EIGHT

Be True to Your Own Nature

–1–

“My resume is basically a list of things I hate to do.”

“I like my job only marginally more than I like being homeless.”

“It’s not that I hate my job, but I’d rather have my eyes gouged out by a rabid beaver than work in this hell hole for a day longer!”

“I like my job to the extent that sometimes I go minutes without checking how many minutes are left in the workday.”

These are some of the ways employees feel about their work. I regularly meet people who find their jobs deeply unsatisfying, even soul-destroying.

Many years ago, before setting up my own business, I was keen to gain work experience in the legal profession. I interned at one of the top firms in the world, at its London office.

Even before I walked through the glass sliding doors and passed security, I was awed by the sheer scale and polished exterior of the firm. Associates and partners, dressed in immaculate tailored suits, ascended the lifts and escalators to their designated departments. I hurried along to “Commercial”, eager to impress.

As I was about to discover, not everything was as it seemed. Some people were clearly made for this workplace: they loved the law and were in their habitat. But for many others, the firm was an impersonal, soul-crushing machine that seemed to siphon off their vitality, demanding everything from them.

To take the edge off their fatigue and alienation, employees would meet at one of the nearby bars till late in the evening and get drunk. If that wasn’t enough, they would head to upmarket strip clubs.

What kept them tied to work they didn’t like? The reward was a lot of money and prestige. With a large salary came new expectations and standards of living: a larger apartment in a more central and expensive London postcode, a more impressive car, costly holidays to the Burj Al Arab in Dubai or to the Bahamas. These things become the new norm, and one day you realize you’re locked in.

I made friends with Chris. He was scheduling his business meetings around his job interviews.

“I can’t tell you how much my spirit has died since I started working here,” he told me. “It feels like a slaughterhouse of the soul.”

A slaughterhouse of the soul! The phrase surprised me. I would be reminded of it a few years later.

“Well, what would you like to do?” I asked Chris.

“I love plants. I was going to be a botanist, but my father convinced me it was a bad idea. Botanists struggle to pay their bills.”

Like so many, Chris was in a profession that didn’t suit his nature. Harried and fatigued, he would get through Mondays knowing that everyone around him was equally miserable. Chris complained regularly that he wasn’t being paid enough; that others of his standing at similar firms were paid more; that colleagues advanced ahead of him because they had connections or navigated the firm’s politics better.

I don’t know what happened to Chris. We didn’t stay in touch. But the phrase he used remained with me: “slaughterhouse of the soul”. No matter how well-paid the job, I knew I didn’t want to end up in a slaughterhouse of the soul.

–2–

Rather than just care for her dying patients, long-time palliative nurse Bronnie Ware thought she could maybe learn from them too. After all, these were people at the end of their life. Awareness of our own mortality has a way of altering our perspective on life, of helping us see what we so easily miss in the frenetic, feverish rush of everyday existence.

Bronnie began questioning her patients: “What went really well in your life? Do you have any regrets? Is there anything you would do differently?”

To Bronnie’s surprise, there was one regret that kept coming up again and again: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”¹⁰

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna that it’s better to strive and even struggle on your own path, than to succeed on the path of another.¹¹ Krishna goes further: “It’s better to follow your own path even if you perish doing so, than to follow the path someone else expects of you and succeed in doing so perfectly.”¹²Arjuna is a warrior by nature. In his dark night of the soul, he wants to give up being a warrior; it’s a difficult path. He would rather choose a different calling, maybe that of a wandering monk. But Krishna teaches him about the importance of being true to one’s nature: “By carrying out action in accord with one’s own nature, one doesn’t go wrong. One should never abandon the type of action one is born to perform, Arjuna, even if it has faults. All undertakings come with some fault, just as fire comes with smoke.”¹³

By carrying out action in accord with one’s own nature, one doesn’t go wrong. That’s a powerful statement.

To express our nature, our calling, making it our personal offering of the heart, is our birthright; it’s what we were placed on earth to do. But how do we know what our nature is? We may have spent so many years, even decades, trying to live up to the expectations of others and trying to fit in that we simply don’t know what our nature is anymore. What then?

We can start by looking to our gifts. If we’re naturally good at something, it may offer us a clue about our nature. Every life form has a particular gift, or “power”. A bee is able to manufacture honey; a hummingbird can stop mid-flight and hover in the air; a fish draws oxygen out of water; glow-worms can illuminate the darkness, like stars fallen to the earth. We too each have a unique gift and contribution to make.

But recognizing our gifts is only a starting point, of course. It’s through active engagement with the world that our calling is revealed to us; it’s by being of service in life that we’re summoned to express our nature in a specific way. Our nature then manifests most clearly to us, as a calling.

One simple way to know if we’re being true to our nature is to ask, “Do I feel more alive? Is what I’m doing creating vitality, or is it sapping my strength and making me feel dead?”

Imagine carrying a fifty-kilo bag of rocks back to your home, ten miles up a mountain path. The sun is beating down. After one mile, you begin questioning whether this was a good idea. How did you ever get involved in this drudgery? After two long miles, you can hardly continue. You question whether you’ll be able to make it. With every step, the bag feels heavier. All your energy is draining away, and the journey is utter misery and torture. After three miles, you finally give up.

Now imagine that instead of rocks, your bag is filled with fifty kilos of gold bars or precious jewels. There’s enough treasure here to last you an entire lifetime. The bag is the same weight as before. The journey up the mountain is the same distance too. But now instead of feeling sapped of strength, you’ll be filled with energy and vitality. Instead of struggling with every step, you’ll probably be dancing up the mountain with that bag.

This is what it feels like when we live in accord with our nature and follow our purpose, or calling. We all have some experience of this. When we truly love what we do, we can spend all day and all night doing it, even forgetting to eat or sleep. But oddly, we don’t feel sapped of strength; we find we have more strength and energy than before. We experience what we might describe as “effortless effort”.

–3–

Imagine spending twenty-five years—a quarter of a century—climbing the corporate ladder and finding yourself unfulfilled. When Peter was finally made a senior partner at his London law firm, the culmination of all his hard toil and sacrifice, he began, for the first time, to acknowledge his unhappiness.

Previously, Peter had viewed his simmering lack of something as the need for a promotion or pay rise. But when he finally became a senior partner, there was nowhere else for him to go; there was nothing on the horizon to hide the emptiness he felt. Peter realized he had spent two and a half decades toiling in the City in work that didn’t satisfy him deeply. He was a good lawyer, for sure; but this was not his passion.

Peter came from a poor family. His parents had struggled to send him to university. Growing up, he sat beside children who had a lot more than he did, and this made him feel inadequate. When it came time to choose a trajectory for his life, he didn’t pause to think about his purpose or his nature. He wanted a career that would give him prestige and a high income. Law promised both.

After twenty-five years, the choices Peter made as a youth had caught up with him. The realization that he had been following a path that was not his own threw Peter into a personal crisis, a dark night of the soul.

What do you do in that situation? You realign with truth, with the way you and the universe are constructed.

And this is what Peter did. “What is it I really want to do?” he asked himself. “If I could start all over, knowing what I know now, what would I choose?”

This brings us back to Bronnie Ware and the number one regret of her dying patients: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” When faced with our own mortality, what stands out most clearly is the quality of the choices we’ve made in our life.

Peter gave up practising law at the height of his career and became a teacher. The pay was far less, but he doesn’t regret his decision. Peter loves what he does. It gives him energy and inspiration every day.

Whenever I think of Peter, I remember Krishna’s words to Arjuna: “One’s own path, even if imperfect, is better than another’s path followed perfectly. By carrying out action according to one’s own nature, one doesn’t go wrong.”

This true story holds a special significance for me. It helped me see that law was also the wrong choice of work for me. I too come from a poor background. In secondary school, when most children went to the corner shop to buy chocolate or fizzy drinks during lunch break, I always stayed behind. Unable to afford anything, I felt left out and different. This feeling affected my career choices. I too wanted to pursue a line of work that commanded respect, that was prestigious and paid well. I wanted to be acknowledged as successful.

But I came to recognize that a career in law is not my life purpose. It’s not what I was placed on this earth to do. While it has its attractions, it didn’t pass the “truth test” for me. And when we aren’t true to ourselves, we inflict a form of violence upon ourselves.

Like our solicitor, I too became a teacher. I now teach dharma and yoga philosophy, with the aim of making it relevant, accessible and engaging for contemporary readers and audiences. I’ve found my purpose. And it all started by living in accord with my own nature. I learned how to do that from the solicitor who left London to become a teacher. His personal story affected me deeply: in some way, his story was my story.

–4–

“Just be yourself, and you’ll be fine. Everything will take care of itself.”

I was a teenager at my sixth form college, Wyggeston & Queen Elizabeth I College in Leicester, and my English teacher decided to give me some life advice. These words of hers sank into my soul like a dart, even if I didn’t fully understand them at the time.

She was the first person in my life to tell me: just be yourself. You don’t need to try to be anyone else. In doing so, she was repeating exactly what Krishna had advised Arjuna on that clear, early morning on the battlefield of Kurukshetra.

From childhood, the media and advertising industries, our friends and even our family have been telling us what it means to be “successful”. Many of us find ourselves unconsciously buying into a dream that is not our own, that doesn’t accord with who we are.

If we continually try to conform to the expectations of others, we never give ourselves the chance to manifest who we’re meant to be. Everything in the universe is true to its nature—except for humans. An acorn pushes out an oak; it doesn’t try to push out lilies. As an oak, it expresses its own perfection perfectly. But we easily embrace an idea of success that isn’t our own, and then allow that idea to direct our life.

One of the strange secrets of life is that no matter how hard we try, we remain incomplete and unfulfilled until we’re perfectly ourselves. When we express ourselves unreservedly, we become beautiful—not just in our own eyes, but in the eyes of everyone around us. To be beautiful means to be yourself. When we ignore the seed of potential within us and try to become someone we’re not, we feel unfulfilled and frustrated.

Awareness of the short duration of our life can give us the clarity and courage to put this principle into practice. Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple and Pixar, put it poignantly:

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.¹⁴

Death has a way of putting things into perspective, and the dark night of the soul is a type of death. Our story has been shattered; past meaning has been lost. We’re cast adrift.

Often a person may fall into a dark night of the soul precisely because they’ve spent years or decades hiding from themselves. They may have pursued other people’s ideas of what they should be doing and have abandoned themselves.

The dark night breaks down our story. It invites us to look at the areas in our life where we’ve abandoned ourselves in favour of an imaginary story. The first step, therefore, is to begin living in a way that is truer to our nature. We’re invited to be more truthful. Living in accord with one’s own nature is an act of self-kindness.

How we’re built is part of the universal order of things. Krishna therefore advises Arjuna to align himself with that universal order and use it to his advantage to undertake powerful and effective action. It’s impossible to be effective or skilful on the field of life if we’re locked in a fight against our own nature. Krishna’s conclusion is really quite simple: “Beings must follow their nature; what can repression accomplish?”¹⁵

The universe has built each of us in a unique way. If we’re engaged in a fight with the universe, guess who’ll win? The universe. Always.

–5–

One summer as a teenager, I found work at Walkers Crisps’ large factory in Leicester. My job was to pick crisp bags from conveyor belts and pack them into cardboard boxes. Morning till evening.

An employee named Edward stood out to me, as he was always cheerful and energetic. He packed twice as quickly as everyone else. I watched him with curiosity and admiration; I wanted to be like him. If I owned the company, I thought, I would want employees just like him.

However much I tried, I couldn’t muster Edward’s enthusiasm. I kept watching the clock. Every minute on the factory floor felt like half an hour. After four days, I quit. I remember thinking that even if the wages had been doubled or tripled, I simply couldn’t possibly bear another day on that packing floor.

We each find that some types of work are natural and satisfying for us, while others leave us feeling drained and deflated. Most of us will work for the greater part of our life, so if we’re unfulfilled at work, we’re setting ourselves up to be unhappy for the greater part of our life.

Is there a way to find happiness in our work? Is there an approach to work that generates vitality, rather than saps our strength?

Krishna tells Arjuna there is. He teaches him Karma-yoga, skill in action. The first step, Krishna explains, is to work in harmony with the gift of our nature, with the way we’re built. Krishna refers to work aligned with our nature as our “personal dharma” (in Sanskrit, sva-dharma).¹⁶ Ideally, this is work we’re good at. More importantly, it’s work that feels right, natural, and aligned with who we are.

Our personal dharma is our own exceptional way of expressing ourselves and of being of service in the world. It’s our very own way of living in alignment with truth.

When we engage in work that suits our nature, even great effort has a feeling of effortlessness. It feels like we’re supported in our endeavours by the universe itself. This is because the universe has designed us in a unique and inimitable way. Expressing that, and living in accordance with it, is what we’re meant to do.

When we love what we do, we naturally attract abundance into our life. But we can never love what we do if we’re living against ourselves. Being true to our nature is therefore the first step to attracting abundance into our life.

Krishna goes still further: “A person attains full perfection by devoting himself to his own particular work.”¹⁷ In other words, our work can become our daily yoga practice.

We’re each born to perform a specific type of action.¹⁸ Our personal dharma is an inherent feature of the way we’re constructed. When we follow our personal dharma, Krishna says, making what we do an offering, then our work can become an act of worship.¹⁹ Imagine that.

If we act against our nature, no matter what we choose to do and no matter how successful we may become in doing it, we’ll always feel a lingering emptiness and dissatisfaction. Living against ourselves is very difficult. It requires immense effort. It’s exhausting. We’re forever looking for external rewards, and always awaiting the future. Our actions in and of themselves don’t satisfy us.

But if we live in agreement with our nature, in a way that is truthful to ourselves, whatever we do—whether it meets with great outward success or even only limited validation—is still highly satisfying. What we do becomes its own reward.