I Am Always Aligned With My Purpose Even When I Think I’m Not
For me, our true purpose flows.
It has movement.
It is softly evolving and expanding.
And it is present through everything we do.
Getting on the awareness trail
I’ve been detoxing emotionally, physically, mentally, and spiritually from so many things for so many years.
Going through many death and rebirth cycles. Walking away from damaging and sabotaging ways and breaking free from all the crap I absorbed growing up, either from:
- society,
- a close-minded and restrictive school system,
- a complicated father-daughter relationship,
- politics,
- social constructs,
- being a woman in our (now crumbling) patriarchal world.
From just about everyone and everything.
When we start as children in this world, we live for the day, follow our hearts easily, and our intuition is mostly on point. But we are so impressionable, and we absorb so very much, directly and indirectly.
I still get surprised by some things that challenge me, things that have come up to be unlearned that I didn’t even know were hidden there.
So what I do is I observe myself and my inner dialogue, try and find the roots of what comes up (if possible), release them, forgive myself, and restart with an open heart.
Such constant unlearning takes a great chunk of energy, but it is so worth it.
I kept purging for a few years until I realized that I would continue to cyclicly move upwards in the spiral of life. Meaning that I was going to encounter many of these moments over and over again and that this repetition was part of the process of healing our wounds deeper and deeper.
We are addressing them. We are not repressing them. So we can relax knowing we are doing what we can to heal. But healing internally is not, for the most part, a “one-time” event. This is why it helps to trust, so that we can surrender and ride the wave with its ebbs and flows.
By riding this wave, we can continue the road of spiritual growth and mind-body-soul connection while also experiencing and enjoying life on this planet.
This great journey we decided to partake in, with the amazing duality of being grounded here on Earth with Pachamama and the experiences we are living here daily, while also being able to catch the wind and glide when connected with spirit, with our higher self, our guides, our ancestors, and the Universe.
When we get into that current, it takes us back to ourselves, to our center. We should hold it tight and live from that place of surrender, that place of unconditional love, as often as we can.
Walking in the shadows
So in my journey, my spiral, one of the things that continually comes up to be released is the feeling like there’s always something more I need to complete, something more I have to learn to feel whole, to feel with purpose.
That little something makes me feel that if I wait just a little longer, there will be a more fertile ground for sharing myself and my art. That voice has kept me waiting and waiting, instead of putting myself out there and being vulnerable, being me.
As if I’d get better if I wait just a little bit longer.
The eternal student that lives inside me who loves learning feels like this a lot.
Sometimes I just need to check in with myself, be gentle and understand that I am where I should be. It is my path, after all. Other times, I can see it is just fear masquerading under perfectionism or obsessing over details and derailing any advances I’ve made.
I banish those feelings constantly. That lingering impression that there’s a download to go through, an upgrade to complete.
On this long path back to myself, while I have fine-tuned my tribe and surrounded myself with people who love me unconditionally, it can still get a little lonely.
I feel joy for the collective as I see people all around me blossoming into their fullest, most beautiful, and vulnerable selves. Then I feel a bit sad for myself for not yet launching into full blooming mode, but this just pops up when I feel like I am “chasing my purpose.”
I have practiced a lot of gentle self-love and self-compassion to help me go as softly and as organically as I need to.
However, I still find it difficult to navigate this new un-corporate-like structured world. Finding the balance between my masculine and feminine energy has been a great challenge since I was so on and doing, doing, doing for so many years.
Switching gears and opening myself to expand into my feminine energy wasn’t as easy as I thought. And if you stay in the yang energy, you mainly focus on results, not on the process—in my case, my creative process.
Re-purposing our purpose.
For a time, I kept believing that I was waiting for my (whole) purpose to unfold before me. Magically.
I wanted the writer in me to come out, the woman in me to hold more sacred feminine circles, the healer and creative in me to take all the ideas from my drawing board (either my own or collaborations), bring them to life, and do them all simultaneously!
As if being home full time with an energetic toddler running around, a son in his senior year of high school, a relationship, and all the other things I love that I make space for in my life didn’t even exist.
I was waiting for it all to come together so that then I could be. But I was already Be-ing. I thought I needed to do it all. I had been asking myself on and off for years, “what is my purpose?”
That was, of course, before I realized that we are always living (in) it.
I’d receive messages telling me: “You are precisely where you need to be,” but kept falling back on waiting for a big reveal.
It still comes back in different ways to heal and heal all its different sides. Once, it came as the need for me to completely define myself. As if I needed a label to create. And we don’t. We can start slowly and be in our purpose every day.
For me, our purpose aligns with who we are at our core, not to a certain job, and it is not solely our passions.
We came on this human adventure to experience it deeply, learn from it, and find the way back into our hearts. To live to the fullest and express ourselves through all the different things we do and love. To share our journey with others, in whichever ways we feel like, and to connect.
As we make way and forge our road, we are also making space for others coming right behind us, as they’ll make space for the ones behind them, just like our teachers and guides did for us. I find this to be an integral part of our purpose.
So for me, our purpose is entrenched in the way we live, the way we love, the way we interact every day with ourselves, our tribes, our communities (physically + virtually), animals, nature, and the planet.
Our purpose is always with us when we own our truths, when we place loving and fierce boundaries and when we live from our hearts as much as we possibly can.
It is here we find our voices and start using them daily. It is here we feel our feelings, we listen to our bodies, we silence the mind, and we connect with spirit.
We are always connected to our purpose
It is only when we suppress our feelings, our intuition, and our lives that we don’t feel aligned with our purpose. When we do this, it might start showing up in small or even big ways in our physical bodies. We need to listen to those signs to get us back on track.
Do the things that lift you up and get you through.
Have your self-care tool kit ready, and keep your tribe close.
When we feel detached from our purpose, we can always go back to feeling in alignment again by practicing meditation often and being very still. In that spaciousness, we can sometimes see the extent of how our lives are woven together into a beautiful masterpiece. We can even see how it extends to our tribes, communities, and the wider collective.
Even when we can’t fully see that we are living our purpose, we just have to trust and remind ourselves that we will be able to see it when we change the micro-perception we are operating from to the macro point of view of how the world is being beautifully woven together.
So even when you feel you haven’t found your thing or have yet to understand how exactly to be of service to humanity or how you will make a mark on the world, keep doing you. This way, you are navigating your purpose. By living your life, following your heart, and sharing the love.
I used to think that I would never get here. I worried until I surrendered completely and decided to quiet the mind, listen to my body and follow my heart as truthfully as I could.
So I kept doing all the things I love. All the witchy things, all the wild-woman things, all the body-emotional healing things, and practicing connecting directly with my body. I keep breaking old patterns and beliefs that make me fall, go dark, and rise again.
But if you feel you need to sync up with what you want to do next in life, you could also pay attention to your life’s shadow work. The things that you work with over and over again, what you heal, where you evolve and grow. Because that’s what you know in your heart and soul. All the ins and outs can be seen through your writing, on your canvas (or insert preferable artistic process here).
You can see it through your healthy and healing relationships, through your healing relationship with yourself, in your conscious parenting, in the workshops you give, or the ones you attend. It goes wherever you go and share your energy with, including yourself.
It is in the little and the big things woven into our fabric.
It is the things that we love all fused together. It’s seen through your daily interactions in life. It’s in the compassion you radiate to the world. We are not perfect, but we are capable of so much love, compassion, and empathy.
The times that I get in my way, I feel as if I am chasing my purpose instead of living it, and that is when I have to come to a complete stop.
I take a break and remember that I am living my purpose.
I accept it, I understand it, I embrace it.
Ever-evolving raison d’être
We have to know that there is no there to get to; there is just now. And even if you think you are moving towards your purpose (in the future), you are only kidding yourself because you are living it NOW.
Take it in.
So instead of trying to “find” our purpose, why don’t we just live it?
I am doing just that and reminding myself to whenever I forget.
We truly do not need big achievements and ridiculous goals to feel like we are living our purpose—unless that is what you want. Being compassionate and loving humans, by sharing our energies with the world, and being a beacon of light, makes a great difference.
That on its own is a significant contribution to the world.
And yes, even the days we deem as crappy fall into it as well. Because we work through them.
On those crappy days, we may decide to clear our minds and go out. Maybe we rest, eat chocolate, watch Netflix, or just retreat. It doesn’t matter because at some point, we fucking work through them. We feel shit, but we honor it because it makes a great difference to actually lean into it, as opposed to always sweeping it under the rug.
After all, it will always come up, one way or another. We each deal with things in a way that works for us. No judgment. So, even on the heavy and darker days that make us retreat, we are aligned with our purpose.
Just as we are never fixed or done with healing, we are never done with our purpose. It evolves daily with what we pour back into the world every second.
So remember:
I am ALWAYS (totally) aligned with MY Purpose.
Even when I feel I am not.
My purpose unfolds before me every day.
Every. Single. Day.