The Search with the Wrong Question.

The Search

Troy Alan Cox

After my brother was unexpectedly killed in a motorcycle accident, I began searching for answers. Like most people who have experienced a sudden and unexpected trauma, I questioned everything I thought was important before the accident. I look at my life as before Todd died and after Todd died.

I first began with a bootleg collection of 1960s talks by Ram Dass that my brother's martial arts teacher gave me. It was the first time I had heard religion mixed with spirituality, humor, adventure, and someone questioning established belief systems. I listened to those cassette tapes so many times that I had some of them memorized.

I ask myself questions every day... but I had never thought about whether I was asking the right ones.

Once I realized my parents and I were not going to be much help to each other during this horrible time, I did what spiritual seekers have done for centuries. I ran and hid. First to the forest and then to the Florida Keys. The Keys were still quiet then, before cruise ships arrived, and during the off-season it felt as though the 1970s had never ended. Everything was slower, simpler, and more isolated. Managing campgrounds on that tropical island gave me exactly what I needed at that point in my life: space, silence, and time to begin processing the massive shift I was experiencing.

Eventually I returned to Orlando. There I discovered a bookstore called The Spiral Circle. The original owner, Beverly, had an uncanny ability to walk someone to a bookshelf and intuitively recommend exactly the book she felt would help them the most. My search moved from religion to near-death experiences, then to self-help, meditation, philosophy, and psychology. I read everything I could find trying to answer the questions that had taken over my life. I listened to CDs during every drive to work and immersed myself in different teachers, different traditions, and different ideas.

No matter where I looked, I couldn't find one place that contained the answer.

Eventually my work as a personal trainer led me to teaching yoga at 24 Hour Fitness. At first it was simply stretching and movement. Workout yoga. The classes became so popular that I developed a waiting list. Then something unexpected happened. Students began telling me their lives were changing. One person said they were sleeping better. Another said their family kept asking what had changed because they seemed calmer. Others noticed their back pain improving or found themselves making different decisions at work and at home. Eventually they all asked me the same question.

"Do you know why this is happening?"

I couldn't answer them.

Their questions became my questions.

That curiosity led me deeper into the history and philosophy of yoga. I studied with teachers from India, traveled there myself, received mantra initiation, and immersed myself in the tradition. I spent years reading, practicing, teaching, and researching, convinced that somewhere I would eventually discover the answer I had been searching for since Todd died.

Instead, something else happened.

My teachers rarely answered my questions.

They answered them with another question.

That frustrated me at first. Then one day I realized why.

Truth is, I wasn't getting the answers I was seeking because I wasn't asking the right questions.

For years I had been asking, "How do I change?" "How do I become happy?" "How do I become successful?" and "Why does this keep happening to me?" Those questions never seemed to lead anywhere.

Eventually I realized the better question wasn't why.

It was what.

What is actually directing my decisions? What keeps leading me back to the same relationships, the same jobs, the same disappointments, and the same patterns? Why did I keep moving from place to place, changing careers, starting businesses, and searching outside myself for answers while never examining what was quietly steering my own life?

We think we are making conscious decisions.

Many of our decisions are quietly being directed by values we have never examined.

What beliefs had I inherited without ever questioning them? What values had I accepted simply because I grew up with them? What assumptions about success, happiness, work, relationships, religion, and life had become so automatic that I no longer noticed they were directing my decisions?

That realization changed everything.

I realized I didn't need another spiritual book, another seminar, another teacher, or another philosophy. I needed to understand the compass that had already been quietly directing my life.

That realization became...

The Safety Compass™.

I use this tool all the time in my life so much so that it's become second nature to me. I've taught this tool over 20 years to thousands of people who have always told me the value they find in it. 

Next week, I'll share the simple exercise I've used with thousands of people over the past two decades to help them discover their own True North—and why the hardest part isn't identifying your values.

It's learning how to use them.