One of the things I worry about most with young people is how early we start defining them. Clever, academic, difficult, anxious, high achieving, not reaching potential, good at maths, bad at English, university material, not university material. And then come the results, the grades, the comparisons and the inevitable question of what you are going to do with your life, often at an age when you barely know who you are.
Of course education matters. Learning matters enormously. It opens our minds and gives us choices and we should encourage young people to do their best. But somewhere along the way we have confused doing your best with being the best, and even more dangerously we have allowed achievement to become confused with worth.
A set of exam results can tell you something about how you performed in a particular examination, on a particular day, within a particular system. It cannot possibly tell you who you are.
This is where I find the teachings of yoga so helpful because they give us a completely different lens through which to look at a human life.
There is the wonderful idea of dharma, which is difficult to translate but can be understood as something like our particular path or purpose, the part we have to play in the great unfolding puzzle of life. We don’t all have the same dharma and therefore it makes very little sense to keep measuring ourselves against one another.
I often think of us as pieces of a huge puzzle. Every piece is a slightly different shape because it has a different place to fit. If you spend your whole life trying to become the same shape as the person next to you, you may completely miss the place that was waiting for you.
And your particular gift may have absolutely nothing to do with school.
Perhaps you are brilliant with animals. Perhaps people tell you things because they instinctively trust you. Perhaps you can fix things. Perhaps you make people laugh. Perhaps you notice the person standing alone at the edge of the room. Perhaps you have an extraordinary imagination, or you are practical, or courageous, or kind. Perhaps your life will take you into something that at fifteen you have never even heard of
I have met so many people whose lives made very little sense when they were young and a great deal more sense later.
This is important because there are also times when life simply does not go well.
Yoga gives us the idea of karma, another word which is often misunderstood. I don’t mean that if you are suffering you have somehow done something wrong and are being punished for it. Rather, we are born into and live within a vast web of causes and consequences that we cannot possibly understand completely. Sometimes our path contains difficulty. Sometimes it contains quite a lot of it.
You may have a period when you cannot concentrate, when your family is struggling, when you are anxious, when friendships fall apart, when you fail something or when everybody around you seems to know where they are going and you haven’t the faintest idea.
That does not mean your life has gone wrong.
It means that this is what is happening now.
And now is not forever.
This is something I wish we could teach much more clearly to young people. At seventeen, one year is an enormous proportion of the life you can remember, so a difficult year can feel as though life itself is difficult. When you are older you realise how extraordinarily much a life changes. Things turn around. People arrive. Opportunities appear. You discover things about yourself you could never have known earlier. Sometimes the very experiences you most wished you had not had become the source of your compassion, your strength and your ability to understand somebody else.
So please don’t turn an experience into an identity.
Failing does not make you a failure. Feeling anxious does not mean anxiety is who you are. Not fitting into one particular group doesn’t mean you don’t belong. Someone finding you difficult doesn’t mean you are difficult. And another person’s opinion of you, however loudly or confidently expressed, is still only another person’s opinion.
We need to help young people develop an inner life strong enough not to be completely dependent upon this endless external commentary.
This is one of the things yoga can give us. Not another achievement, not another thing to be good at, but somewhere to come home to.
When you sit and become quiet enough to notice your breath, your body and your thoughts, something rather interesting happens. You begin to notice that thoughts come and go. Feelings come and go. Even our ideas about ourselves come and go.
There might be a thought saying, I’m not good enough.
But who is noticing that thought?
Vedanta takes us right to the heart of this question. Beneath all the things we normally use to describe ourselves — our name, body, personality, intelligence, successes, failures, qualifications, diagnoses, nationality, appearance — there is awareness itself.
The Sanskrit tradition speaks of nama rupa, names and forms. We need names and forms to live in the world, of course. But we suffer when we mistake them for the whole of who we are.
At the deepest level you are not your school report. You are not your Instagram account. You are not the university that accepted or rejected you. You are not the clever one or the difficult one or the beautiful one or the disappointing one.
You are the awareness in which all these experiences are happening.
And that awareness is no brighter in the person who gets straight A*s than it is in the person who doesn’t.
There is as much life in you, as much possibility, as much of that extraordinary bright energy of consciousness, as there is in anybody else.
So yes, work hard. Learn. Be interested. Try things and fail at things and try again. Listen to advice, particularly from people who genuinely know and love you. But don’t spend your life trying to become the person other people have decided you ought to be.
Find out who you are when the noise dies down.
Find what you love. Find where you are useful. Find what gives you energy rather than constantly taking it away. Find the people around whom you can breathe properly. Pay attention to what life keeps drawing you towards.
Your dharma may take time to reveal itself.
Your karma may mean that part of the journey is difficult.
But neither your difficulties nor your results define you.
You are part of something much larger, and perhaps the task is not to become good enough at all
Perhaps the task is to realise that beneath all the names and forms, you always were.