This is how the story of how I reconnected with my inner guru.
People have always told me how strong they think I am. Funny thing is, I never felt strong at the time they were telling me that.
Like a lot of you, I grew up in an unsupportive household where I had to fight my own battles. To ask for help seemed futile and I was usually better off figuring it out myself than risk receiving good intentioned but misleading advice, or even worse, backlash as only a bully can deliver. So, while others saw me as being strong, in my mind, I was simply was simply doing what I had to in order to survive.
I got through well enough but there came a time when that inner power I relied on started slipping away.
After recently moving to a new city and not finding my place in it, people really started getting me down. The loneliness of the big city got to me and it started making a permanent dent in my soul.
In a desperate effort to gain acceptance and happiness, I found myself handing my power over to other people and I began internalizing their unhealthy opinions and expectations of me.
As you may imagine, it was at this point that I really started to lose my grip on my inner strength. The more I looked to others, the more I felt let down and disappointed.
It was when I found myself with my finances a near disaster and unable to help myself for those around me that I finally woke up and realized that I could not look to them for direction any longer. I cut them off and started trying new solutions to my problems
I was ruthless in my struggle to regain my power, wisdom and direction.
No matter how much I wanted new friends, when I met new people that I didn’t feel good around I cut them loose to live their own lives and not affect mine anymore. I learned to honor my intuition and wisdom by doing this.
Cutting people off and rebuilding who I was wasn’t as easy as just getting on with my life. I had internalized a lot of negative comments and attitudes toward me and this would take a little more work to overcome.
I sifted through my memories searching for the times in my life when I felt empowered and my life was going well.
Having a coach, or knowing how to coach myself, would have sped up this process. Alas, I didn’t have one or know how to at the time
It was during these times that, although I felt like a small boat on the open sea, I was most engaged and happy in life.
Being a warrior in life isn’t about being powerful in your social and economic circle. It’s not about fighting everyone around you in an effort to climb to the top of the heap. It’s about fighting your own inner demons that keep you small and frightened so that you can reconnect to your inner guru.
These are the steps that I took and that you also can take to reconnect to that inner guru within you.
1 – Self-compassion
Have you heard about the pygmalion effect or self fulfilling prophecy? Studies have shown that the expectations that are put on a person strongly correlates to how well they perform. This also holds true for the expectations, or lack there of, you put on yourself. So,it’s a scientific fact that if you’re telling yourself you will fail then it’s almost guaranteed that you will.
The first step in reconnecting to your inner guru absolutely has to be connecting to your compassion. Without compassion we can’t find that encouraging internal voice that we need to hear if we’re going to make the change we want in our lives.
Compassion for others is essential in life and compassion for yourself even more essential. So often we are willing to forgive other people’s mistakes and be understanding of the obstacles and struggles they face but when it comes to ourselves we are overly demanding and, at times, cruel.
If you doubt yourself, ask yourself why, then challenge that to see if it’s true or if it’s just the negative voice in your head. More often than not, we can find counter arguments to the habitual negative chatter in out heads.
2 – Honour your wants and needs
The next step to take is to start honoring your wants and, more importantly, your needs. It’s hard to argue against the fact that giving yourself what you need is essential if you want to be fully physically, mentally and emotionally functional.
It’s also a great way to show yourself kindness, which goes back to point #1 compassion.
Doing this will help you practice assertiveness (as opposed to aggressiveness). By learning to state what you need and then actively giving that to yourself, you learn to stand up for yourself and become more assertive in your life.
3 – Honor your life experience and innate wisdom
There is so much in my life that I had learned to keep hidden because I felt ashamed and embarrassed of it. This was my mistake.
No one should never apologize for where they’ve been in life or even where they are now. What is most important in life is not where you have been, or where you are now, but whether you’ve learned, or are learning, the necessary lessons that come with each experience in life.
This isn’t about becoming perfect, it’s about progressing and becoming a better version of yourself. There is no one in life who has not moved forward, fallen back and then moved forward again. Honour those experiences. They’re a natural part of life.
Life isn’t a smooth line. When you find yourself somewhere that you don’t want to be, ask yourself, “What is the lesson I can learn from this?”. Until you learn your lesson you are doomed to repeat the same experience over and over again. It’s a fact of life and there’s no way to get around it.
It is by practicing this that I’ve learned to welcome difficulties. Like a life long treasure hunt, you will always look for the lessons hidden in difficulties.
Extracting the lesson from your experiences is an essential step to connecting with your inner guru.
We can learn positive and negative lessons from everything we experience and it’s in applying these lessons now, and in the future, that we begin to learn to work with this wisdom both for ourselves and others.
4 – Accept that life is strange
Choose a direction, any direction because, as the saying goes, all roads lead to Rome and sometimes what happens on the road leads us to even better places.
Being brave means moving forward no matter how much fear you may have. Sometimes it’s hard to know which direction to move but unless you make the choice of which direction it will be life will choose for you. Trust me when I say that it’s better if you make the choice yourself and don’t leave it to chance. Personal experience will probably confirm that for you too.
There is no right or wrong way to get to where you want to be. There’s also no guarantee that you will get there. All that’s guaranteed that you will benefit from whichever direction you move in if you approach it with a willingness to learn.
That is not to say that you should blindly go in any direction. Goal setting, planning, and applying the wisdom from lessons in the past will help guide you down whichever path you go whichever path you choose and keep you from having to repeat the same mistakes twice.