Step into your purpose

Photo by Jesse Bowser on Unsplash

"What inspires you? What excites you when you wake up in the morning? Go do that!"  ~Carol Mossa, How to Live a Wildly Creative Life

As a certified meditation teacher, I hear it all the time, "I can't meditate; I can't quiet my mind." Somewhere along the way, folks got the idea that meditation was all about relaxation, all about quieting the mind, and that if they couldn't quiet the mind, they couldn't develop a consistent practice or become effective meditators. I have spent years trying to dispel this myth, this misplaced notion. (For more information, check out: https://www.heygo.com/the-footloose-muse.) We've made it so hard to just sit, to sit and notice, and then without judgement, to allow the thoughts, sounds, and sensations to move on by. Those distractions? They are the gold. They are the practice.

It's the same thing with this notion of purpose. Once again, myths abound. Finding one's purpose has become a mystical quest, a head-scratching conundrum of confusion and inaction. We need to keep this simple. Let me try to get to the heart of the matter. What do you love to do? What's the one thing (perhaps there's more than one thing), the pursuit that if you gave yourself permission to do, you could do without hesitation, with passion, with vigor, with enthusiasm often and without guilt?

Your purposeful, purpose-driven life is right under you nose.

I'll use me as an example. I love photographing abandoned buildings, in fact I live for these outings. Hands down it's the one thing I could do every day. Urban exploration; that's my thing. So where's the purpose in that you ask? Over the years, through my camera lens, I have been able to share some of the most decrepit, rundown, sadsack buildings (most with horrific histories of abuse) with my followers, and in so doing, I have been able to uncover and reveal the intrinsic beauty among the ruins. 

I'll give you another example. I am a creative midwife. I help people give birth to their creative ideas. It just so happens I am uniquely qualified to carry out this work because I have given birth to countless creative ideas of my own. I know what keeps us stuck, and I know how to unstick you. Combined with my writing and communication skills, I get to live a purpose-driven life: spreading the word among followers to stop making excuses and reach for the creative stars we all came from.

So how do you derive satisfaction? How do you express your creativity? What gifts and talents can you offer the world? In other words, what inspires you? What excites you when you wake up in the morning? Go do that!

Can we make a deal? Can we stop mythologizing the notion of purpose, can we stop pretending we don't already know how to forge passion into intention? Can we just do what we love, share it with gusto and unabashed enthusiasm with the world? Step up, step into your purpose, step into your power.

I'll end with this quote from Rumi: "Let yourself be drawn by the strange pull of what you love. It will not lead you astray."