In A World Obsessed With More, Japji Sahib Offers Another Way: Explains Sikh Spiritual Leader SathPaal Singh

A friend of mine spent three years on manifestation. Vision boards, morning affirmations, an app that reminded her to “raise her vibration” twice a day. And six months later, she did get the promotion she’d been "manifesting." But a year into the job, she came back saying she felt exactly as anxious as before, burnt out and severely down at times, just with a bigger salary now. Nothing had actually changed in her life. She had simply gotten better at wanting things.

SathPaal Singh, a former IT professional turned world-renowned spiritual educator and the founder of Nanak Naam, who has spent nearly twenty years studying the philosophy of Guru Nanak, believes the real problem is how spirituality gets sold today. He asks a more uncomfortable question: what if the thing that needs to change is not our life, but the way we experience it? 

When Inner Peace Starts Looking Suspiciously Like Marketing 

We live in strange times. There is no shortage of advice on how to become happier, wealthier, or more successful, and much of it now arrives dressed in spiritual language. SathPaal argues if the destination remains more money, higher social rankings—if the goal is always "more"—then it’s not spirituality at all, but simply another form of material ambition. Underneath all of it sits the same old assumption: get enough money to buy the right things, and happiness follows. And that is exactly where the problem lies.

He also points out why this version sells so well. Telling someone “practice gratitude no matter what happens to you” is a hard sell, because it demands real effort and gives you nothing shiny to show for it afterward. But telling someone “manifest your promotion” is easy, because it flatters a desire people already have, and promises proof that you can show off the "results." 

And that is Marketing 101.

So Which Spiritual Teachings Should We Focus On?

SathPaal argues that true spiritual teaching urges you to focus on the journey rather than the destination. Because that is where life happens—on the journey. Deeper wisdom comes from changing the question from “How do I get that house?” to “How do I be happy?”

That is close to a central concern in Guru Nanak’s teaching: the problem is not the world outside us, but the ego through which we interpret it. Sikh wisdom teaches you to connect spiritual transformation with loosening the ego’s tendency to divide the self from the world. 

In other words, the idea is to let go of the concept of “I” and be more detached from your own desires in the world. However, when he says “spiritual detachment," SathPaal does not interpret it as abandoning family, ambition, or your duties and responsibilities altogether. Instead, he describes it as learning to love things without believing they will permanently belong to us.

“Learn how to love them and enjoy them, but also have the wisdom to know that nothing will ultimately last,” he says.

Acceptance, Not Surrender

The central teaching of Guru Nanak is: radical acceptance. SathPaal’s test for it is equally radically simple: go 24 hours without complaining about anything—traffic, weather, a bad meeting—none of it. Try it once, and you’ll notice how the outside world barely changes, but it all comes down to your perspective towards it.

That’s not the same as giving up. You can still chase the promotion, want more money, and try to improve your situation. The difference is whether your peace of mind is hostage to any of it working out. “It’s not about changing your life on the outside, but about changing your mind on the inside,” SathPaal says.

It’s also not the same as toxic positivity. Positivity culture tells you everything will work out eventually. Guru Nanak’s teachings, on the other hand, urge you to appreciate life even when it’s going badly. When you start counting your blessings, they might just outweigh the count of your problems.

So, How To Identify True Spiritual Teachings?

SathPaal has a test for this too, and it sounds embarrassingly obvious: stop looking at how spiritual a teacher seems and start looking at what happens to people who actually practice the lessons. “The proof has to be not words, but evidence — you gotta see how many people’s lives have been changed by the teachings,” he says, comparing it to reading reviews before buying anything else online. You wouldn’t hand over money on vibes alone, so why would you hand over your inner life to blind faith?

This is why SathPaal believes Japji Sahib can speak to anyone — the religious and the skeptics alike. More importantly, in the Nanak Naam Community Support group on Facebook, where its 11,000 members swap real problems daily and talk through them using exactly these teachings, you can witness people go through true transformation almost in real time. SathPaal has now compiled all the teachings of Japji Sahib in the form of a unique poetic English translation where you will find the most challenging response to the modern culture of manifestation: instead of asking how to get more from life, it asks us to look more honestly at the person who is doing the asking.