Outer and Inner Purposes

Martha Beck's "Finding Your Own North Star" is a good book. Martha defines one's North Star as a metaphor for one's right life. She tells us in her book how her clients followed their North Star to find careers, partners and even geographical locations most suited to them. Two terms that come up frequently in her book are 'essential self' and 'social self'. Your essential self is the essence of your personality, the self that knows where your North Star is. Your social self is the set of skills that actually carry you toward this goal. In simplistic terms, the essential self is like the doctor who knows what it will take to cure a patient, and the social self is like the nurses and other medical technicians who assist the doctor in executing the treatment. Martha Beck says that a navigational breakdown occurs when the social selves, or worse, other people, start steering our lives, instead of our essential selves.

How do you know if you are not following your North Star?

1. Energy crisis - You feel drained and exhausted on your way to and during activities you think you must finish.

2. Sickness - The farther away you get from your North Star, the more likely that your body manifests it by compromising your immune system and/or making you sick

3.Forgetting/making mistakes/socially awkward - Your essential self can conveniently make you forget things that help you go in a direction it doesn't like. It is also more likely to make you blunder or behave socially inept in situations it doesn't recognize as taking you closer to your North Star.
4. Addiction - Whenever you're headed away from your North Star, your essential self feels a constant sense of yearning emptiness. If you stumble across a substance or activity that dulls this feeling, your essential self may mistake the mood-altering device for your North Star. The result is often addictive behavior
5. Moody blues- If you are experiencing moods you can't explain (suddenly breaking down in tears or bursting out in laughter for no apparent reason, going ballistic with rage in light traffic or slogging your way through a surprise party feeling nothing but hollow ennui), you can be sure your social and essential selves are seriously disconnected.

Martha Beck has a chequered and controversial personal life. Without going into details, suffice to say that on the face of it, her life does not look like that of one who has found her purpose. I see the danger in making a judgement like that about someone I have not even met, but this is my essential self speaking, and I can't make my social self believe something that my essential self has already decided it knows.  Second, she reveals in the book that she still chronically suffers from some of the same problems the book is meant to help resolve, for example, her chronic backaches. Imagine getting treated by a doctor who admits he's been exhibiting for a while now the same symptoms as you, the patient! Let's just say, the principles espoused in the book, while quite admirable in theory, need to be taken with a grain of salt in practice.

The Power of Now - Eckhart Tolle

"To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly. Things, people,or conditions that you thought you needed for your happiness now come to you with no struggle or effort on your part, and you are free to enjoy and appreciate them - while they last. All those things, of course, will still pass away, cycles will come and go, but with dependency gone there is no fear of loss anymore. Life flows with ease."