YOURU: Find the Guru within You

Preface

One day you will tell your story of how you have overcome

what you are going through now, and it will become

part of someone else’s survival guide.

– Unknown –

We have not met, but I can assure you that throughout the earlier years of my life, said no one ever, oh, I wish so much that I could be exactly like Sarah. She’s so independent, so in control, so calm and just eternally happy. I was certifiably mad. I would break out my defensive armoury at the deliverance of any words that even remotely sounded like criticism. If Desperate Debbie had a twin sister, it would have been me. I literally thought I might die if I was not in a relationship. I needed validation and compliments as often as the average human needs to go to the toilet. I lived for the day that a cosmetics manufacturer would produce an innovative sensitive skin cream, not to deal with rashes but that I could have rubbed all over my pathetic body to help reduce the amount I would cry if I saw something sad or someone didn’t like me. If you saw me leave a shopping mall with all my bags in tow you would have been forgiven for thinking I had just swallowed a bag of amphetamines, I was on such a retail high. And you only had to fail to answer your phone twice before I would have mentally determined that you had been in a life-taking car accident and that I would never see you again, such was the epic nature of my ability to catastrophise.

It is undeniably true that I have lived most of my life (and my pursuit for personal fulfilment) entirely reliant on people, places or phenomena out there to make me happy and feel worthy. But the whack from the wrecking ball that was a life-threatening cancer diagnosis just one year after I had given birth to my first (and only) child was of such a vibratory magnitude that I was catapulted onto a new path. A path as terrifying as it was radically liberating. A path that not only offered me a way to move this new mountain of grief, fear and anxiety entirely out of the way but also left me with no other choice but to take that mountain assigned to me and find a way to show others that it can be moved.

I am not trying to change you, only myself

If each of us would only sweep our own doorstep,

the whole world would be clean.

– Mother Theresa –

This book is certainly not about proselytising. I am not trying to convert you from where you stand today in your own worldview to my own. Think of my stories as the underground and yourself as the miner, digging out any useful insights that may be valuable and applicable to your own personal discoveries. I am fully cognisant of the fact that I cannot change you. It would be a fruitless and, in fact, manipulative exercise to try to do so. I don’t desire to change you at all. I do, however, want you to believe and know that you can change yourself if you wish to. In fact, that is where your power lies. And if this book inspires you do that for yourself, I would be happy.

Almost as painfully repetitive as an old locked vinyl groove, I have on many occasions found myself stuck in a continuous loop of the same questions. Some of these may sound familiar. Why is life so hard sometimes? Why do good people suffer? What is wrong with this crazy world? And the most agonising of all: How can I change it? Far too often my first instinct has been to place all of my effort and energy into trying to change the people and situations around me. Clearly under a mistaken belief that if those changes happened, then just like magic, things would be better and I would be eternally happy. However, if you have tried that for as many years and as many times as I have, I am sure you will agree that it’s really exhausting. The benefits are always only fleeting before a new challenging person or circumstance will pop up and threaten the new-found peaceful existence again.

So, in recent times, I have shifted to focusing on sweeping up my own mess: sorting out what is making me afraid or unhappy and addressing that for myself, lasering in on my own self-care and healing. Through that individual reform, from that expanded happier state of consciousness, I am hoping that, taken out into the world, it might have some kind of beneficial ripple effect on the collective. I have ultimately found it both less intimidating and more fruitful to just start with the crap that is on my own doorstep and seek to establish a happy home within. Any natural and broader impact on others is then a happy and welcome by-product of my own self work.

I am not an expert, but I am on a path

I have been a lifetime devotee to a charitable organisation in Sydney called the Wayside Chapel, which I talk a lot about in Chapter Ten. It was here, in this beautiful protective sanctum of real community, that I learned one of my most important life lessons. I learned that the goal in life and in all relationships should never be about establishing yourself as an expert anyway. And that to do so is actually the antithesis of what it means to create meaningful human connections. Because of course, as soon as you do that, it makes the other somehow inferior to you. And that is quite literally the last thing I wish to do by writing this book. The old pastor of the Wayside Chapel, Rev. Graham Long AM, taught all of us lucky enough to be in his presence that people are not problems to be solved, they are people to be met. And that if we can truly meet each other without that dividing layer of superiority, then real and genuine movement, progression and healing can take place.

I have come to believe that there is actually a real danger in pedestals. They separate people from each other. If they are too high, you can fall off them and really hurt yourself. If someone kicks one out from under you, also not good. And if you crane your neck too high to stare in awe at someone you yourself have placed on one, you will for sure, at some point, need to see a chiropractor for that injury too. And besides, sometimes I wonder whether some people even want to be placed on these pedestals at all. I am sure there is a real pain and pressure experienced in that. Those exalted by others, or even those who freely exalt themselves, can also be fragile, fallible and afraid, and we need to never lose awareness of that, or else hatred and anger become separating forces in our lives.

Bottom line is that I do not wish to write a book that makes you feel shit about yourself. I want you to feel comfortable with and enjoy your own pace and journey. I am deliberately avoiding deducing my personal stories into some kind of guaranteed methodology or an unrealistic top ten things-type manifesto. I am also not positioning myself as an expert who can teach you, especially when I now know (and I will show you how I know) that you actually already have all that you need to teach yourself.

So, what the heck am I doing then?

I am a researcher. I am a storyteller. I am a share bear.

To know even one life has breathed easier because

you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson –

I have lived my entire life in what, until now, has felt like a somewhat insatiable search for the way. I was born with a thirst for sipping solutions. With a tenacious unwillingness to allow the cup to stay empty for too long, constantly refilling it with new knowledge or new ways to satisfy my thirst for the answers. I have been out there since I was very young, relentlessly pounding the pavement, obsessively doing the research, enthusiastically exploring all the different ways, worshipping every possible being or idea outside of myself in hope of the answers.

I have, of course, stagnated at so many points along the way, but for the first time in my life I have never felt as close to understanding what it is that I need to do. I finally feel like everything I need to know is now within my reach. That I can do less searching and more being. I feel like the answers are less of an illusory mirage that I am uselessly clutching at and more of an actual, experienced and verifiable truth. That, funnily enough, I don’t even have to do anything to reach out and touch them, because they are already within me.

So, this is me not wanting to keep that shit to myself. This is me offering up the fruits of a lifelong labour. This is me hoping that from reading my stories just one person is able to feel a little more able to cope for themselves, a little less helpless, a little less reliant on other people or things. I believe in the power of communal sharing and storytelling for inspiration. In deciding to write this book, I wondered: if I was willing to share my own stories, would that create an open and safe space for people to feel courageous enough to look at, or also share, their own? Would someone who was about to experience something I have already, or something remotely similar, benefit from hearing from someone who has navigated their way through it? Could my own personal hindsight give someone a head-start on their own efforts towards avoiding pain?

I put finger to keyboard precisely because I was becoming more and more aware of the commonality in my own stories and heartaches with those of others around me. I heard a great analogy once about how our own histories can offer others the rungs towards that place on the ladder where we are now. That our stories of that climb may give a platform of hope to others who are currently further down the rungs. Our individual life challenges are like giant, heavy metallic anchors that can sink us to the bottom of any deep cess pool. But our personal stories, when shared, can act as emergency life rafts for the sunken (or the sinking) to take refuge on and use to find their own way towards safer shores.

Of course, it is true that we benefit from and get the most impactful life lessons through our own actual experience rather than from hearing intellectual concepts about what that experience is like. There is no one-size-fits-all on this path: it is deeply personal, it is based on each person’s own mind map, their likes, dislikes, fears and individual realm of belief and possibilities. So, I want you to think of this book not as a how-to book but rather a from me to you book. Please take from it what you need. It was written with one goal in mind and that was to remind others what I now know to be an absolute certainty: that we hold all the power for positive self-change in our lives, and no one or no thing can create that for us.

You are now, always have been and always will be enough.

Prologue

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom.

– Lao Tzu –

Have you ever noticed that some of those itty-bitty songs our parents and grandparents sung us when we were itty-bitty babies are actually kinda grim? I mean, Jack and Jill’s trip up that hill for what many would consider a basic human right, clean water, well, that didn’t end well. And as for the right finger of the poor kid who was at first lucky enough to catch a fish alive. Ouchy. I got all the feels for the hopeful sailor who went out to sea in order to see the world. Nuthin’ but the bottom of the deep blue sea sea sea for him. Every. Single. Time. And who doesn’t have empathy for the sore heads of those cute little monkeys? C’mon. Those poor poppets were just trying to have some fun jumping on a bed. And all five of them went down.

But the one that really razzle dazzles me is the poor, fragile egg that sat, very innocently, high up, solving the world’s problems on a wall. Doing what all kids imagine to be a really fun thing to do. What happens to him? He falls, doesn’t he? Worse. He falls and then no one, not even all the king’s horses and men, the entire battalion of the community’s most powerful and trained army, could put him together again. And that’s literally it. No more lyrics. It just ends, tragically, there. Now, tradition would have us believe that the more perfect and happy ending to that nursery rhyme might be the saving of that little source of animal protein by his fellow comrades. Sure, I have no doubt, even a vegan would crack a smile. But imagine just for a second if at the tender age of three (and beyond) we heard the story end with the words with all of his might and a splash of some zen, Humpty put himself together again. Now we’re talkin’.

I can really feel for Humpty. There he was with this grand sense of perspective. High up on a wall. A rock-solid foundation underneath him, holding him up confidently. And then, BOOM. With absolutely no warning. The great fall. I mean, who, on this almighty planet, does not resonate with that feeling? The feeling that comes with a totally unexpected and enormously impactful fall from grace? And who wouldn’t, lying cracked into a million tiny pieces on the floor, hope and pray for the saving grace of a royal army to make them better again? I have fallen off proverbial walls a million times over. And I have also relied on my dutiful army of people, wisdom and ideas to prop me back on up. Some of these rescues have felt momentarily healing and many provided me with immense feelings of gratitude.

There have been falls from walls that barely bruised my bottom on landing and many that required more serious triage or Band-Aids. But there was one particular fall that felt ironically dreamlike. Where the descent from the precipice felt inordinately long. From the life-threatening push to the crippling impact of concrete beneath me. Almost as if suspended in time. Or perhaps not actually really happening. But unlike these make-belief verses, this one was true.

Introduction

If it is to be, it is up to me

– William Johnsen –

Rare and deadly. Two words that altered my entire sense of personal stability. As my brand-spanking-new baby girl turned one year old, a doctor told me that there was a rather nasty head and neck cancer hiding in my face which fit that exact description. Rare. And deadly. The C word alone is enough to fill one’s mind with horror-story futures. So, the two dramatic adjectives that got emphatically attached to my diagnosis did absolutely nothing to spare me from the mental catastrophes that quickly spewed forth into the crystal ball that I thought to be my mind.

Within seconds of hearing the crushing news, all my plans for a perfect family life that I had pinned my happiness on were immediately on the chopping board. My daughter’s name played on a violent loop inside my head as the doctor casually spoke the words. Her name and the fast-forward visuals about all the milestones I would now not be there for were so loud to me that I stopped hearing what he was saying. How could the world be so cruel as to give me a rare and deadly head and neck cancer so soon after my beautiful daughter had arrived?

Until I was diagnosed, I had spent a large part of my life subconsciously assuming that I was invincible, taking risks and participating in life in a way that took for granted that bad things can happen. I guess that comes as much with youthful innocence as it does with adult arrogance, but let’s all face into what we know undoubtedly to be true: invincibility could not be further from the truth as it relates to our physical bodies. They, whoever they are, are not pulling our legs when they say life is short and death is a certainty.

Sometimes, though, when something bad or unexpected happens to us, it is normal to feel a loss of control and empowerment, as if we are somehow just a victim of circumstance. There can be a yearning or a desperate feeling of just wanting to be saved. To be spared the crushing blow. Like everyone, I have lived a lifetime of feeling exposed to a myriad of circumstances, and surrounded by people, that offer up daily the potential for suffering and pain. And this has led to almost fifty years of trialling and experimenting with reliance on others to help me with the effort required to reduce that pain.

This diagnosis was a shocking and unwanted entry into my life that had me initially categorise it as an ending of some kind. However, looking back, I can see it now as a true beginning. The beginning of my journey towards finding an answer. An answer to the question I had been searching for all my life. When the chips are down, how is it that one should approach putting oneself back together again? Cancer coming into my life was the gateway. The catalyst, you could even call it, for me to discover the one with all the answers. Youru.

A who-ru? Well, that’s a good bloody question. No, it is not a distinctive Australian way of saying goodbye. It would be kind of foolish, don’t you think, for me to start a book by saying Hooroo to you all. No, instead I am deliberately naming each one of you right up front, even before you might be ready to accept it for yourself, a Youru. Clearly, it is a made-up word. Clearly, it has no current formal meaning. But whilst totally fictional and not yet listed in the dictionary, it is my personal truth and my continual aspiration. And I would like to share with you how I personally define it and see if, together, we can somehow make it more commonly used vernacular.

I’ve done my research. A word gets into the dictionary when it is used by many people who all agree it means the same thing. You need to use it. First, you drop the word into conversation or writing. Check. Then others pick it up. Well, you are reading this book, so Check. Then its use starts to spread, an alert and wise dictionary editor may notice it has become part of mainstream life, et voilà, we have all become authors. To pass the muster, though, what you need is to satisfy three key criteria – frequent use, widespread use and meaningful use – before anyone will open the golden gates into the illustrious forever land of a dictionary.

Frequent use means it cannot be just a trendy flash in the pan that comes and goes; it needs to have staying power. Widespread use means an average adult is likely to encounter the word and know what it means. Meaningful use is not one I think we even need to explain or understand intellectually; it will hopefully be self-evident by the last page in this book. The bottom line is that this word does fill a really important gap not only in our language but also in our minds and our hearts, and I would like to move some part of the way, if not all of the way, towards filling that for myself and hopefully help you do the same if it resonates. It is not just intended by me as a clever, creative gimmick. But even if it never ends up in any universal glossary of words, that doesn’t make it any less real.

If I did ever happen to come across a lexicographer in my life and had a chance to make a good pitch, here is where I would start:

The word Guru is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as:

1. a Hindu spiritual teacher.

2. an influential teacher or popular expert.

In the Merriam-Webster Dictionary it is similarly defined:

1. a personal religious teacher and spiritual guide in Hinduism.

2. a teacher and especially intellectual guide in matters of fundamental concern.

3. one who is an acknowledged leader or chief proponent.

4. a person with knowledge or expertise, an expert.

Both of these sources of formal intelligence agree on a number of things. First, that when used in a spiritual context, there is a direct link to Hinduism. In Hinduism, the Guru is an ancient and central figure. A Guru is a teacher of skills, a counsellor, one who helps in the birth of mind and realisation of one’s soul, who instils values and knowledge, an exemplar and an inspiration to others’ personal growth. A Guru, as a shedder of light, does not even need to be a person but can be a teacher that comes to you in the form of an experience which itself has taught you