Fake It Till You Make It - The Authentic Path to Your Truest Self

How to Fake your Way to Your Dharma

If you have ever practised loving-kindness meditation, you will already be on board with the “fake it till you make it” approach to peace and fulfilment. Loving-kindness, or metta bhavana, is the preferred meditation technique of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It involves cultivating feelings of loving-kindness, tolerance and well-wishing to all beings, even if you don’t really mean it at first. You begin by bringing to mind an image of yourself, seeing yourself as everything you are, have been and want to be. You then cultivate feelings of compassion towards yourself, offer your good wishes and repeat the mantra “May I be happy, may I be at peace, may I be free from suffering” or a variation of this.

Interestingly, kindness to self is the one a lot of people have most trouble with, and the advice on this is to picture oneself as a child, in the hope that feelings of tenderness and compassion will arise more easily. If the feelings don’t come naturally, you continue going through the motions, staying with the intention and repeating the loving-kindness mantra first to yourself, then to a person you feel neutrally towards, then to someone you are fond of, someone you have friction with, and finally towards all the beings of the world.

The technique is predicated on the belief that if you have the intention to create a certain state or attitude within yourself and you practice diligently, you can reshape the way you feel by nurturing the aspects of yourself that you wish to develop - in this case, compassion. In doing so, you rid yourself of a limiting mindset - the one that harbours ill-feeling or indifference towards others.

The yogic view of the fluid self

The yogic view of self is one of a fluid projection of shifting states and impressions, which is subject to change from one moment to the next and which will change radically during the course of a lifetime. According to yoga, rather than being a fixed state, much of our identity is comprised of a combination of who we think we are, and who others think we are. Identity is so much subject to change that you might feel like a completely different person from one end of the day to the other. When you wake up in the morning, you might feel confident, capable and energised. After your morning run you possess a leonine invincibility and you are ready to take on the world. Then, over the course of the day, you have some negative feedback from your boss, you have a communication issue with your child and you are late for your evening yoga class. By bedtime, your sense of who you are has shifted from someone who is winning at life, to someone just scraping a pass. Which one is the real you?

During your life you will likely mature into adulthood, probably be employed in a few different professional roles, perhaps transition into parenthood and, if you are lucky, become a community elder. These are just a few of the identities you may occupy during your lifetime. Some of them will be chosen by you, others for you. While you are on this planet, you will assume some roles to survive, others because society expects them of you and the more privileged among us will be able to choose the roles in life that move them towards their heart’s desire. In an ideal world, we would all have the means to forge the path which will lead us to realise our potential and live out our life’s purpose, or dharma.

Arjuna's crisis

At the opening of the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna is faced with a terrible choice: slaughter his brethren or send the Universe into chaos. In that moment, the world needs him to act according to his life’s true path, which means going into battle against his family. As Arjuna lies prostrate in his chariot, beating his fists on the floor and groaning with dread under the scornful gaze of his charioteer Krishna, he does not feel like a warrior. However, after much persuasion from Krishna to embrace the idea that battle is his true calling, he is able to pick himself up, put on his big boy pants and lead the Pandavas into the ensuing carnage, gaining victory and ensuring the future harmony of the Universe.

Our lives are full of "Arjuna moments"

As I write this, I am reminded of several “Arjuna” moments in my life. Standing in front of my first yoga class is one of them. Before teaching your first class, you cannot really call yourself a yoga teacher. “To teach” is a verb that indicates a participatory state beyond the abstract; without any previous students, the teaching you have learned is all theoretical. At the threshold one must cross in order to veritably occupy the teacher role, there is a terrible moment when you have to take the first steps along the perilous path into a future version of yourself. The becoming is sudden, and it is public. At this pivotal point, it stops being solely about you and your dharma. Your dharma is now irrevocably a collaborative one, shared with the students sitting expectantly in front of you.

Here is the scene: the clock shows time for class to begin, your students are waiting and you are having an existential crisis. You're not the first, and you won't be the last. The teaching certificate, framed on your study wall at home, cannot help you now. However, one thing protects you from the full force of an encounter with the unknown. You know that those students have no idea how panic-stricken you are. In fact, they are not thinking about how you are at all – they have come for a nice yoga class for themselves. They’ve paid their money, made the necessary arrangements and travelled to your class because they need a bit of movement and relaxation. Your inner turmoil could not be further from their minds.

You are now socially contracted to deliver a yoga class. So, do you throw yourself on the floor, beat your fists and cry? Here's what I did in that moment. I swiftly stitched together a coat of many colours, made of the highlights of all the yoga teachers I have ever admired. I donned my new mantle and then went to tread the boards of the yoga studio, hoping to convince the class participants of my credibility. I was pretending - but isn't that what we do? Isn't that how we become anything?

Children instinctively practice for adulthood through role play - they reenact speech and behaviours they have seen in others to cultivate skills they will need later on in life. Our personalities are an architectural fusion of elements of self and others. Our beliefs, norms, opinions, communication style and body language are fashioned from bits and pieces of all the people we've ever met, and even some we have never met. Our inner world is built brick by conceptual brick from landscapes, conversations, artwork, observations and other flotsam and jetsam that floats into our experiential soup from without. Are we not all Frankenstein's monsters of a kind?

Some situations require us to “be that person”, even when we are bedevilled by resistance and doubt. We emulate in order to assimilate. Until the mantle becomes truly ours through lived experience, we have to borrow it.

Stepping into a Future Version of Yourself

There is beauty in our shared consciousness—in the cultural imprints which inform our tacit knowing. They allow us to feel with and for each other, composite creatures that we are. These impressions of others enable us to assume and cast off archetypes in order for the great procession of life to advance and evolve. In earnest, I have faked the roles of mother, teacher and group facilitator – my three strongest dharmas in life so far. If I hadn’t, none of them would have been fulfilled. Your dharma is your truth, and truth is a process. It’s not the same from one moment to the next, nor from your side of the room to mine. Faking it until making it, is simply the telling of a future truth.

Sometimes the world needs you to be something you don’t feel ready to be, or don’t know how to be and you have no choice but to step up, because we all form the warp and weft of this world while we are here. With a bit of loving kindness, a bit of faking and a clear intention, you can summon all of the wonderful expressions of yourself, step boldly into your next thrilling iteration and, with any luck, fend off chaos and the unravelling of the cosmos.