Session 9: Finding our Purpose

Positive Affirmation: My life has great value and purpose.

Seamus: We’re going to start with the big question. What is purpose?

Ned: It is God’s individual will for us; that is the short answer. I believe my purpose was given to me by God when I came into this world. My purpose is the destiny in my soul. I don’t believe that it’s something we create on our own.

I used to think that God’s will was something outside of me. When I was younger I remember wondering how I would ever know God’s will. It didn’t seem relatable or within my reach. When someone talked about God’s Will, it seemed more like rules than God’s actual will. Then later in life, I thought my purpose was going to be given to me by some divine voice.

I searched for purpose for many years. It wasn’t something that I just thought about here and there. I remember being very young and thinking, “I have a purpose. What is it?” I wanted to know—I needed to know. I sought out different masters and teachers, asking them, “What’s my purpose?” thinking that they could give it to me.

I never did receive a definitive answer. Then one day it became clear to me: my purpose happens from one moment to the next. It’s not one thing! My purpose is a series of things that happen over the duration of my life.

Seamus: I wanted to start off this part of our series about finding our purpose with that question. It’s a rather large question, but this sets up the rest of this part of the interview. Now, if we are to take it back a little bit, at what age do you think we begin wondering what our purpose might be?

Ned: I think it can come at any age. I remember being very young and thinking, why am I here? These questions were always on my mind. There is no particular age when we start thinking about it. I think it’s something that should come naturally. Some may never give it much thought.

Seamus: When I think back to when I was a youngster, the most common question was, “What are you going to be when you grow up?” The question refers to what we want to do for a living. To me, that’s when the seed was planted that I was meant to do something. Then sometimes the things that you dream about get squashed out by realities or certain influences, like your parents.

You start seeing possibilities and become interested in what other people are doing. However, these dreams may be curtailed by statements like “starving artist.” Your parents may say, “That’s not really a stable income.” You can end up wondering what it is that you’re supposed to do for a long time. That can become quite stressful.

Ned: That’s the thing, Seamus. There is a paradigm that your purpose is one thing. At a young age, people start asking us, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” We then get this idea that our purpose has everything to do with what type of job we want to do.

What if our purpose was much bigger than a job? Because we correlate this idea that our purpose is linked with our job, we assume that’s what our purpose is. I’m way more than my job. That’s not my purpose; that is one of my purposes.

Purpose is something that is realized over the duration of our life. It happens from one moment to the next. The thing about purpose is that we don’t ever get ahead of or behind our purpose. If you didn’t fulfill your purpose for three years, you wouldn’t be three years behind in your purpose.

Our purpose is with us, no matter where we go. We can’t shake it. When we surrender to the moment and rest in our soul, our purpose becomes clearer. Only then is our purpose revealed to us. Who and what is around you determines your purpose right now. In the next moment it will be something new. For me, realizing this has been very freeing. There is not one thing I need to figure out.

Seamus: By thinking our purpose is one giant thing, we’re setting ourselves up for expectations of something grand. Overthinking it keeps us trapped in our mind, contemplating our purpose. If we don’t ever think that we have found our conclusion, we may feel that we don’t have a purpose or that it is too hard to reach.

Ned: If we are trapped in our mind we may never live our purpose. The mind keeps us trapped in our desires, holding us back from a more purposeful life.

I have already begun writing my next book. It is about the layers of the soul, and how the deeper we go into our soul, everything in our world changes. Your outlook and your view on everything around you change the deeper you go. After this session, I am including the first chapter of my next book as a bonus and a preview for my readers.

For years the notion of my purpose tore at my self-worth. I felt it was something I needed to know. I knew that I had a purpose. But now that I have been able to step back and turn inward, my purpose has become obvious to me.

Seamus: Do you remember the light-bulb moment specifically?

Ned: It was a slow build-up and a progression of understanding. The light-bulb moment was, “Yes, life is just full of purposeful moments.” That was the conclusion I came to. My whole concept of purpose has changed. It’s still the most important thing for me. That realization was the end of wondering and the beginning of discovering.

Understanding my purpose has given me specific instructions to move forward with. When I live my purpose, which is my destiny, it is the perfect life that has been tailored for me. When you are living your life, doing the things that you are most naturally inclined to do, is that a struggle? I think not.

Seamus: I can relate to that as well.

Ned: I said in the last session that joy is the heart’s way of saying thank you for following it.

Seamus: Yes, absolutely. We were talking about the length of one’s journey to reach the goal. It can be trying and difficult at times, but I feel like devotion to whatever it is you are investing yourself in is what gets you there. In your book Be Love, you talk about how a goal is the minimum you can achieve, whereas when you add devotion, it delivers you miles past any finish line or quitting point. You say that purpose is a dear subject to you, but also that when you were younger, you weren’t sure what your purpose was. Why do you think it was so important to you?

Ned: I knew I had to get to it in this lifetime. My future was pressing on me at an early age. Everything I’m doing now and will do is why this subject is so important to me.

Seamus: Did you think it was your salvation?

Ned: No, I didn’t know why I felt that way. At the time I felt an intense pressure in me. I had to live my purpose. When I met the Ishaya monks they talked about devoting ourselves to our path and getting to our freedom. After I became an Ishaya and began to practice meditation, I knew there was something there for me.

I knew enough at that time that I had to awaken. When I look back, I see that I’ve had some sideways movement where I set down my meditation practice and took some time out. My awakening was very confusing to me. When I changed one belief, it challenged several others, causing periods of confusion. My mind was at odds with my emerging understanding. Also, I was at war with my emotions. Under the surface, my anger was coming to a boil. I was stuffing my true feelings down because I had a hard time accepting my sensitive side. My gender programming had led me to believe that being loving was weak. By learning how to stop identifying with my emotions and the thoughts running through my mind I began to embrace my empowerment. At this point in my life, nothing is stopping me in my journey to living my enlightenment.

Seamus: That’s awesome. Why do you think that there are expectations for what people ought to do?

Ned: It’s really about projection. If your parents were self-employed, and your parents’ parents were self-employed, then they probably expect you to become self-employed. A lot of times people are projecting what is in their consciousness onto you. They project what they feel is possible for you, because of what they find possible for themselves. They also project limitations.

Seamus: Right—it’s like Thomas Keating’s story, where his father was a lawyer and had funded Thomas’s education. He went to Yale and a few other schools. His father was trying to give him the best education possible. When Thomas decided that he wanted to go to a monastery instead of practising law, his father had conflict with that, because he had placed expectations on Thomas. His dad had put all this money into his education hoping for a certain outcome for him.

Expectations come from parents, but they also come from media, from people saying things like, “Success is what you drive. It’s where you live, it’s the things you have. The clothes you wear, the food you eat, the people you keep as your company.” All those things are expectations for what is perceived to be a successful person.

I think people get pretty jumbled up with the definition of success. I think as far as living your purpose goes, it might not always mean money. There are other things that you’re going to be provided with that give you a whole lot more satisfaction.

Ned: I have spent twenty-five years marking skin and I intend to spend the next twenty-five years marking hearts. I want to put marks on people’s hearts and I want to share and become love, to fully become the love that I am in this lifetime; that’s my goal. I’m no longer focused on what makes money and drives worldly success. My purpose will give me everything I need. This is faith.

Seamus: Is there a way to discover our purpose without creating expectations and fantasies in our minds about it? How do we really know what is reality?

Ned: I’m not creating expectations about my future. I’m more interested in living the present. How we avoid creating expectations is to allow our purpose to happen naturally. I no longer feel the need to squeeze this moment into something that it’s not. Again, that is our mind chasing desires: it only draws us away from our purpose. 

Our purpose follows us around each step of our journey. We don’t have to chase it. We don’t have to try to figure out anything beyond our immediate future. When we let go, we stop pushing the ball uphill. We simply allow our purpose to be what it is, from one moment to the next. We surrender ourselves in our purpose, here and now.

Seamus: If we don’t like what we currently do, often our mind dreams up and cultivates ideas about what we think our purpose is. If we are saying our heart knows what our purpose is, differentiating between our mind and our heart could be difficult. You might not know that straight away and there could be big risks to changing careers, for example.

Ned: That is where the mind enters the equation. Our mind makes things more difficult than they need to be. The mind also tracks progress; it looks at the distance between the start and finish and it calculates all the effort in between. Whereas the heart only deals with the present moment and that’s all we ever need to deal with. This moment right now.

I look at my dreams as a goal, but my potential is way beyond my wildest dreams. Our dreams may only be a sliver of our true potential.

The difference between dreams and reality is what you are willing to believe in. Our dreams can become our reality; it is a matter of where you put your focus. Where do you see yourself? Are you willing to allow your greatness to unfold? Sometimes people are afraid to start living their purpose because they are not willing to accept their greatness. I was told I was going to write a book that would change the world. I’ve sold about one thousand of copies of my book Be Love so far. I don’t think it’s changing the world, but it’s changed my world and that of a few others. I don’t really care if that’s true or not. My job is to take care of what’s in front of me right now. That’s all we ever have to deal with. The rest is details. The mind likes to fuss over minuscule details, whereas the heart just knows. The details will take care of themselves. I never worry about the details.

Never settle for a life that is less than purposefully yours.

Seamus: You talk about living another’s purpose. What do you mean by that?

Ned: Years ago, I realized I was living my parents’ purpose. I think a lot of people do this. We will start to live another’s purpose. We sometimes live our children’s purpose, or we will live our partner’s purpose or our parents’ purpose. It’s not that their purpose isn’t wonderful, but it is not yours. It’s not in accordance with the destiny that lies inside of your soul. We often adhere to social norms and gender roles. Those are not purposeful, either.

As a young man, I was very sensitive. In my mind this made me a sissy or a wimp, so I conformed to gender roles. I acted like a tough guy, which was like wearing shoes that didn’t fit. In the process of trying to live another’s purpose or live an imposed purpose that was not really meant for me, I became angrier and unfulfilled in the process.

I have realized that by living someone else’s purpose, I was living more from my mind than I was from my heart. The problem with living from our mind is that the mind only knows what we have put into it. It has no idea about the larger context of life, whereas the heart knows everything because the heart is the doorway into the soul. It is where we find God inside of us, and God knows everything. Why would we use a sliver of knowledge from our mind versus drawing our wisdom from deeper within ourselves? 

Some may reject what I am saying here because they think they are really clever. However, our deeper wisdom comes out of the silence in us. It reminds me of a story that my old teacher used to tell. He told about an inventor who created all kinds of different gizmos and gadgets, from garden hose attachments to major inventions. One invention that he was trying to create, he couldn’t figure out. He had one of the most brilliant minds in the world, yet he couldn’t figure out this one invention. He finally resolved to let it go.

Letting go was difficult for him to do because he was always able to create the things that came to him. Once he finally came to this conclusion, he decided to set everything down and take his dog for a walk in the park. While walking his dog, he suddenly realized how to create the thing that he had been toiling with for so long. He went home and to his surprise it worked. He found the answer. This was the greatest invention he’d ever made. 

Shortly after that, he slumped into a depressed state. What the guy realized was that he couldn’t take credit for it. It was truly not his creation. He then looked back at all his creations. He realized none of them had come from his mind. They all just came through him. He knew that this invention hadn’t come from him because he had already exhausted every corner of his mind. Having one of the most brilliant minds in the world, he was able to put things together in ways that baffled most. He realized that all his inventions were the product of the silence within himself. They came out of the wisdom of the silence: it was God moving through him. He had very little to do with the whole process.

 All we need to know is what is in front of us, in the next 200 feet. Jack Canfield tells a story about how you can drive across the country in the middle of the night. All you need to do is see 200 feet in front of you. I think that’s such a beautiful metaphor for life.

We are planners; we like to plan things because that’s what the ego likes. It gives the ego something to do. The ego wants to plan and predict and weigh and judge and calculate the whole trip of life, whereas life is really unfolding as a live feed happening in this moment. The future my mind has planned for, may never come. All we really need to do is keep looking in front of us. It’s okay to make plans and to have long-term goals, but allowing flexibility is what keeps us from getting hung up. I understand there are some logical things like saving for your retirement, of course, but those are exceptions.

Seamus: Sure, absolutely. In your opinion, when do you think people tend to change and choose to live their life?

Ned: There are many awakening points in life. My doctor friend Rod Johnson used to say that there are different points where people naturally start to awaken. I think it’s when we get to a certain point and don’t feel fulfilled in our life, or when we begin to look at our purpose.

I needed to get into a place in my life where I became hungry for change. I needed things to be different and I needed my mental health to take a dive. It forced me to get on my motorcycle and want to drive into a brick wall. I didn’t need to hit the wall; I needed the pressure that built in me, that drove me to want to do that. It caused me to get on with what I’m really here to do. The catalyst for awakening is different for everybody.

Seamus: In your book you explained four steps regarding how to live with purpose. Could you go through those with us?

Ned: Here is my take on how to live with purpose. I have narrowed it down the four steps:

1.     Learn how to let go of your thoughts.

2.     Follow your heart and listen to its wise instructions.

3.     Live only the life that is purposefully yours.

4.     Live deeply in the moment and watch for how you can serve the world rather than how the world can serve you.

Every great adventure begins with the courage to face the unknown.

Seamus: I particularly enjoy number four—how you can serve the world, rather than how the world can serve you. That’s awesome. I love that.

Ned: That came from the Ishayas. They often said, “The high road to unity is through service.” They believe that you must be in service. That’s part of what we are doing right now—we are serving the community through doing this podcast.

Seamus: Absolutely, man. Why do you believe that some people don’t break through and become stagnant as a result?

Ned: Saint Augustine said, “Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity.” That saying has been in my mind for many years. If we are not mindful, habits can turn into obsessions or addictions. Being stagnant doesn’t always equate to being less purposeful. Sometimes we need a bit of sideways or even backwards movement.

Stagnation is trying to recreate and control our days. If we feel we are stagnant in life, maybe it’s time to change our job, or to look at the status of your relationship with your friends and family or your partner. Maybe it is time to change your relationship with your mind and begin listening to what you know to be true. Inside, we all know what’s right for us. At times I think we ignore what we know to be true. We are afraid of our greatness or we are afraid of failure, whatever the case may be; they both keep us from moving forward. Our stagnation has everything to do with ourselves. We cannot place that on others.

Seamus: In your book you talked about being your own support team in your life. How important is that?

Ned: We must be the first player on our team. Who has time to be the captain of your team? We must be the one who starts and follows through with our endeavours. We can’t wait for others to take our hand. If we can’t support ourselves, then we can’t expect others to support us.

Seamus: Very important.

Ned: I have never accomplished my purpose by waiting for somebody else.

Seamus: Talk to me about the differences between authentic engagement with life and extracting worth from our actions.

Ned: Our authentic engagement with life is claiming and living our own purpose. It is our job to live the life that is purposely ours. The idea of extracting worth from anything is more about our ego. The ego needs to feel worthy. The soul doesn’t. Your soul is actually perfect and pristine; it requires nothing. I used to go to great lengths to feel worthy. The fact that I was born and am breathing makes me worthy.

I would put my self-worth up for debate over many things. If I tripped and fell in front of people, my self-worth was up for debate. If I felt stupid, it would challenge my ego. If we are trying to extract our self-worth from anything external, that is a sign that we are trapped in our mind.

Seamus: Getting to the end of this session, there are a couple more things I’d like to know. You are saying that purpose lives in our soul. That’s what it says in the book. How do we get to know what’s in our soul?

Ned: Our engagement with our soul happens directly through the silence. It’s a relationship we have with the silence within. When we go into the silence within, we begin to know our purpose. We just know what to do from one moment to the next. We learn how to live from that space.

Seamus: Why is it so important to live your purpose?

Ned: That’s how we started this interview. It is God’s will for us. In the Lord’s prayer it is written, “Thy i.e., God’s will be done.” I believe that the will of our soul is our purpose. I believe the will that lives in our soul will be fulfilled over the duration of our life. It happens over the duration of all our lives. We will eventually have to get to it, before the soul dissolves itself back into God. The idea that we are a separate soul or a fragment of God is an illusion. When we get deep into our soul we discover that the separation between God and ourselves is made in our mind.

Do we have a purpose? We have many purposes; the idea is to serve our purposes from one moment to the next.