What the Spirit World Has Taught Me About Life Purpose

Most of us were handed a story about purpose — find it, build it, monetize it, arrive. But what if that story is exactly what's keeping you stuck?

This one is a personal share — drawing from years of lived experience, a lifelong search, and more than a decade of sitting with the spirit world. What I have learned from the spirit world might just change everything about how you think about "life purpose". It has for me.

A few things you'll walk away with:

• Why struggling at something doesn't necessarily mean it's not for you
• What the spirit world actually regrets (it's not what you'd expect)
• The real reason your purpose might not be your job

And if you've been waiting for a sign or a lightning bolt moment to finally point you in the right direction — there's a much simpler place to start, and I'm sharing it here, today.

Purpose isn't a ladder. It's a symphony. And you're already playing it.

Sign up here: https://www.joyfulmedium.com/compromise-or-self-betrayal-masterclass

Compromise or Self-Betrayal? (and the three red flags you're losing yourself🚩🚩🚩)

Learn how to easily and quickly spot the difference between healthy compromise and self-betrayal — in real time. 

Join me LIVE - April 6, 5pm PT/ 8pm ET.  

Get Joy's Free "Sign Magnet" 3 Day Mini Course HERE https://www.joyfulmedium.com/sign-magnet
Joy's Website: www.joyfulmedium.com
Instagram: @JoyfulMedium
TikTok: @JoyfulMedium
Facebook: @JoyfulMedium
Facebook Group: Joy's Soul Spa
YouTube: Psychic Medium Joy Giovanni 

Transcript

Unknown: 0:01

Joy, hey, beautiful soul, welcome to spirit. Speak Easy. I'm Joy Giovanni, joyful medium. I'm a working psychic medium, energy healer and spiritual gifts mentor. This podcast is like a seat at the table in a secret club, but with mediums, mystics and the spiritual luminaries of our time. So come behind the velvet ropes with me and see inside my world as I chat insider style with profoundly gifted souls, we go deep, share juicy stories, laugh a lot, and it wouldn't be a speakeasy without great insider secrets and tips. You might even learn that you have some gifts of your own. So step inside the spirit speakeasy. Hey, beautiful soul. Welcome in for another episode of spirit speakeasy. Today, we are going to be talking about what mediumship has taught me about life purpose. I don't know about you, but I am someone who has been searching for my life purpose for as long as I can remember, I can even remember being as young as like, second or third grade, thinking about, what am I going to do with my big life? What am I going to do with the rest of my life? What am I going to be, or who should I be? What's my purpose, right? Is that true of you, too? I was thinking about this as I was thinking about what I wanted to share with you this week, and really from where I came from as a little person growing up in this world, and what I understand now about our life purpose, our life path, and what the spirit world has shared with me, I see things completely differently, so I'm going to Give you some personal shares along the way, but I really thought it could just be powerful to explain what I've learned up to this point, because I so often get asked from clients about their life purpose, wanting to know either what their life purpose is or how to build it from there, or if they're on the right life purpose. And I think one of the challenges is, is that in our current day society, we have equated, in most cases, life purpose with this capitalistic pursuit, because we're so busy, because life is so expensive in many of our countries. Oftentimes, these days, we look at life purpose and think, okay, my life purpose has to also be my profession, right? It has to be the thing that I am successful at in the world that monetizes, that provides me the life success that I want. And I just want to start by acknowledging that that's not always true. Sure, some people can make their career and their life purpose or the things that they want to experience in life mesh, but other people don't, and that's okay, and I feel like we need to start extricating those and separating those, one from the other. It's an awful lot of pressure to put on ourselves that the thing that our soul calls us to express or experience has to also be the thing that we do business with in the world. It just doesn't always work that way. I'm going to flash back and talk to you a little bit about when I was a kid and what I thought about life purpose, and how that shifted even over my years. I many of you know I've had a lot of pursuits in my life. I've done a lot of different jobs, I've done a lot of different education, and I've pursued different things that I thought might be my life purpose. I remember when I was I must have been about seven or eight, and my mom had she was doing some school, and she had a job. And then sometimes during the holiday season in Boston, she would do some ushering work at a place called the Wang Center, which is a famous theater there, and they have the Boston Ballet that does the Nutcracker every year. And that would be mostly what she would be ushering for helping people find their seats. And she got to work backstage quite a bit. The Nutcracker performance, when it's done by the Boston Ballet, has also some kids in it, so she would help to wrangle the kids, and I would get to go backstage. I would either be home alone, or sometimes get to go with her. And I'd be backstage at the Wang center, and I'd get to be in the dressing room with all the kids getting ready, and sometimes I'd get to sit on the wings of the stage, if I could, be very small and quiet, which, luckily, I could, and it was a magical experience overall. But one of the little strange things that stuck out to me is when I was in the dressing room with all of the ballerinas getting ready, and I was so excited, and I was little still, and I thought, wow, these people are so incredible. I want to dance. I want to move my body like this. I want to be a ballerina. And one of the instructors that was there, she had an accent, and I couldn't tell you where it was from, but I feel like possibly French. Uh, she looked me up and down, and again, I was, like, seven or eight years old. I was a tiny little person, and she said, You're much too big. You weigh too much. You'll never be a ballerina. And right then in my mind, I was like, Okay, let's take that off the list of life purpose not built to be a ballerina. And from there, it just is this interesting path for me from such a small age of trying to understand my life purpose. I also had this weird little quirk. Let me know if this is true for any of you. This is maybe a strange thing about me, but as I dove into things as a kid and moving into my like adolescence, I felt like if I picked up a new hobby or something that I was interested in, I had to be the only one of my friend group or people I knew doing that hobby, if a friend of mine also picked up that hobby, I felt like, Okay, well, that's probably their purpose, and I shouldn't do it, and I don't want to have a competition situation between us, because I'd already had some situations like that as a kid, and just really felt like I had to put something down if someone else picked it up. This is true for me of music and acting and photography and some other arts in my life, because I always felt very drawn to arts. I had a dear friend. We're a friend for much of our childhood, and actually still know her today, and she started getting very involved in drama at the high school she went to. She was just a couple years older than me in school, and the high school that I had transitioned to didn't really have drama. I had a little bit, but her program was much bigger and and much more active and involved. And I just kind of felt like, okay, that's her thing. I shouldn't pursue this anymore. And I didn't really pursue very much acting again until college, and then I started taking some classes. When I was first in college at UMass Boston. I did some some film study, and actually a theater class, and some other classes sort of similar to that, and some psychology classes. So it was many years that I put it aside. And then, as I my life shifted again, and I moved to California, I put it aside again, and didn't pick up acting for many, many years, but was always searching for this purpose, and I want to just also touch on something, because we often think about the things that happen to us in life, right? We all have challenges and struggles. And many of us have traumas that happen. And there was a time in my life, so I went to Catholic school when I was little, then elementary through kind of later Middle School. Seventh grade, I was in a very rough public school. Then I went to Christian school for a couple years, and then for my last year and a half, a half of 10th and 11th, I went to another public school that was in like a very fancy kind of a wealthier neighborhood. So I had lots of different experiences, but I had had some pretty strong traumas in my younger life. I was really severely bullied, which, if you guys want, we can talk about another day. And I also had, I'm not going to go into this, but bit of a trigger warning. I also had some essay and abuse in that vein. And then I shifted into this Christian school, and we would go every week to something called chapel, where they would read the Bible and sing, and do you know, kind of like a mini church every week in our school, because I didn't go to church with my family at the time, and I remember, in my mind, doing this math right? The way it was presented to us, is this idea of God in this specific type of church was all knowing and all powerful and all things work together to serve God. And in my mind, I had just come through a lot when I transitioned to that school, and was still going through a lot, and I was really trying to do the math in my mind and equate it to Okay. I've gone through these things, but if God knows everything, and God's in charge of everything, and allowed these things to happen to me, and I was just wrestling and trying to make sense, and the math I came up with in my probably 1314, year old mind was okay, certainly if God allowed all these really hard things to happen in my life. This must be my purpose. This must be my purpose. And these things had to happen to me so that I can hold light and healing and help other people who these things have happened to as well. Spoiler alert, I've now learned that that is not true at all. Nor is that the way that it works. We live in a chaotic world. Humans have free will. Some humans have very bad intentions and use their free will in a very terrible way. I don't believe that there is a puppeteer God that is allowing terrible things to happen to people, especially children. I just believe that this is a chaotic world, and sometimes things happen. You've probably heard me say this before. I do believe that all of the things that happen to us in our life can be used and we can grow from them and expand from them and then basically stand on them to express and experience and explore life, having gone through those challenges. But I. No longer believe thank God that things get to happen to us horribly, so that we can then be helpful to someone else who has had horrible things happen. Is that true? Certainly it could be true, but it doesn't. It's not a requirement, and it's not why terrible things happen. So for several years in there, I thought, Okay, I'm supposed to be a chaplain, I'm supposed to be a religious leader. I'm supposed to help people understand the teachings of God and and I really did a lot of work on myself then trying to understand my purpose, which clearly has looped around in a different way. I had so many other people what during my education years, tell me what they thought my purpose was too people said I should be a lawyer. I should be a writer. I should be a teacher. I should be I was really good at debate. I should do something that had to do with litigation or or debate. And none of those things really felt true to me. And really, I think what I was waiting for was some magical understanding to click in. And I felt like, if I was on my life path, and maybe this was that I was a little bit older, probably like college age, or maybe even when I just moved to California, when I was, like, about 17, is when I moved here just before my 18th birthday. I kind of felt like, certainly, if I am living in my purpose and on my life path, the indication of that will be that things will just unfold, cue little blue Tweety birds from Cinderella movie, and the path just unfolding in front of me in a joyous way, and I'm just skipping ahead, right? We know that's not how it works, but for many years, and I know many people that still believe this way. I felt like certainly, if I am in the right direction, that there will be a signal that things will be unfolding, that I will be feeling happy, that things will be smooth, that things will be falling into place, that money will happen, right? Have you ever felt like that in your life? Because I think especially in Western culture. I think that's something that we can get stuck into right thinking. Well, certainly, if I find this magical path that has been laid out before me that somehow lives inside of me, even though I have no clue about what it is, I will know, because the result will be that everything will work out. I've learned that that's just not true, and I've pursued a lot of career paths. So I'm here to tell you that what I have discovered is, even when I've had success at pretty high levels with my acting career, even though you guys have heard me say before World Wrestling Entertainment WWE was not maybe where I had my sights set as winning looking back. I mean, that's a fairly successful result of a career, right? I did get some some international recognition and success, and I did get to work in my field, which for an actor, is kind of a big deal to get to work anyway. But what I discovered is that purpose really has to be less about the outcome and more about the experience along the way, getting to explore, getting to enjoy those parts of being on sets, or being on a production, or working with the crew, learning lines, the messy middle, is the work of the purpose. So for some reason, for many years, and I do feel like I see this a lot with clients and students and sometimes even people I come across in life, we just think that if we are quote, unquote, living on purpose or living in our purpose, that everything else will sort itself out and it will be easier. And that just has not held true in my experience. So over the years, I kept, you know, pivoting and shifting and moving in different directions to find this purpose. And what I've really learned through the last many years of doing mediumship is that I really feel like purpose is used and defined in our world currently, maybe different than how our soul sees or understands purpose, maybe different than how we understand purpose from the spirit world. So flash forward after really holding this religious belief in my heart that certainly God was going to help me find my purpose many years later, after WWE, after the ice cream truck that many of you know that I did when I was back in health and wellness and doing massage therapy, I came across metaphysics. That's when metaphysics really started to enter my life in a different way. It had been nudging or knocking at the door. I read books by metaphysical authors. I had watched the secret but I didn't connect the dots that these are metaphysical teachers that you could continue to learn from until much later. And that is one of the breadcrumbs that helped me step into my own spiritual gifts, into mediumship. And what was amazing back then, shout out Hay House. They had something called Hay House Radio, which is not a thing anymore, but it was essentially an online radio. Platform that had all of these different spiritual teachers and speakers that I felt was incredible, and I started hearing some of the same themes and some of the same messages that I had heard from religion, but just in a different way, and the way that I was hearing them made so much more sense to me, and so I collected those breadcrumbs. I had already learned Reiki and learned a lot about energy, and I kept moving forward with these breadcrumbs of understanding and still thinking, certainly some window is going to open up to my purpose, and I'm going to fall inside and be like, Hey, I found my purpose, which, to be quite honest, still hasn't happened in the way that I thought that it would. Once I really was fully certified and developed in Reiki, I thought, Oh, certainly, this is going to be the thing, and people will see how healing this is and how much it can help us on our own personal development, and this will be the thing that is my purpose. And then I started developing my psychic reading. And then I thought, oh, surely everyone will want intuitive guidance, and this will be the thing. This maybe is my purpose. And then my mentor encouraged me to develop trance mediumship, which is a channeling, essentially. And then I thought, Oh, wow. Well, not a lot of people do that. Certainly this is going to be the thing. And then my mediumship with the spirit world started to happen, started to open up, and I started training and developing. And I thought, okay, certainly this will be the thing. And as I trained in mediumship and developed, there were so many times on my path that I felt like, why is this not moving forward? Why am I not getting this, as I told you growing up, there were many things that I just could pick up and figure out or be good at. I could just kind of play this didn't feel the same. It felt like struggle. It felt like an uphill climb. It felt like feeling I often describe it as feeling in a dark hallway, because I felt like if I was doing all the steps and ticking all the boxes, then certainly the equation would be then spirit would get louder, then the subtle energies would become more clear. And for me, it was just a reorientation to understanding how these gifts work. But step by step, as I continue to expand in my mediumship, what I have noticed over these more than 10 years now is that the spirit world has also been teaching me about life purpose and teaching me about what they see their life purpose as, and in combination with things that I've learned from many mentors over my life and Many spiritual teachers, including my mediumship mentor, Andy Bing. Shout out to Andy. I really understand the soul differently. I understand how we come into human form and what our intentions are a little differently. So I want to share a little bit about that, because it's been really profound in just reordering the way I think about it. But I also want to say here that you know, it's not my intention to disappoint anyone, but thinking that someone is going to be able to magically give us a golden ticket and say, Okay, this is your purpose. Go to this university, study this thing, climb this ladder, and you will have all of the success and recognition. You will feel like you are enough. You will have a windfall of money. That's not real. That's something that was kind of sold to many of us, myself, and raise your hand if this is you, sold to many of us in our movies and TV and stories we were told as kids, and we thought, if we do all these right things, that we will feel fulfilled. And that's what I want to talk about, that feeling of fulfillment, because sometimes that is connected to our job, and sometimes it's not. And again, I want to talk about life purpose, not necessarily being connected to our work in the world, our job that pays our bills, right. Purpose can include so many more facets of us from a soul perspective and what our soul wants to experience, what our soul's purpose is. The purpose of our soul coming into human incarnation is not necessarily the same agenda that our human world has constructed in capitalist societies right now, our soul doesn't necessarily come in and like, Okay, I'm going to get on this capitalist program, and I'm going to learn from a young age what my skills are and build it into something that monetizes. Right? It's a part of the way that we function in the world now. But the reason I keep harping on this is because for many people, for most people, those things that you want to experience, that your soul wants you to experience, do not necessarily match the job that you have or the career that you do, and that's okay. Can we find elements of it in our work? Probably in 99.9% of jobs, you can find elements of fulfillment in your work. But in most jobs, even as a medium, I have to have fulfillment in other places as well, because if I'm depending on entire fulfillment, complete fulfillment, from my work as a medium, it's just not going to come that way. You're hanging too much on that job, right? So my encouragement here is to just start opening your mind about what purpose means now, what I understand from the spirit world and from my own experience in meditations, and what I've learned over this time is that our soul comes into this incarnation, right, comes into the physical body with a group of qualities and characteristics in different proportions for each of us, different skills, different abilities. We all are equally amazing and equally challenged in different ways. We all are incredibly powerful and unique, and we all are equally ordinary. So I know in the metaphysical work, we talk about everybody being special and nobody being special, right? I think that's true. And as we develop as a human being, those qualities of our soul rise to the surface, recede into the background and move around, right? Often, people will say, Have you ever heard someone say like, oh, what color is my aura? It's all the colors all the time in different layers and different proportions, and it moves around like a lava lamp. So those colors, those qualities of us move as we need them, as we move through the phases of our life, as we move through the challenges of our life. And sometimes, certain qualities don't rise to the surface until we have gone through certain life experiences, certain parts of growth that we need to have to experience in order to step into another part of our purpose. I don't think our purpose is linear, and I don't think our purpose is a job. I think it's more experiential. Part of my purpose is to be a mom because I have kids in the world, and to love those kids and continue to grow and move with them. And as part of that, there's a requirement to keep working on myself. If you have kids in the world, whether they're bio kids or just kids that you love or kids that you mentor, you know that those relationships can be challenging and can light up a lot of things in us to work on. So part of our purpose is continuing to work on ourselves and understand Who are you now? What qualities do you want to express now? What do you want to prioritize, as far as experiences, right? And that doesn't mean necessarily explaining your dream vacation to me, although sure that could be part of what you want to experience, it's more about those qualities that make you you, that you want to pursue, want to explore, want to expand upon, just as a natural part of you again stripping away this need to monetize. We'll talk about that again in a few minutes, but just for now, stay with me here about thinking of those qualities of you. And if it's too hard to think about yourself, you can think about someone else that you care about. Sometimes we can more clearly see these type of qualities in someone else than ourselves. Often it's things like the way we support others the way that we can see something for another that we can't see for ourselves, these humanitarian aspects of us, for some of us, we might experience and be be needing to express qualities around leadership, qualities around being a teacher, qualities around being some version of an unofficial therapist or support person or a compassionate holder of space, right? Others feel called or feel interested curious. That's a calling that's often how it feels initially. If it's not this huge calling on your heart that from the time you're little, you knew you wanted to be a doctor. That's true for a few people. But if it's not true for you, and you keep thinking, What is my purpose? Please listen, because I think I can guide you in the right direction here. What are those qualities of you that you just either need to express or that get expressed, whether you like it or not? What do I mean by that, I mean that for me, from the time I was a kid, I was getting put in leadership positions, even if I didn't raise my hand for it, I ended up being, you know, when you're a kid and you sit at those like group tables. I ended up being table captain. I ended up being teachers helper. I ended up being captain for sports teams, even if I didn't want to be. So it's just those natural leadership abilities. And it doesn't mean that you have to have been in leadership positions before even it's just knowing that you can take the lead, you can handle things, you can see things from a different perspective. For some people, we're talking about healing job. Just a second ago, let's just say hypothetically, that one of the qualities your soul wants to express in this lifetime is healing, but you don't feel called to medicine. This was me. I collected every little wounded bird. I was trying to save bugs and little boxes and recover them. I had such an empathic ability, I could feel other people's emotions. I could feel when hard things were going on. But as a kid, the last thing I would have wanted to be was like an actual doctor. I was terrified of doctors, and that's a whole nother story for another day, but I knew like not doctor, and it wasn't until much, much, much later, that I understood how all these puzzle pieces came together, and how I could express the energy of healing, of supporting, of holding space for people. But it didn't have to look only one way. So just starting to think about instead of purpose, what are the qualities of you as a soul in this lifetime? What are the qualities of you as a human being that make you feel fulfilled, right? And again, this is not a monetary fulfillment. It could be at some level, in some degree, for some people, but take that off of it, just for now. Maybe for you, it's creativity, right? We all have versions of creativity, and maybe you feel fulfilled when you're doing some holiday baking, maybe you feel fulfilled when you're designing a living room. Maybe you feel fulfilled when you're plucking away on an instrument and making a song just for yourself, or making a different creative expression. It's starting to reorient ourselves, and instead of thinking of it as this one path that we're meant to march, that we will march our whole life, and this will provide us with sense of worthiness, feeling of being loved, feeling that we're worthy of love, feeling that we're enough, feeling that it satisfies our fear of scarcity. We're attaching a lot of things to this idea of purpose, instead of thinking of it as needing to cover all of those areas, what if purpose is actually those qualities that our soul wants to express in this lifetime and again, when we have these qualities? Is there the highest expression of those qualities? Sure? Is there barely expressing those qualities? Sure. But I also believe our soul is not attached to at what point on our timeline we express or experience those qualities. So perhaps for you, you feel like you want to nurture people and you want to support people, and maybe you haven't gotten to do that in your life yet, but it's not too late. There's always time to explore more of those qualities of us. It's why to really find our purpose, or to know that we are in our current purpose. Because I also don't believe we have one purpose for our entire lives. I believe that the qualities about us and the things that we choose to explore in life, plus the experiences that we have along the way, whether they happen to us or we choose them, those things all get braided together and become what we have access to our life experience, what we've learned, what we've studied, what we've taken on board the directions we've chosen, plus just who we are as a natural soul, right? All of that is part of what expands into some version of purpose, or what we want to experience, what our soul wants us to experience in life. And for me, one of the ways that I continue to know that something is still for me is I still feel interested in it. But let me clear up something really clearly, I guess is the way to say it really quickly, just because it is a quality that your soul wants to express, just because you're capable of expressing it, and just because you're focusing on expressing this specific quality to the highest degree that you can doesn't mean it's going to flow easily or seamlessly or without effort, and even when we are putting our effort in that direction, it doesn't mean that it's going to feel linear or easy or fun all the time. This was really surprising to me, because there were many times on my mediumship journey that I thought, certainly, if mediumship is for me, it will start becoming easier. There will start to be more of a flow. But that is, again, why you always hear me talking about the importance of personal development working through our stuff, whether it's trauma or hard experiences or whether it's stuff that we just think differently about now, right? We all have different versions of loss or hurdles or challenges in our life, and as we grow and expand, we can look at those in different ways and different angles. And the truth is, there are always things being I say lit up, is the way I usually say it triggered is another way to say it in us to learn and grow from we are in a messy world with lots of other messy. And sometimes someone might say something to you that lights you up or triggers you, and then it's your responsibility to go back and look at why did that person's opinion send me in such a spiral? What is going on in me? Do I feel like I don't have enough experience to be doing this thing I'm being criticized about, for example, or do I feel like I am in integrity? Is there something in me I need to look at right so it's continuing to peel back those layers of us to understand ourselves more and more, and why I'm including this is because there are so many people recently, within the last couple years, that have come to me and said, Joy. I felt like I was living my purpose. I felt like I did like my career, or I did like this element of the earlier part of my life, and now something's shifting in me, and I feel like I don't know if I want to be in this field anymore. I don't know if I feel satisfied in this job anymore. I don't know if I'm still living in my purpose or what I'm supposed to do. And I want to highlight that little phrase, what I'm supposed to do. I don't believe that there are certain things that we are supposed to do, right? That's us living on behalf of the world. What does the world want me to do? What does the world need me to achieve? Instead of looking within and saying, Am I feeling fulfilled in the areas of my life, right? And of course, it could include your job, but it doesn't have to looking at the relationships of your life. Are you cultivating meaningful, deep relationships with other souls in this world? And I think most of you know this by now, but I'm a bit introvert, extrovert, I guess, and so I don't necessarily keep tons and tons of people close to me. I have a small circle of people that I love very much. I have a lot of people in the world that I love very much, but I keep a small circle of close friends and family members. And what I look at is, am I engaging and cultivating Am I giving them access to me? Am I having access to them? Am I really seeing them? Am I really making them feel heard? Am I really prioritizing these people that I care about, and that is part of our purpose in life, to have relationships, to have experiences, to I hate to say it, but to bump up against things that feel hard. That is part of our purpose. That is part of why we came here, because if we think about, what does purpose actually mean, purpose means fulfilling the reason that we came into this incarnation, into this body, into this life, in this time, right? I've always thought it was a little strange that society positions it to us as like this mystical purpose that we are supposed to somehow figure out on our own, and often we're expected to do it before we enter college, right? We didn't know what we're going to be. And then we're supposed to choose something, stick with it, fight as hard as we can, climb the ladder, often pushing over other skilled and talented people to achieve some version of success that makes us acceptable, that makes us lovable, that makes us worthy, and that also somehow magically fulfills everything in us that doesn't sound real, and I've chased it for a lot of years, and I just don't feel like it is real. And the more I work with the spirit world over these years, what has been so fascinating to me, without giving any names or too many specific details, so that I keep my commitment to privacy for my clients, I can tell you that I've met a good handful of notable people on the other side. And of course, each of us is notable in our own lives, in our own worlds, to the people that love us. So no disrespect to anyone, but I've gotten the privilege to work with a number of spirit people from the other side for their loved ones, my clients who have been either well known scholars, well known humanitarians, some well known public figures and musicians. And what has been fascinating to me, when I kind of look over it over the years, is that what those souls want to express is typically not, oh, look at how great I was in my life and how much success that I have. I'm thinking of one in particular that keeps standing out in my mind. I'm not going to name names, but this is a quite famous musician of the past. Most people would know who this was, just by name if you have lived within the last 40 years. And what this person was expressing to my client was very sweet, tender memories of youthful times together and this connection. And actually, I did end up knowing through this person, the spirit person's communication, that they were a musician. And what was so beautiful about that is I knew that this person had written and provided music to the world. Touched a lot of hearts. I knew that they had performed on very large stages, which was true, but what they were expressing as part of this communication was that very small, intimate venues with very few people, or even times where this person was just with an instrument and sharing their gift with their friend group or with a small group of people that they had met. That's when they felt the most connected. That's when this person felt the most vibrant in their gift. That's what they expressed as their favorite times of sharing their musical gifts with the world, plus they really went on with my client to acknowledge the beauty of the relationship and the connection of the relationship they had had, and the appreciation that they had for my client as being a loving, supportive, non judgmental person on their path, that they felt connected to. So it's fascinating to me that from the other side. What the spirit world is wanting to share about is the love, the connection, the real moments and sometimes hard moments they do express when they've gone through something really challenging, and often what they've learned from that on this side and on the other side. So just know that even when we are doing something that fulfills us, it doesn't mean that nothing else will be chaotic. Even when we are having what we would deem, in our current world as success in one area, it doesn't mean that all the other areas are going to cooperate. So if we are demanding that all the puzzle pieces be in place and life be smooth sailing, and that is how we are going to know that we are on purpose or living in our purpose. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you're probably not going to feel purposeful, because I can only think of maybe a handful of moments in my life where everything was okay at the same time, and everyone I loved was okay and every one was had enough and and, I mean, I, most of us can look outside and see people who don't have enough. So if we are waiting for everything to be perfect or ideal, to feel like we're living on purpose, just know that that's it's probably not the best goal point to set right? And that's the other piece of it. What the spirit world has taught me is that our fulfillment, our purpose, the expression of our qualities of our soul, right? It's not a goal point. It's not a Okay, well, once I get here, then I can live, then I can love, then I can exhale. Really, we're doing purpose and doing expression the whole way, the whole time, and it's how we interact with others, and it's how we enjoy other people's expressions, and how we become vulnerable and share our deepest expressions with other people, right? So just know that if you're someone who's feeling like, What is my purpose? How do I find my purpose? It you're the only one who can find your purpose. Someone else, like a medium, an intuitive can do a reading for you and tell you the qualities that your soul wants to express. But I can almost guarantee that you know what they are. You know, if you're someone who likes to communicate, who likes to express. You're someone, you know if you're someone who wants to express through writing and who who doesn't want to be seen, right? Maybe you want to be a ghost writer for other people, and you feel like you don't want to tell your story, but you want to tell other people's stories. You probably know if you're the person who wants to be out front, telling your story on a platform or podium, or if you're someone who wants to be more behind the scenes, you probably know if you feel like you're someone who is more drawn to expressing or experiencing arts, theater, music, painting, dance writing, or if you're someone who really gets lit up By exploring sciences, right? And maybe you prefer to be on a microscope than at an easel, right? So it's looking within and understanding more. Remember intimacy, intimacy? So it's that intimate relationship with yourself as it relates to the world at large. What parts of you, those private, personal, experienced parts of you, are you willing to share and express and explore? And it can feel scary, but part of sharing our gifts with the world, I believe that's part of our purpose is to share our gifts with the world. And for some people, that might be spiritual gifts for other people, there's all kinds of gifts, right? And I have to say the other, the other piece of this that I want to make sure to include. I had so many thoughts I didn't make a lot of notes for this episode because I wanted it to be a little more of a personal share. And I had so many thoughts that I didn't make notes of them. But one of the, one of the things I wanted. To make sure to express was, it's really the relationships in our lives, and it can be personal relationships. It can also be relationships with those that we serve, right? But that really is where most of the purpose lies. I think about those of us that have our own kids, or those of us that love or support kids in the world. Do you feel like I'll use my own kids, for example, even though I just was listening to a different podcast and they were talking about their kids, and this person's a world class athlete, and talking about that when they go home to their kids, their kids don't care if they just won the medal or, you know, did the thing on TV for the prize. They only care about that that's their parent, and they're bossy with their own parent in a way that people in the world who appreciate the gifts are not are not right. So from that little kid's perspective, their parents purpose is to love them and be with them and support them and their dreams, and they don't care what their parent does. So I know I said I was going to use my own kids, but with my kids, they Yeah, of course. They understand what I do at this point. And even when I was on TV and when I was working as an actor, did they enjoy that, and did they think it was fun and get a kick out of it? Sure, was it an interesting part of their childhood? Sure, but they don't care what everyone else in the world wants of me. They care that they have access to me. 24/7 when they need me, they care how I show up for them, and that my daughter said this to me recently that I keep trying to continue to work on myself to be a better mom to her as she continues to grow and expand and she doesn't need me to be the same mom to her at 25 that she did when she was four. Sometimes I wish but, but it's different now, right? So that for me is maybe the greatest purpose. It's, you know, people will forget what we said. Maya Angelou, right? People will forget what we said or what we did, but they will remember how we made them feel and that goes for us, too, if we're raking ourselves over the coals over and over, oh, what's your purpose? What are you supposed to be doing? And I did it for many years. I picked something up. I'd try, I'd get some success, and then I feel like, well, yeah, I could make this business go more but I just don't love it, and I want to do something I love that I feel passionate about, right? So I would put that down and on to the next thing. I've been kind of criticized for this over my life, because I do just kind of know when I'm done with something and when I'm ready to pick up the next thing. But it's not a jump like that for me. For me, let's look at my massage therapy and body work practice. Yeah, I was also doing Reiki, but I wasn't formally doing readings at the time, and readings mediumship started to come to me, and I started to be aware of spirit people and no information. And then I mentored for many, many years, I was still doing massage and mentoring and mediumship on the side, because that's what felt interesting, that's what felt exciting. That's what fulfilled me. And I didn't know if I was going to make that a business or not. I didn't know if that was even possible for me, right? So it's not necessarily about the end result. It's about what does your soul want to enjoy along the way? What are you curious about? What holds your curiosity, even if it frustrates you? I think that's the important piece too, because Don't think that just because these spiritual gifts are quote, unquote natural gifts, that they're not frustrating. They are. It's work, it's effort, it's so much personal development that goes into expressing these spiritual gifts. And I'm not saying this to discourage anyone, because I do love this work, and I love getting to have this form of expression. But the way Andy said it, and he had told me that he learned this from a medium of the past called Gordon Higginson that was one of his mentors. Gordon Higginson ran the spiritualist national union for many years, and the Arthur Findlay College, which is the mediumship and psychic arts college in the UK and Stansted. You can look it up. It's a lovely place, but, and I'm going to probably misquote, because this is a telephone quote, meaning, like through a person to another person, to another person. But the story goes that Gordon would say, Gordon was a powerful, profound medium, but also had a shoe cobbler business. And the story goes that Gordon would say, if there is another job you can do, and Andy says this too, if there's another business, another job that you can do that sustains your life, do it and do your mediumship or your spiritual gifts as a hobby or as a passion or as a project, because once we put the pressure to monetize on the spiritual gifts, it becomes much harder. There's a vulnerability of the expression of these spiritual gifts, and when we are having to worry about if our client's going to leave us a bad review, or if someone's going to be mad at us, or if someone's not going to like what we say, it does make it feel a lot harder. And I think I'm just throwing this in here to partially acknowledge so many of you that listen to this podcast and are a part of this community, very valuable part, by the way, and I love you all so much. Just know that you probably do have gifts. You probably do have gifts that your soul wants to explore and wants to express, and it probably is part of the purpose of this lifetime for you, but it doesn't mean that you have to set up an end goal and reach it. It doesn't mean that it has to look only one way. It doesn't have to be attached to only a certain outcome or to a capitalistic monetization to be your quote, unquote, purpose, right? So I just feel like we need to rework that word purpose in our society and maybe move it towards expression fulfillment, more of something that contains all of those because the spirit world teaches me over and over and over, not only through what they choose to communicate, but also through the regrets that they choose to share. And it's not regrets about not climbing higher on their proverbial corporate ladder of whatever job they did. It's often regrets about not taking the time to really understand their loved ones, or really be present with their loved ones, or sometimes they express regrets about not working on themselves, or not understanding challenging parts of their own personality and how they affected their loved ones, because just thinking about our work in the world really is missing what I think is the main part of purpose. The spirit world acknowledges purpose as a level of love, the most loving choices we make for ourselves, the most loving choices we make for others, but coming from a place an intention of love, expression through love, what are you passionately needing to explore or express? And the other bit of it that I really want to lock in for you is I was under some strange illusion, probably because I watched a lot of media as a kid, but that almost like time will stand still and your purpose will fall from the sky as this, knowing that drops in and you will a light bulb will go off in your mind, and you will know I am supposed to be a zoologist, or whatever it is, that didn't happen for me, and it didn't happen for most people I have met in the world. So if you're one of those people, just know that I don't believe that's how purpose often comes in, because as part of these qualities that our soul comes in with, we don't necessarily have access to all of them at one time. What do I mean if we're born as a little, tiny human being with all of the core qualities of our soul, certainly there are things we need to learn and experience while we go through this world for those qualities to develop and sometimes for certain qualities to rise to the surface. It's why you've heard me say that not all mediums have their mediumistic gifts as a kid, is it living somewhere deep inside your soul? Yeah, sure, but it needs to move to the surface. Your soul needs to move that gift of mediumship to the surface. We can't force the gifts to the surface. They have to come up naturally. It's why it is said that even the best teacher cannot make you a medium if you're not having mediumistic experiences in some way already doesn't mean that it doesn't exist within you. It just means that's not ripe, it's not ready, it's not come to the surface yet. So just know that as you continue to experience and explore and express and be curious in life, other things will call your interest, and there's not only one path to get to what your soul wants to experience. There's lots of paths. There's lots of ways that you can go, lots of collection of experiences you could have to then, hypothetically, make your gifts ready to be explored. It doesn't have to be spiritual gifts. It can be just about anything, but sometimes it's only going through certain experiences that we get access to these parts of our soul, it's only through following certain breadcrumbs and picking them up and getting curious and moving in that direction, and that is part of our free will, and it's why I believe our soul is not necessarily attached to the job that we do or what we become in the world, but more concerned about our experiences and our expression. So if you feel like you're starting to feel a stir around wanting to deep, deeper, more deeply understand your purpose, or deepen your understanding of yourself or your spiritual gifts, it's through the breadcrumbs. It's almost never going to be a giant light bulb that just goes off and then the path is made clear to you once in a blue moon. I think that can happen, but I don't think it's kind of the standard way it works for us. I believe that there are breadcrumbs presented to us. Maybe you go to a presentation and you get very curious about really. Writing, or maybe you go to someone else's dinner party, and then you get very curious about a recipe, and you think, I wonder if I could make that recipe, even if you're not a cook, right? And then you follow that breadcrumb, and you do some research, and you do some different trials of this recipe, and you discover, oh my gosh, I do really love to cook. How else could I use this, right? So I think so often we are conditioned to want to look outside of ourself, for someone else, to give us an answer, give us the cheat codes, right, so that we can just get on with it already. That's not at all our purpose. That's not at all why we're here. It is in the unfolding. It is in the expansion and the exploration and the picking up those breadcrumbs and being curious and just being willing to explore. I believe our purpose is a collection of experiences and not one job or one path that we march our whole entire life. And even if you are someone, let's just say I used to have a client that was a profound researcher in brain studies and studies, specifically at a very high level of research, advancing Alzheimer's and dementia, those types of conditions. And while this person is incredibly accomplished in this area, this is not the only area of their life. I don't believe their soul would be fulfilled if they only focused on the research and nothing else. Is that incredibly important and doing a wonderful service to the world? Absolutely, is it incredible offering of not just this scientist, but also the teams that they have worked with over the years. For sure, this person actually also teaches and teaches what they know, and that's a fulfilling aspect. It's not just the research aspect, right? Not only teaches on bigger stages in the world about these conditions, but also to students who are learning and researchers and doctors and medical professionals. But we could look at it and say, Oh, that's that person's purpose, for sure. It's not what that person always did. It's not their passion hobby. They actually have a totally different passion hobby, working with animals that has nothing to do with the research or the science or this incredible offering that they're making to the world. Their passion is something totally different, and the relationships that they have and this spiritual exploration in their life don't tie back to their work whatsoever, and that's how they feel fulfilled. And the truth is, those elements of this person's life, just like any of us, is true for all of us, work together, so when they are off doing their animal work that they love to do. It is inspiring them or freeing up their energy, so that when they do go back to the lab or back to teaching, they have more inspiration. Their energy is recharged. They can be fulfilled in a different way. So it's not so one note, this idea of purpose, life, purpose, it's more of a symphony. It's more of what other elements are you working into weaving, into braiding, into the symphony that is your life's offering. And when we're on the spirit side, I believe all of us gets to look at the life that we have lived in this lifetime. Look at the connections we've made, the relationships, the people who we've touched, whether we know it or not, emotionally, the offering that we've made to the world. But I don't believe our offering is only one note. I believe we are meant to have full, well rounded human experiences filled with highlights and happiness and joy and wonderful moments, but also tempered and sprinkled with grief and with loss and with some really hard questions and situations that we have to face, that we get to choose how to then alchemize those things in our life, in our past, whether for you it's trauma or whether for you, you had an idyllic childhood, and that set you up in a strange way. It's alchemizing Those ingredients we've been given, continuing to let curiosity lead to pick up those bread crumbs, to use our free will to explore, and then those things that we want to keep continuing to braid into our own personal symphony that we're offering the world, and those things that we decide are not for us, it doesn't mean it's a waste of time. This is where I believe that adage, of all things can work together for the greatest good. I don't mean I don't think it means that everything happens to us for a reason. I think it means that all the things that happen to us, we can choose to learn, expand, grow and explore and express from them, and that's what helps create purpose. I hope that makes sense. So really, just starting to think. About your own purpose in life, your own fulfillment, the expression of the qualities of you. And if you are someone who's searching for more fulfillment, more purpose, I really believe that the key is looking within. What are the parts of you that you love expressing? What are the parts of you that you feel challenged in expressing, and I know that because I do this podcast, I express a lot. You guys hear me talking a lot, but there's still a lot of things within myself that I wrestle with, that I struggle with, that I pull apart, that I'm looking at, the parts of myself that I don't present publicly, the parts of myself that have been through really hard, things that still rise up for me, that I still work on and work through. We all have those. Don't let that be the signifier of whether you have fulfilled a purpose. It's are you real time feeling fulfilled, feeling curious, feeling pulled forward, or feeling like there's something shiny up ahead that you're curious about, right? It doesn't have to be an attachment to an end result. I feel like that's a cultural conditioning of our world, that it has to be attached to an end result. Are you playing baseball so that you can be the best on your rec league baseball team and show everyone and get attention that way and feel loved that way. Or are you playing baseball on your rec league so you can have exercise and fun and community and yeah, maybe you can help out along the way to win the championship, but it's more for the experience of it, right? So while I do know that in our world. We do often need goals. We do need outcomes. That's part of what we need to live, part of what we need to pay our bills. I don't believe that it is totally intertwined with our purpose. I believe those things can be worked together, but they don't have to be completely bound to one another. So I would invite you to start thinking about those qualities that your soul wants to express, those qualities that you are curious about. And it's through that learning, that curiosity, that picking up that thing, whether it's a spiritual gift or an instrument or a microscope, and playing and letting yourself get curious. And for me, the reason that I continue to pursue mediumship. I mean, if you really knew me and knew my whole life story, I've done a lot of different things just because that's how my curiosity moves, that's how my mind moves, that's how my energy moves. And if I, if I don't, explore other things along the way it just really deflates me and leaves me not feeling great. So I'm I'm often exploring more than one thing at a time, even if I don't know if it's ever going to braid into my purpose, if it's ever going to be part of my expression of mediumship, or what I want to share in the world with you guys, or the overall symphony of my life, it might never quite braid in. Might be just something I'm interested in, just something for me, I do believe we we it's very important for us to explore those things, even if it's not going to ever monetize, even if it's not going to ever lend itself to your career, we can learn from everything. First of all, I think we all know that, but it's about exploring yourself and your expression and how you express the qualities, those unique qualities and unique blend of qualities that only you possess. We each have our own signature blend of qualities, right? We might have many of the same qualities of someone else, but through our own lens, through our own human experience through our own expression. They're all slightly different in the way we can apply them. So those unique, that unique, special blend of qualities that is you, the secret sauce of you. What are those qualities? What does light you up the most? Is it when you're sharing yourself with other people? Is it when you're hearing other people's stories? Is it when you're creating? Is it when you're using your brain power and really mentally processing or researching or figuring something out like a puzzle? It's knowing yourself, what are the qualities of you? And then that frees you up to be curious, right? And if we're releasing this attachment to outcome or monetization. Could you just be curious about the thing you're curious about? Could you just take a class for fun? Could you just watch something a documentary because you're interested in the information? Could you just have a relationship with someone that's not built on networking, and how are you exploring the relationships of your life? And how are you knowing others and allowing yourselves to be known? And I think you guys know this because I say it a lot, I don't think we have to be known by everybody or not in the same degree. So who are you choosing to really let into your vulnerable. World, and how are you growing in those relationships? That's all part of your purpose, that's all part of being fulfilled as a human being. So there's no magic wand here. There's no special pill to swallow that is going to tell you your purpose and how to monetize it, because I don't believe those things have to go together. And really, when the spirit world expresses regret, besides what we were talking about earlier, about the emotional connection or wishing they had been more present, sometimes it is around things like, you know, I wish I let myself have more days off. Or I wish I, kind of, you know, how we hear that saying, smelled the roses. I wish I smelled the roses along the way. I wish I took time to understand my emotions so that I could be a better whatever, dad, brother, sister, friend, grandma. So I really want to encourage you as part of understanding your purpose and your ideal work in the world and what you need to express, to start looking within at yourself. What are the top 10 qualities of you? And remember the other side of that coin, the challenge side of our qualities that is part of us, and that is part of our purpose to explore, express and quite frankly, often that challenged part inside of each of us, whatever it is for us as an individual, that is often one of the keys to moving forward in your own fulfillment. Often we hold ourselves back by being stuck in certain emotions or beliefs or patterns by the lens that we look through, or the judgments that we have right, the fears that we hold. These are the things that hold us back from exploring ourselves, from exploring what we want to express in the world. And let me just give you permission right now, before we close out that your offering to this world, your purpose, if you will, part of it's being fulfilled, and that's probably not going to look the same through your entire life. So what makes you feel fulfilled today might not still make you feel fulfilled in five years, 10 years, 20 years, 100 years, if you get it. So just really starting to crack the egg of potential and life purpose open a little bit looking at what are the qualities that you bring what are the qualities you want to expand in yourself? What are the things in this world that you're curious about that make you have questions or want to explore deeper? And how are little ways that you can start integrating that exploration of the things that you're curious about, of yourself, of how you connect with others in the world, of what you might have to offer. And the truth is, most of us what we have to offer. It is our story. It is our unique way of moving in the world. These are all part of our unique collection of gifts, and if we're using our purpose or our work in the world to find that worthiness of being loved or that feeling of being complete, it's never going to work, because we cannot feel Complete from just one element of our lives again, it's a symphony, right? It's not a ladder. So I'm so curious to know, what is the current fulfillment or direction or purpose of your life, and is it changed? Has it changed from when you were younger? Is it changed from what you thought you were going to do, the things that you've learned in life. Are you using that collection of experiences towards a symphony in a different way than maybe you thought you would? Or are you someone who still feels like I'm still searching for fulfillment, I'm still searching for purpose, I'm still searching for what lights me up? And again, I think the key to that and through that is just picking up the breadcrumbs of what you feel curious about and letting them move you to the next thing. Because if you would have told me when I was an actor and when I was on giant stages in front of 10s of 1000s of people, that one day I would be talking to the dead, talking to spirit people on the other side, I would have laughed right in your face. And many points along the way between then and now, I would have thought that's crazy. But it was only through picking up the breadcrumbs of what felt good to me, what fulfilled me, what made me feel curious or intrigued. And I started the sentence earlier, I realized, and I didn't finish it, one of the things that keeps me locked into mediumship, it's not because it's easy. When it's great, it feels amazing as a medium and it feels so connected and so beautiful. But when it's hard, it sends me soul search. So mediumship is not the easiest undertaking, but what keeps me in it, what keeps me working it, and what keeps me coming back, even when I get knocked down, it is this curiosity within me to explore, to express. My soul is not ready to put it down yet, and that's how I know it continues to be for me, it doesn't mean I'm not. Also, you guys know I teach, and I teach about intuition, and we have the pod, and we do other things. So I am doing other things that also help fulfill me. But mediumship just continues to, like tickle my curiosity. And there's more I want to know and more I want to learn, and I want to keep getting back in there. And I I don't always love doing the work of it, the meditation part and the self critique part. And, you know, there's some hard parts in there, but when I'm in the energy of the spirit world, and when I'm giving a mediumship communication, and when it's working, and when I am communicating what my spirit person needs to express, and when it is landing for my client, my recipient, in a way that is healing their heart or their soul, even if it's not in that moment, but I can just feel it getting in there. It's profound and meaningful to me as an expression of myself like nothing else. But when it's hard, it's hard, so I'm here to tell you, don't let the difficulty or the challenge of something make you feel like, Oh, I'm not meant to do this. Because things that are meant to grow us, remember, even if it's an expression that we're giving to the world, it's also meant to grow us. So when something's meant to grow us, it's not meant to be all smooth sailing, all easy peasy, all gimmies, right? We are going to have to work and churn and express and do work on ourselves. And there's so many pieces to it. And I really feel like that is one of the other ways to know when you are working in a purposeful way towards your overall life symphony, which could include many, many purposes in your life. It's, do you continue to feel curious? Do you continue to feel challenged? Does this continue to send you inward, looking at yourself, looking at, why am I offended about that? Or why am I feeling this way? Or, you know, our own stuff, basically, I really feel like that is part of knowing when we are in the vein of our purpose. And again, I just want to reiterate it one more time before we go, because I can't even tell you how many people reach out to me about life purpose. I don't believe there's only one flat purpose in our lives. I think there are many elements, many expressions, many pieces of us that we are braiding together in any given time period in our life that are all towards our greater purpose, and I feel like we continue to evolve and expand within that purpose. So it's natural if it feels like something that did fulfill you is now morphing or changing or calling you forward in a new way that is ideal. So let me know if this has opened your mind at all about purpose and what that really means and how all the experiences of our life can be used towards our highest and greatest expression in this lifetime. And I hope that this has just shifted your perspective a little bit about what purpose actually means, refocusing on those qualities that you want to express in your symphony and understanding fulfillment, rather than only climbing towards goals. So let me know how this resonates with you. Please share this with someone that you care about that is struggling with their understanding of purpose. That would really mean a lot to me, and I would love it if you would follow the pod wherever you are listening. Give me a like or a subscribe. Send me a comment. I try to read them all. Big hugs. Lots of love. Bye for now. From inside, spirits. You kick, kick kick.