How To Recognize Your Purpose

Discussing how our lives rarely have only one over arching purpose, as we ae not a single use tool like a screw driver, and instead how we have multiple purposes which overlap, instigate new goals, and blend into the tapestry which is unfolding in each step we take on our path.

Transcript

How To Recognize Your Purpose

Everyone wants to know their life, their existence, their experiences have a purpose. Not just any purpose but something meaningful to people other than themselves. From the Greek hero warriors to the legendary Samurai to today's Marvel Superheroes we love it when someone has a destiny and struggles to fulfill it. We don't mind their sacrifice of stable relationships or family if the sacrifice means saving the world, making things right for humanity, making our world safe for the rest of...the world. In fact, we like our heroes tragic. It makes them relatable. If they didn't have a flaw or some kind of secret pain or yearning they wouldn't be heroes, they'd be gods and we don't get along well with gods for the most part.

We also are very interested in heroes who fail and so we have tragedy. Oedipus and Frankenstein (and his monster), Othello and Magneto all have the potential to succeed and fail tragically in all kinds of ways. Although I guess we should hold out for Magneto as the Marvel writers are still writing his mythology in the comic books and more movies are scheduled. But I'm not holding my breath for happily ever after. He's too delicious in his woundedness for them to let him off the hook.

The thing about heroes, no matter how dramatic or tragic, how flawed or perfect, is they are all very much one note. By their very nature they give up everything in their lives which matters other than their purpose, of which they have one and only one, thereby becoming a juggernaut in the service of achieving that purpose. This is part of the tragedy of the Odyssey. Odysseus comes home, having achieved his heroic purpose. He's handed his home, his son and his wife, not in pristine condition but who is after a couple of decades, then realizes he doesn't want them and goes off to find another heroic goal to take on. Heroes who try to have it all fail at everything, which we love too. We enjoy watching the Romeo/Juliet of it such as Batman's failed attempts at relationship or Spiderman's for that matter. Othello's terrible lack of relationship skills is the main gist of his tale. Heroes do the heroic and either fail or succeed at it, suck at everything else, and we feel uplifted by them or go through catharsis with them.

Knowing all of this, being completely immersed in it, being part of a culture which is not only continuing to develop its own myths but coopting the hero myths of almost every other culture we come in contact with, with all of our TV and Movies and books being saturated with it, it's not surprising this is what we think about when we think about purpose. Because this is what it means to have purpose right? Ignoring the fact that in all these stories the people are horribly beat up, have terrible relationships, their lives are pretty much torture, and they sometimes end tragically through no fault of their own or completely through their own mistaken efforts, we should follow their example and desire to have an overarching purpose to our lives which makes everything make sense, right?

Um, thankfully no.

This doesn't mean each of us is without purpose. I'm not saying this at all. In fact quite the contrary. What I want to get out of the way first is I have yet to meet someone who needs to wear a spandex outfit and go fight crime as a superhero or renounce all connection to other human beings so they can spend their life learning to be a ninja. No one I have met is this one dimensional. (As a side note, being a true geek I'm in no way stating cosplay, spandex outfits, ninjas or fandom in any of its forms is a bad thing. This would be hypocritical as I cosplay myself. So spandex away with my blessing if it's your thing.) 

The question "What is my purpose?" is a common one and in my business it's probably the most common. I look at this in people's soul books all the time. However, there isn't a line in there which says "My purpose is __________". We have many purposes in any given lifetime, sometimes a handful of high priority ones, sometimes a tapestry of them to work through depending on how complicated and jam packed the life. Some purposes are long term and are threaded throughout all aspects of a life, others are like beads in a time release capsule, and they come into effect at various times throughout the life. Some purposes require our skills be obvious and available to us early on in life like math and spacial recognition skills which aid in art and engineering as well as sports. The same can be said for some healers or mediums needing to be empathic or attuned to "the other side" depending on their modality. And again, drawing skills for someone headed towards the arts. 

Sometimes we have purposes stacked up because they only work in a certain order. Education and career then family or family then education then career. Multiple careers as we bounce from one to another gathering/remembering skills and connections until we have all we need to blossom into our primary purpose, or moving from place to place touching people as we go because making those connections and blessing their lives is one of our purposes. What we think of as purpose can sometimes not activate until Eldership/Retirement/Midlife Crisis/Menopause and we can become confused because of everything which went before which seems so disconnected to this new phase of life. But part of our purpose is to be a child and some of us have contracts to bring other souls into this life as our children and still others have contracts to raise children brought in by others. Some have a purpose to provide a certain experience to a group of people by being in a situation for a certain length of time (a job, a relationship, a trip) and when this is over it can feel like there was no purpose to the event if we're looking for our lesson in it and not looking at what it provided others.

We are multidimensional beings. Our purposes for entering into an embodied life aren't single strings but symphonies of connection and experience. We do a huge amount of preplanning and prepping, choosing and crafting when we create a new embodied life to enter. We do this not because we are afraid to deviate from it, but because we know we will. One of the key ingredients of life is Free Will. We are not trains trying to refrain from jumping off the tracks which have been laid for us, we are Mickey Mouse in Fantasia delighting in the world around us in all its quirky fascination and adding our part. Many of us are here to participate in the paradigm shift which humanity is making in how it lives and interacts with itself and with the rest of the world, but this is not our main purpose nor does it define how we do so and what else we wish to accomplish. Some people are choosing to inhabit roles for and share experiences with their soul group, to provide families for souls who want to accelerate their ability to participate in a skill or profession or calling, or to support a soul who is their student or peer in a lesson they are attempting to learn through embodiment. Others accomplish everything on their list and end up with 20 years of life left to simply enjoy and revel in life. This becomes their final purpose, to embody happiness and joy for themselves and everyone else they come in contact with.

Another thing to note is purposes change. What we set up for ourselves prior to entering a life is rarely what we end up with when we're done. We know this going in so for anything truly important we set up all kinds of flags and warnings, tendencies, bumpers and roadblocks, and oh so many redundancies so we won't miss them and can achieve them in any of a million different ways depending on where our and other's free will takes us. But some people do radically change one purpose or another or many in the course of a life. Those who choose soul mate partnerships know from the outset, no matter how contracted they are with their partner or how many redundancies they build in, the purpose of coming together has a very low rate of success and so they will more than likely need to alter their purpose around relationships and this relationship in particular. Others change their purpose and the course of their lives by accident. They get into an extreme situation and pray really hard for a solution not realizing the solution might have more drastic effects than just resolving the moment. For instance, a person I have worked with simply could not deal with a lifetime of pain and anguish and overwrought emotions so at the crux they screamed out in agony, not just in a random low moment, but in the final moment of despair and the response for relief came in the form of a whole additional portion of their soul. This not only helped them with emotional stability, but changed their entire perspective on life which they then spent years trying to reconcile. Another asked for the ability to succeed in their quest with such an open, honest, and sincere heart the scope of what they had prepared for themselves as a purpose expanded exponentially and took them in completely new directions.

The most well-known example of this is what is called the shaman's illness or what my people refer to as the calling of the medicine way. The person is giving a choice, to enter into a life of service as a medicine person, a priestess or priest, a healer and wisdom elder for their people or to remain a layman as they have been up to this point. Like Neo in the Matrix they can choose the red pill or the blue pill, go forward to see what's down the rabbit hole or stay the way they are with no harm and no realization of what they have passed by. So, two totally different groupings of purpose are available to the person and neither is right or wrong. Choosing one isn't a success and choosing the other isn't a failure. Or vice versa. :) Doors open in both directions, there is fulfillment in both. Once the choice is made the other door closes and it's off to the races with the multiple purposes now activated.

So instead of asking "What's my purpose?" we might want to be more detailed or specific such as what purposes did I have for myself when I planned this life, what purposes lie ahead of me, what do I have left to accomplish, what was the purpose of this/that/the other event in my life and so on. It is never too late to accomplish what we want to do or be, whether it was our initial purpose, a purpose we've picked up along the way, or one we have created for ourselves by taking the road less travelled.