Story of the book

Grow Your Own Guru or How to access your Inner Mystic

This is about changing your story. Many people want to change their story. One group is people who are mid stage in their careers. They have played the game and achieved success. But something is missing. They don’t want to play that game anymore. It is out of balance; the focus is exclusively on money as if money is all we need.

They don’t enjoy their work, or they have to work hard to find the joy wherever they see a possibility.

They want to get off this train but it’s fast moving so there are big risks to jumping off the train. They don’t know where they want to go and how they are going to get there.

The risks seem insurmountable and overwhelming.

There are any number of people and businesses offering easy fixes to find the life of their dreams, build a business following a proven, guaranteed model.

They are scared, anxious and feel trapped. That makes them vulnerable. At risk of making bad choices. Hoping for quick and easy answers.

What do they want?

We need a lot more than money to have a rich and fulfilling life. Western culture is like a living organism with an obsession to commoditise and extract financial value from all aspects of life.

Ultrasociality by John Gowdy explores modern society and compares Western culture since the adoption of agriculture with ant and termite cultures that have adopted (fungi) agriculture. Western society and these colonies are the most successful cultures in terms of dominating their ecosystem. In both cases, the colony members sacrifice individual freedom for the growth of the colony. Ants and termites work within ecological constraints.

In the case of humanity, sadly, we do not.

In the culture that is dominant in Western society, all our needs can only be met with money.

However, our needs are not actually met with money and consumption. There is always unmet need or a failure to meet needs fully. This is the driving force behind a consumer society.

Many of us are worried about the climate and nature crisis. There was a moment when I realised I couldn’t ‘stand on the sidelines’ anymore. I needed to do something; to stand up and be counted; to hold my head up high and tell my daughter what I had done during this time in history.

Extinction Rebellion had just appeared on the scene, and they helped with this moment of awakening.

I had spent many years beforehand trying to escape my unsatisfying and unfulfilling career as a contract business analyst. I had been focusing on the money, trying to meet my financial needs by experimenting with businesses which would give me (financial) freedom.

This book is about what I learnt from that point.

It’s here to help you. To help you develop what you really need to change.

You need energy, inspiration, hope, enchantment, awe, love; love of yourself most of all.

To love yourself you must know yourself and what gives you joy.

This book is not a step-by-step method. The natural world does not have plans or proven solutions that work for everyone. Diversity is a guiding principle.

The natural world thrives – it is an imperative that drives everything. The history of the earth shows us this.

Diversity always increases, even mass extinction events can be followed by a jump in diversity

It is patient, carefully running experiments with the confidence of 3.8 billions of years of results and incremental, iterative growth.

In this book, I will support you to learn what it means in practice to follow the laws of nature.

Over time, as you will observe yourself with curiosity (recognizing your susceptibility to self-judgment) and openness and wonder what those feelings want to tell you. You will experience astonishment as you become consciously aware with insights that help you make decisions that work for you.

You will become aware of this amazing feedback loop (our feelings) which is exactly what you need to find the path which is uniquely yours.

Over time you will find yourself on a new, unexpected path that you could never have imagined. More importantly it would never have been realised if you had continued using the tools and mentality of Western culture which values only logic and rationality in business and economic affairs.

And, in so doing, blinds you to other possibilities, makes personal progress and fulfilment hard work and extremely limited.

When you access your intuition and trust yourself, you discover possibilities and potential.

I know because this is what I experienced. It never even occurred to me to write a book. I had never imagined that I had something to share which was genuinely of value to others. Something that would help others that hadn’t been said before in my own particular way.

The possibility which started as an idea, a seed, and rapidly became a drive to write as the conditions were right.

This is something I know because I believe in the power of nature. And it’s not a blind faith, it is something I have been experiencing and using to guide my life over the last four years.

I hope you enjoy the book.