Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live

by Martha N. Beck

If your life is cloudy and you’re far, far off course, you may have to go on faith for a while, but eventually you’ll learn that every time you trust your internal navigation system, you end up closer to your right life.

As any good Buddhist will tell you, the only way to find permanent joy is by embracing the fact that nothing is permanent.

The essential self contains several sophisticated compasses that continuously point toward your North Star. The social self is the set of skills that actually carry you toward this goal.

Your essential self formed before you were born, and it will remain until you’ve shuffled off your mortal coil.

It is “essential” in two ways: first, it is the essence of your personality, and second, you absolutely need it to find your North Star.

The social self, on the other hand, is the part of you that developed in response to pressures from the people around you, including everyone from your family to your first love to the pope.

The problem isn’t that Melvin’s social self is a bad person—in fact, it’s a very good person. It has the horsepower to get Melvin all the way to his North Star. But only his essential self can tell him where that is.

Paradoxically, if you want to do a really good job at this, you’re going to have to stop thinking about doing a really good job. To find your North Star, you must teach your social self to relax and back off.

In the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In the practice of the Way, every day something is dropped. Less and less do you need to force things, until finally you arrive at non-action. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.

“No one could swim in that water without being killed.” “Oh, no, it’s really very easy,” the old man tells them. “You just go up when the water goes up, and down when the water goes down.” The idea here is that when you relax the thinking mind, the rule-bound, anxiety-ridden social self, you are not simply stopping everything. Taoists believe that there is an immense benevolent force flowing through all reality, and that each of us—at least our essences—are a part of that force. Once you’re aligned with this force (the Tao, or “Way”), you’re like a surfer on the perfect wave; you move forward with tremendous power, but the only thing you have to do is go up when the water goes up, and down when the water goes down.

The way to do this is to turn off the rules you’ve learned from culture, and allow your essential self to come out and run the show. While the social self is rigid and fixed, the essential self is relaxed and responsive. In any situation, it can give you instructions about how to “not-do” in a way that carries you closer to your North Star.