it is actually not. Consider for a minute how this manifests in everyday life. A lot of us identify ourselves strongly with some dimension our identity - work identity for example. At a more harmless level, when we meet someone new, almost inevitably we start with “What do you do?”, “Where do your work?” etc., putting the work we do ahead of who we really are. On the more harmful level, we end up taking our titles, size of our teams, revenue we bring in, airline miles we accrue and the rest of it too seriously - we get attached and feed these narratives like nutrition supplements to the “provisional delusion”. Am I saying ambition is bad? Not at all - Be ambitious. Reach for the skies. Just don’t feed the ghost. The title is a mask and the mask has a utility in a specific context - max it out but make sure you remove it when you don’t need it. Makes you a better leader, parent, son/daughter, sibling and a human being. Build some self awareness. Be present. Suffer less.

Mental health and wellness conversations need to have this front and center. Sure, there are things you can “do” like meditation - but that’s a bandaid. What you need is a shift to a different paradigm where all of life is a meditation - while you are in the thick of things that your role and title demand from you, you still have enough self awareness to stay detached and not feed the ghost. You enjoy the dopamine surge but you stay a bit aloof. I anchor on this all the while in my coaching conversations - the paradox of balancing intense passion for what you do and detachment at once.

I’ll leave you with what is considered to be a red thread running across Chinese philosophy which I believe captures the spirit of this post beautifully.

‘Sageliness within’ and ‘Kingliness without.’

This is the ethos we need for creating a new generation of leaders who are intensely fearless and compassionate at once.

“A human being sees himself as a deficient person. His constant, compulsive pursuits make his sense of inadequacy evident.” So begins the book titled “Introduction To Vedanta - Understanding the fundamental problem” by Swami Dayananda. Our constant pursuit of wealth and pleasure almost inevitably ends up in a sense of emptiness - the rock keeps rolling back down like the curse of Sisyphus.

The Fundamental Error & The Solution

• There is a perpetual sense of inadequacy in all of us that vanishes only very momentarily under some circumstances.

• No external pursuit of wealth & pleasure is going to make one feel adequate completely and permanently. One’s day to day experience is the evidence for this.

• This sense of inadequacy to start with is because of the ignorance that we are and have always been fully adequate. (this is a big leap) Ignorance blurs our view and stops us from seeing this, thus leading to the fundamental error.

• One needs the right means of knowledge to remove this ignorance.

• Vedanta is that knowledge.

More in posts to come.

• Do I need to say something?

• Do I need to say it now?

• How do I say it kindly?