The Inner Compass: Cultivating the Courage to Trust Yourself

by Lawrence Yeo

In my mind, peace was not a given. It had to be earned, over and over again.

Knowledge is taught through information, but understanding is taught through experience.

This is important because each day, our resolve is tested. We live in a world where people are incentivized to disturb the stillness within us, usually by making us feel inadequate or alone.

Well, here’s the good news. Knowledge can become understanding when you least expect it, and it can strike you at a moment’s notice. It can take the form of an experience you have, a conversation with a friend, or a serendipitous insight that sticks. In my case, the journey into understanding—and out of depression—all started with a single question: Who created these stories I’m telling myself?

The powerful thing about questions, however, is that they're the birthplace of answers. This sounds painfully obvious, but everything about the world indicates that people don’t see this connection. Political discourse, for example, is a steady stream of opinions about what must be right, but no inquiries about what may be missing.

That’s because the most significant part of life, regardless of who you are, is your upbringing.

If happiness was my baseline, how could depression be a natural descendant of it? What had to intervene so that my innate source of light would go on to produce so much darkness?

created from within, but rather by an external force that has convinced us of its truth. This force is called conditioning, which is the source of all tension and suffering we feel.

At its core, that’s what suffering is. It’s the belief that peace can’t be found within yourself, so you have to attain it through a series of outcomes. This is why the Buddha famously linked desire with suffering, knowing that desire always required an external goal or objective to be satisfied.

So if a baby is crawling around a sofa and sees a short drop, he’ll first look to his mother to get a sense of her reaction. If she’s anxious, he will absorb that anxiety and exercise caution. But if she’s calm and collected, he will adopt that state and proceed onward. This happens at a moment’s notice, without any conscious thought.

What conditioning does, however, is to convince us that our curiosities are sources of fear. It will make us believe that our intuition is faulty, and that success or serenity will be elusive if we follow it. It will make us believe that everyone else has the answers, and that listening to our own voice is a distraction from pursuing what’s practical and realistic.

When you are suffering, you do so because you don’t understand who you truly are. Every thread of mental anguish ties back to an inability to trust yourself, which makes you outsource your thoughts and actions to an outside entity. But given that contentment can only be found within, the tendency to deny your intuition is the surest route to discontent.

Remember: Conditioning is the source of all suffering. Once you internalize this, things will never be the same.

When I heard that sentence, I had a realization: My tinnitus started long ago, but my expectations of what should happen was the source of my misery. The buzzing in my ear was my pain, but my desire for its dissipation was my suffering.

Anytime you have an expectation of becoming something you are not, that is conditioning. This doesn’t only apply to other people, but also to prior versions of yourself.

contentment doesn’t reside in what you previously were, but rather in an embrace of what you currently are.

Anytime we are in an unfamiliar environment, there are two opposing forces that emerge: The push for certainty, and The pull toward curiosity.

Anytime you think you “should” do something, that’s conditioning. Anytime you compare yourself to another, that’s conditioning. Anything that causes fear or worry to arise is conditioning, as peace is disturbed only when you have an expectation that lies beyond the present moment.

Upon learning about this opportunity, you’ll likely feel a tension arise somewhere in your body. Some common areas are the chest, stomach, or forehead, but it’s a familiar area where tensions of this kind arise. You may initially interpret it as anxiety or stress, but what’s really happening is that your inner compass is alerting you of a pull away from true north (in some cases, it feels like a literal pull on your body). It’s telling you that the winds of conditioning are strong, and that there’s a chance you may go against your intuition as a result.

When you are conditioned, every action feels tense. But when you have conviction, every action feels fluid.

Ultimately, every endeavor comes down to two options. You can either choose conviction, or choose conditioning. You can follow your true north, or be swayed by external winds. You can choose what you must do, or what you should do.

Intuition needs to be stress tested by reality to earn its reliability.

This constant dance between setback and growth is what fuels confidence in your own judgments, which is what gives rise to your resolve.

is only through knowing yourself where you can trust that your intuition is guiding you to the right place. Without self-understanding, you will always use external validation as a proxy for what you want and how you’ll get it. This leads to an outsourcing of your intuition to other minds, which means that you’ll never learn how to trust your own judgment.

Applying them changed the course of my life, from lifting me out of depression to imbuing a sense of purpose in my days. Knowing yourself is the antidote to suffering, and the mere awareness of this truth is half the journey.

Life is a single-player game, but meaning is derived on multi-player mode. You’re responsible for the actions you take, but the results of those actions will be shared amongst others.

Everything you do contributes to the state of the world, irrespective of how large or small you think that impact may be.

For him who has conquered the mind, the mind is the best of friends; but for one who has failed to do so, his mind will remain the greatest enemy. BHAGAVAD GITA

Wisdom is the co-existence of contradictory truths.

Meditation is the absence of thought to achieve stillness, whereas reflection is the usage of thought to achieve clarity. They are two wholly different things that are often mistaken for one another.

If you dig into anything that causes fear, at the root is some tale that’s been planted by another.

This ability to ask “why” is what differentiates humanity from any other species on the planet. A gorilla and caveman may have navigated the material world in similar ways, but only the human looked up at the sky and wondered why we were here. This led to the birth of myths, religions, philosophy, and every other story attempting to explain our relationship to the world at large.

The reality is that they were just trying to teach me the value of a dollar, but I didn’t have the self-awareness to extract the wisdom of that lesson when I was young. Instead, I took in the worst of it and it became my conditioning.

Even if I lost all my money, I wouldn’t go homeless because there were too many people that cared for me. Any one of these individuals would ensure that I had somewhere to stay while I figured out whatever came next. I viscerally understood that the abundance of compassion would overcome any scarcity of currency.

So here’s a question I’d like to propose: If writing has been so effective at helping us navigate the world, how effective would it be in helping us navigate ourselves? If we recognized the power of writing and directed it toward the inner compass instead, what type of insights might arise as a result?

Writing turns you into a historian of your life, which helps you identify the old stories you’ve inherited so that they can later be reframed.

You are writing purely for yourself, so what matters isn’t whether the writing is any good, but that you showed up to write in the first place. Presence precedes prose in the domain of reflection.

And the more you desire to win this game, the more you’ll judge others by the coldness of utility rather than the warmth of character.

The inner critic is a reflection of the lens you use to view others. So if you want to change the way you treat yourself, it starts with a conscious shift in the way you treat the other.

Take social media for example. It’s been widely reported that social media has had disastrous effects on the population’s mental health, especially in our youth. If the people responsible for these tools were truly driven by the desire to create a better world, they would make sweeping reforms to ensure that their platforms never cause additional harm. But as you know, that rarely happens. Instead, they continue onward with their development, exploiting even more vulnerabilities in our psychology so they could maximize engagement and claim their place in the cultural zeitgeist. These people are not driven by the common good; they are driven by status.

The anthropologist Ernest Becker once wrote that we are “gods with anuses.” What he meant was that humans are equipped with godlike imaginations that can compose beautiful music, build towering skylines, and even send rockets into space. But at the same time, the biological container that houses this incredible mind has been inherited from our monkey ancestors. It is a body that defecates, secretes, and deteriorates until it ceases to function.

The tension between what we’re capable of and what we’ve inherited is the core strugg...

The solution is to do away with status, and to choose compassion instead. Compassion is the ability to extend full presence to people, regardless of who they are or what they’ve achieved. It’s to see that people are not defined by their proximity to your goals, but by the unity of the human experience. In the end, we all find our way to the soil or the sea, and that humbling fact makes you appreciate every person that accompanies you on this ride.

And to that I’d ask, “Who would you respect more: The person that strategically chooses who to appreciate, or the person that can do that for anyone?” The paradox of declining status is that there is a magnetism to it, and that manifests through the allocation of trust.

Krishnamurti said that “it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” When you see that this sickness is caused by our justification of status, then you’ll see just how healthy our relationships can be once you remove

Well, as you’re used to hearing by now, that is conditioning. Anytime you use an external barometer to make an internal conclusion, you deny your intuition and restrict yourself.

When you embody this intention in what you do, two things happen. The first is that you stop questioning whether a creative act is worth doing. In the same way that a child plays without justification, you express without expectation. A child doesn’t play because she’ll be paid for it, and similarly, you don’t create because you’ll be praised for it. You do it for its own sake, which is the sentiment behind the adage that “a creative adult is a child who has survived.”⁠*

And whenever a metric is introduced in this way, a status game is born.

Mastery is the quest to improve yourself as an end in itself. Comparisons are not made with other people, but only with prior versions of yourself.

The best way to sharpen that intuition is to read, watch, or listen to those that have already mastered their craft, and to update your model of mastery based on how you interpret their creations. If you earnestly hold yourself to a high enough standard, you won’t be in a situation where you think you’re on the right path when you’ve actually gone astray. The paradox of mastery is that even if you could care less about status, people will find their way to you since mastery is a gravitating force of its own.