Can You Find Your Inner Compass?

Hello and welcome to wild:philosophy, your newsletter about philosophy as a way of life.

Lately, I have been thinking whether it’s really “a way of life” or more like “an art of living” which has the beautiful German word “Lebenskunst” (for those who don’t know, I am German). I also struggle with expressing that my work is always situated in the whole, in the context of our ecos, in service to Life. I am deeply committed to planetary flourishing and it is the whole reason of what motivates me to get up each morning and do this work. How to say all of that in a tagline that speaks to people is something I can obsess about. I think many of you who are here on substack (or any social media platform for that matter) might understand. We love to convey nuance, yet are often drawn to simplicity. Finding the sweetspot, in which we feel comfortable is a challenge. Something, I’ll write more about soon.

We will have our last PhilosophyGym for this season at Grokkist. If you are curious, you are warmly invited to join. In last week’s session we talked about values and in a way, this is also what this week’s essay is about. If you are curious to read more, I also highly recommend

Paul Musso, PhD

’s work on this.

I also want to share a short reflections about the last Gym. I experienced the last one as very different from the ones that came before that. Contrary to what I usually do, I gave a sort of lengthy theoretical introduction. I then planned on following that with some exercises. We didn’t make it to the exercises and ended up having an inquiry into the nature and role of values. While inquiring is something that we do in the Gyms, this time it seemed to be a bit different - coming more form the head instead of the lived experience of our everyday life. To me, it was the perfect demonstration of what it means to do philosophy like we’d find often in academia, and practical philosophy, which - as I understand it - doesn’t start with what Aristotles, Satre or whoever said, but instead starts and ends with one’s lived experience. Aristotles and Satre might come in in-between. I think by starting out heavily with theory on my part and it was difficult for many of us to (some managed well), but for us as a whole, it was difficult to leave that space. So, a learning I took away is to decenter theory even more and to start out with a ritual that brings the body in, or as

Emergentcy With Musclemonk

suggested “to set a sort of meditative and mindful approach so that we can be sensitive to ourselves and each other”. The whole Gym is a continuous learning process, and the art of facilitation is something I am constantly exploring. For those of you who run or participate in similar spaces, I would be super curious to hear about your experiences. What practices have you found effective for grounding discussions in lived experience and fostering both intellectual rigor and embodied presence? I’d love to hear from you.

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collage by author (without using AI).

I have always thought it important to have an inner compass. For a long time, I believed that once I found it—by discovering a philosophy I could live by—my life would become easy, blissful, a mere joyride. I’d know exactly who to be and how to be in any situation. I’d find an unshakeable stability in myself. I wouldn’t need to rely on outside authorities to guide my decisions.

An inner compass would clarify what I believe, and what I value.

For the time being, however, I was trying to find that stability in those very authorities.

They came in many facets. Philosophy. Self-help. People. When I meet people, I have always been deeply fascinated by how they live their lives. Sometimes, I’d ask very intimate question without knowing the person well, just because I wanted to see what they knew that I don’t. I thought knowing how to live was not something you learn, but something that’s just there. For others. That is.

And to a degree, that’s true. Some people never question who they are, why they are or where they are going. The narratives and stories that have formed them when growing up have deeply slipped into their identities and gotten very comfortable. For many people, too comfortable to ever be questioned again.

Because these early maps have been internalized so completely, it feels natural to look inside ourselves when we feel the need to find a new one. We search inward for a new compass.

But what if that compass is not in us?

From a psychological perspective, the very idea of an inner compass is a beautiful idea. While it might seem that we are born with a compass because it so invisibly sneaks in, it’s something that is built, piece by piece, from the outside in. From our first moments, we learn about the world through our primary caregivers. Their responses to our cries, their reassurances, and their rules become us. We internalize their voices, which later evolve into our conscience, telling us what we should and should’t do. Schools, culture, and the stories our society—about success, love, and a meaningful life—add further layers.

Our inner compass is the result from these relationships, like the collages I share, it’s a complex collage of all the relationships and systems we have ever been a part of. It was never truly "inner" to begin with.

Research also increasingly shows how our inner compass is guided by our actions. From the outside in. Maller et al. (2021) write:

One of the most common pathways assumed to generate action is based on the idea that action is driven by values, and that in order to change action, we therefore need to change values. The paper questions the assumed relationship between values and actions and its direction, and instead posits that beginning with actions is a more productive place to start.

The very idea of the inner compass is an outcome of a mechanistic way of seeing the world, which places a rational, autonomous Man at the center of everything. While most of you reading this are comfortable and familiar with the idea that we are not, many are struggling with applying a different understanding to everyday lived experience (myself included). So even while many today argue that this illusion of a separate, sovereign self is the very root of our alienation, it’s still this imagined separation that allows us to treat the world, and often each other, as a collection of resources for our own benefits.

The reason the search for a fixed, internal guide then can feel so frustrating is, because it’s not there. It changes every time we talk to a different therapist. We're looking for a solid object in a place where only multiplicity and constant flow exist.

The Entangled Self

Photo by Andy Holmes on Unsplash

Many spiritual teachings point to the illusion of a stable self. Often, they deny the existence of a self altogether.

The philosopher Karen Barad offers a reframing with the idea of "intra-action." We tend to think that we are pre-existing entities who then interact with each other. Barad suggests that we only emerge through our meetings.

We are constantly being re-made by our entanglements.

I am a dynamic phenomenon that materializes in my intra-action with you, with the dog barking outside, with the memory of a past kindness, with the ecosystem I inhabit.

The search for a stable, inner compass is a fool’s errand because the "I" doing the searching is not stable at all, it is a relational subject, always in process.

This shifts the question.

The question is not "Who am I?" but "Who can I be when I am with you?" or if you strive for an ethical life, as Nora Bateson would say, “Who can you be when you are with me?” Suddenly, ethics is not about adhering to a private set of principles, to an inner compass and instead asks what is being co-created in the space between.

My identity, my ethics, my very being are relational.

In "Braiding Sweetgrass," Robin Wall Kimmerer speaks of a "grammar of animacy," a philosophy where rocks, rivers, and mountains are not "its" but subjects of being, worthy of relationship and respect. A compass, in this view, doesn’t show the direction, but helps me navigate my responsibilities within a web of kinship. It is a continuous call and response with a living world. The right path is the one that strengthens the web, the one born from reciprocity.

To live this way is to abandon the fantasy of the "easy, blissful joyride" I once thought I achieve as soon as I find my compass.

To live this way is to accept, as Donna Haraway urges, the responsibility of "staying with the trouble." My struggle to find my compass was not really a failure. The struggle itself, the feeling of being pulled in multiple directions, is the compass. In that tension we are forced to slow down, to listen, and to find our way—in relation.

The Messiness of Relationality

Giving up the search for a fixed north and instead learning to navigate by the shifting entanglements of our relations: It’s messy.

Sometimes, what is needed in my relationship with one person is in direct tension with my responsibility to another, or to the land I stand on.

Wisdom, then, is not the possession of timeless truths. It is the cultivated, embodied skill of sensing, wisdom-ing, into these tensions and responding with care. It is knowing when specific values, such as honesty serve connection and when it is a form of violence, when courage is necessary and when it is merely ego. This kind of wisdom is learned in the body, through the painful, sometimes beautiful, and usually unpredictable practice of being in relation.

At the same time, this might imply that we have no inner guiding system whatsoever. Or in other words: total chaos. Whereas one end of the spectrum is a fixed inner compass, the other end of the spectrum is complete relationality—a lot of order vs. a lot of chaos. Ecosystems thrive somewhere in the middle of the two poles. And as I often argue, while we are relational, we are also differentiated.

So, how can we live with this tension? If we are not a fixed self but a relational one, yet we are not this shapeless puddle of reactions, how do we navigate?

Some ideas, you can find in last week’s essay.

I don’t want to deny the idea of an inner compass altogether. I want an inner compass. And I want it to be relational. Ideally, I also integrate the multiple dimensions of my being. My compass is not just a cognitive tool (head) but an embodied one, attuned to emotional connection (heart), intuitive knowing (belly), and practical skills (hand). It values the knowledge that comes from lived, sensory experience, not just abstract analysis, recognizing that my body is my mouthpiece to the world.

A fixed, inner compass is predicated on a fantasy of purity, the idea that we can find a position that is untainted, objectively right, and morally clean. From this pure position, we can judge the world and ourselves. But a relational compass demolishes this fantasy. It works from the assumption of our inevitable entanglement and, therefore, our inevitable complicity in systems of harm.

What is then required is a commitment to a lifelong apprenticeship to navigate the complexity, through practice, through making mistakes, through repair, and through a slow, often uncomfortable work of staying in relationship.

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