Finding my purpose

[RohanMitchell]

Hi everyone,

I recently had a breakthrough in finding my life purpose, and I'd like to share what worked for me, since I struggled with it for some time.

1) Intention
I hadn't made much progress before now, but I have wanted to find my purpose for a long time (maybe a year or so). I formally committed to the intention "I am conscious of my life purpose and expressing it to the best of my abilities." about two weeks ago, and I wrote about my vision for it daily, using Steve's Feeling Blessed article as a guide. I found the writing helped to keep me focused on what I wanted to think about instead of drifting off onto another topic.

2) Polarity
The major breakthrough happened when I looked at my purpose through the lens of polarity. I chose to use love polarity (contribution orientation), and looked at finding my purpose as a creative endeavour, not just passive detection. This was quite different from how I'd been previously approaching the problem. Once I got this mindset, I formed the intention:
"I am now noticing elements of meaning that I can creatively combine to form my life purpose. As I do so, I feel grateful that I have this tool to increase the power of my contribution. I select the most strongly resonant elements I have access to to form my life purpose statement. Having done this, I move my intentions ever outward in creativity and contribution. I refine my life purpose statement as my understanding of reality becomes more accurate, and I am able to make a more profound contribution."

3) Brainstorming
I started mind-mapping the things that I thought were important. As a guide for this process, I used the question "What elements of meaning can I combine to create a life purpose statement for myself that will result in the greatest possible contribution from me?" From this I got the answer "My life purpose is to connect with the greatest need that I can in some way fill, and to creatively fill that need."

3) Recursion
That initial statement was very general (in fact, I suspect it might be close to a general-purpose lightworker purpose statement). In this phase, I continually asked myself more questions to explore what I'd found so far. These are the important stepping stones I came up with along the way:

"What is the greatest need that I can in some way satisfy?"
"My purpose in life is to make the greatest and most meaningful contribution I can make to the perfection of this reality."
"My purpose in life is to wake up to what is real to me and to courageously pursue it, simultaneously reaching out to others and helping them to do the same."
"What is real to me?"
"What is real to me in relation to helping others?"
"Dreaming and courageously and passionately pursuing those dreams, and encouraging and helping others to do the same."
"My life purpose is to dream, courageously and passionately pursue those dreams, and to encourage and help others to do the same."

I fiddled with the wording a bit from there, but that's the essence of it. It feels right to me and I'm happy with the answer I came up with. Out of the whole process, I think the key point for me was to use polarity view my purpose as a contribution.

There are a few other things that helped. Along the way, a bunch of memories popped up that supported my answers. If I hadn't yet had those experiences, I might not have been able to make the connections (that might be part of what held me back earlier). Secondly, I did the strengths finder test from Now, Discover Your Strengths about four months ago. The results from that pointed me in the right direction, since I came up with strengths to do with vision, goals and disciplined organisation. I'd recommend the book and the test it gives you access to, since it seems to be very accurate and insightful.

And that's about it. Thanks for reading, and I hope you've found this helpful!

Cheers,
Rohan

[sbdiane]

But isn't dreaming and pursuing dreams just as vague?

[RohanMitchell]

After thinking about it, I agree, it's still a bit vague. I have a specific feeling I recognise when I'm working towards a dream that matters, but I haven't defined it as closely as I could. I'll keep working on it. Thanks for your feedback

Rohan