Purpose is the simple sharing of Spirit that occurs when your heart opens wide enough in personal joy to activate those of others. Purpose lies in the everyday joy-filled, loving acts of caring and sharing that come directly from the heart and weave us all together as one family. Purpose isn’t a profession—it can be expressed in your profession, but it doesn’t have to be it, and often isn’t.
I have a friend who had a nervous breakdown and suffered clinical depression in his early 30s. Since then, he has been unable to hold down anything other than a few odd jobs. At 63, he hasn’t been a paid professional or employee anywhere in more than 30 years . . . and yet he is completely fulfilling his purpose.
The way he does this is by selflessly and quietly walking around the neighborhood being a good neighbor to those around him. He does simple things, such as getting out the hose to water the lawn or cutting the grass—not only at his house, but at his neighbors’ as well, especially when they’re out of town. In the winter, he trades in the lawn mower for a snow shovel and clears the sidewalks of snow and ice, making way for pedestrians to make it to the bus stop or train station to get to work.
He dabbles in the kitchen and frequently cooks up batches of cookies or bakes multilayered cakes. Then he randomly shows up at various other homes with a slice or two of cake or a few hot cookies in hand, along with an invitation for the neighbor to take a break and share a cup of coffee with him for a few minutes.
He loves to tinker with electronics as well, so he shows up to help with the latest TiVo installation, fix the short in the telephone line, or put in a new switch on the garbage disposal or washing machine so that no one has to call the service technician.
Is he doing all of this out of a sense of duty? Absolutely not. He simply does these things because he loves doing them. If you asked him whether he thought he was fulfilling his purpose through his actions, I’m certain he would say “Probably not,” since he doesn’t have a paying job.
Yet if you pose the same question to his neighbors and friends, they would respond quite differently. “He absolutely is fulfilling his purpose!” they would affirm. With his joyful, low-key contributions, he has transformed an impersonal city neighborhood into a place of belonging and community for all those he has touched over the years. He has more than fulfilled his purpose by simply sharing his gift of being a good neighbor and friend.
This brings to mind a woman who had been consulting with me for years, tortured about being unable to find or feel her purpose. While she, too, was a good friend, family member, and neighbor, her ego mind had her absolutely convinced that she’d wasted her life because her job as a secretary at an automobile dealership was utterly shameful in terms of its value.
Granted, the job itself hadn’t been particularly rewarding or terribly fulfilling, but her steady work had allowed her to be the primary breadwinner for her family, including three children, since her husband had had a stroke at 37 and had been unable to fully function ever since.
Her gift was her ability to pick up the slack, be consistent, provide stability, and do it all with love and goodnaturedness until the very last of her children graduated from college. Her purpose and love was holding the family intact, especially after her kids suffered the loss of an able-bodied father. Her job was secondary to her purpose. She said that she would have gladly cleaned toilets, cleared sewers, and scrubbed on her hands and knees if doing so was necessary, as long as this allowed her family to meet its basic financial needs, kept the kids at home, and permitted her husband to heal.
The entire time her children were growing up, she never even pondered the idea of purpose. She was too engaged in it to wonder about it. But once her kids were grown, her husband was relatively stable, and the extreme stress was subsiding, her ego began to taunt her, telling her that she’d missed out on her life. Cruel, yes, but egos tend to be that way.
In our last session, she felt rather desperate, no longer young or full of energy, and alone with herself. She asked, “What is my purpose?”
When I said that it was serving her heart, which in her case was the family, she seemed skeptical. “My kids are grown up and gone now,” she lamented. “Does this mean my purpose is over?”
“Not at all,” I replied. “It’s just evolving. You served the family in hard times, which you loved. Now practice serving in good times. Celebrate your togetherness now—encourage relaxation and discussions . . . even plan outings.
“Your purpose was to keep the family grounded and intact financially. Now that purpose can evolve into keeping the family grounded and intact emotionally. Call your kids. Be concerned with who they’ve become, and communicate with them. Take an interest in them as adults and enjoy them. That’s your purpose for now.”
She remained suspicious. “You mean I don’t have to personally stop the genocide in Darfur or ‘leave no child behind’ in school?”
“Of course you can campaign for those issues if they speak to your heart,” I replied. “But maintaining a loving, positive connection with your own children is just as important.”
She was quiet. “Well, that’s what I love most,” she mused. “That seems almost too easy.”
“That’s your ego talking. Listen to your heart now. What does it say?”
Again, she was quiet. After a moment, she spoke:“My heart says to relax. I’ve been attending to my life with love, so I’ve been doing the right thing for me.”
“Exactly,” I answered.
Purpose isn’t complicated. It’s not what you do that constitutes fulfillment—it’s that whatever you do, you do it because you love it and therefore are loving when you do it.
I have a friend who sells old clothing and junk on eBay, and she’s having the time of her life. She’s in purpose mode because in her energetic recycling endeavors, she’s having fun and infusing joy into the lives of those she touches. Her buyers have fun as well. The wheel of “stuff” goes ’round and ’round, but in the end all are satisfied. The result is a positive vibration that touches everyone.
Be very suspicious of your ego if it suggests to you that unless you’re single-handedly executing some heroic, selfless feat, you’re missing your purpose. A telltale clue that your ego is at work is the pressure it puts on you to do something “significant.” Any feeling or thought floating through your mind that you must do or be something special in order to fulfill your true purpose should be laughed at and exposed for what it is: a narcissistic ego trip.
The Spirit never demands to be or do something special. It only encourages you to be and do what you love. It’s not so much the action itself that makes something purposeful as it is the vibration that the action creates. If it creates a loving one, continue. If not, stop and reexamine what you’re doing.
For example, I had a client in Chicago who was obsessed with finding her purpose. A freelance writer covering what she called “meaningless yuppie materialism,” she was angry with—and judgmental of—herself and impatient with the way her life was unfolding, so she quit writing and turned to volunteer work.
During the period between the time she enrolled and the time she was actually assigned work, her ego stopped harassing her. Instead, it strutted around like a peacock with its tail spread. At last she could say what she was doing mattered . . . she could, that is, until she received her assignment.
Instead of saving Africa from AIDS, she was assigned to run a small mobile library in rural Texas. There was no glamour, no excitement, and no romance in this. It was only tedious, fairly boring work serving a poor community overrun with alcohol and methamphetamine abuse. She was appalled and disgusted. In spite of how loudly her ego crowed over her selflessness, her heart remained uninspired. In fact, just the opposite was true: She despised every minute of it and, sadly, hated the people she met as well. They were disinterested, unmotivated, and generally couldn’t care less about reading, leaving her angry and frustrated.
Nevertheless, she put in her two years, not only miserable herself, but
causing the already-miserable people around her even more misery as well.
Oh well, such are the diversions of the ego.
When we last spoke, she shook her head and said, “I was certain that was my purpose. It sure sounded good, anyway.”
It wasn’t. Now she runs a small bath-and-body shop in a friendly Chicago neighborhood and writes kids’ stories. No longer an angry, resentful volunteer, she organizes a children’s story hour in her neighborhood bookstore, publishes her own books, and feels that in her own small way she’s adding to the joy of the world.
The point of all of this is that purpose can’t be found outside you. Rather, it can only be found by opening your heart, connecting to what you love, and sharing with others. In the great equation of life, if we each pursue our purpose, all of our needs will be met.
Before you arrived, you and God had a talk and you hand-selected your gifts together. None is any more or less valuable than any other. In the Divine realm, if it comes from love and is shared with love, the gift is triumphant.
Your gift may be creating music, solving great mathematical equations, discovering new biofuels, reading stories to babies, mowing the lawn, or picking up garbage. The ego differentiates these things as more or less important, but not the Spirit. The Divine mind knows that all that comes from love is important, and every loving act contributes to the whole.
All gifts are equal in Divine mind. Claiming, valuing, and then sharing yours completely, without hesitation or interference from your ego, is one of the greatest and simplest secrets to loving yourself and living your Spirit.
What do you love? Sharing that fully is your purpose.
Simple Practice: Create
The highest, most joyful expression of the Divine Spirit within comes through creativity. Nothing is more powerful. Nothing is more self-loving. And nothing is more rewarding. It doesn’t matter what you create, as long as it makes your life more beautiful and satisfying, because all creativity is the Holy Spirit in action.
The ego mind doesn’t create; only the Spirit within creates. The only thing that the ego mind manifests is drama and frustration, leaving you and everyone around you depleted, exhausted, and miserable. Drama is the cheap, impotent substitute for true creative expression: You can tell whether you’re creating in the beautiful frequency of Divine mind or are swallowed up by the frequency of ego mind by the amount of it in your life.
For example, if you find yourself having frequent arguments with significant others, often feel angry and mistreated at work, spend vast amounts of time ruminating over comments others have made—or didn’t make, get easily offended, cause discord or get upset with others, and often announce how you have no choice and must simply suffer life as it is, you’re in drama. The same holds true if you overreact to change or spend time resenting the way things are or fearing the way they might be. If you dwell on the question What’s wrong with this picture? instead of focusing on what’s right, you’re in drama.
Culturally we’ve been scared away from our creativity by what my dear friend Julia Cameron, the author of The Artist’s Way, calls creativity monsters—the voices from the past and present who criticize, attack, ridicule, and judge us, and who banish us from owning and expressing our creativity with joy and abandon.
They’re the art teachers who gave your work low grades, the music teachers who told you that you couldn’t sing or play a tune, the friends who laughed at your dance moves, or the coach who wouldn’t allow you to perform in the all-school talent show. They’re the people who imply that creativity must be “good” in order to be valuable, who subject your work to public appraisal before you’re allowed to join the club.
These creativity monsters forget that creativity is the highest Divine right bestowed upon us all, and our creations are the voice and expression of our Spirit. Without creativity grounded in our daily lives as a personal resource of joy and renewal, our Spirits are muffled, muted, and denied
If we don’t allow ourselves to express ourselves creatively, we can’t live our Spirit. Being creative is one of the fundamental ways in which we do love ourselves and live our Spirit, and being creative will always succeed in bringing that love and life force forward.
One of the problems that distances so many of us from our creative Spirit is the notion that being creative is synonymous with being a professional or an aspiring artist. It’s not. It simply means making something new out of something that presently exists.
Being creative can be as simple as baking a cake; making a flower arrangement; rearranging the furniture in your living room; or trying out a new outfit, haircut, or color. It can be as uncomplicated as writing a poem, making up new words to a song, solving a crossword puzzle, or fixing a broken window yourself. There are so many ways to be creative that it’s impossible to name them all. Mostly, though, it means tapping into your inventive, beauty-oriented, loving Spirit and allowing it to come out and play for a while.
My daughter Sabrina, like her father, is highly creative in the kitchen. A lover of sweets but possessing a sugar and wheat intolerance, she never ceases to amaze all of us with her sugar- and gluten-free pastries, cakes, and pies. She doesn’t even follow recipes. She just experiments and sees what happens. Some of her culinary creations are delicious. Some are . . . well, let’s say, interesting and not necessarily edible, but still fulfilling and fun for her to invent.
Every time she’s stressed with school or overworked in the thinking department, we can be sure to find her in the kitchen, apron on, whizzing around like a mad chemist, conjuring up yet another guilt-free treat.
My other daughter is completely different. Always having been passionate about music, she expresses her creativity by making CD compilations of great recording artists, either for herself or her friends. This endeavor occupies her for hours at a time, but she always emerges with a great mix and a heart full of light.
I have a neighbor whose creative love is tinkering in the backyard. Armed with tools and a cheap radio, he spends hours rewiring old lamps, sanding doors, fixing stereos or vacuum cleaners, or dabbing paint on the house trim. When his partner of 41 years passed away several years ago, he thought that he’d die of grief right alongside her. The tinkering saved him. It paced his mourning and gave his Spirit respites of peace and calm. When overwhelmed, he’d wander out back and begin what he called a “mindless” project. He was accurate: Creativity relieves us of our ego minds and parks us squarely in the calm of our Spirit.
My mother not only encouraged creativity as a way for us to love ourselves and live our Spirit, she used it as a method of communicating directly with her higher self and with Divine wisdom. Her outlets were several, but centered on photography, oil painting, and sewing.
As a mother of seven children, all born close together, with my father’s aging parents to care for, she found that it was easy for her ego to get flustered and become quite upset at times. When this occurred, she would excuse herself and go to her darkroom, studio, or sewing room with a stern warning to us not to bother her. And we didn’t. But we did love when she retreated because while she often exited in a tizzy, she always returned in a good mood.
In the quiet efforts of sewing, developing photos, or painting, her concentration was so deep that her mind chatter quieted down. In the silence, she often heard her inner voice loud and clear, offering comfort, guidance, suggestions, and direction. She developed stronger-thanever powers of intuition in these long, quiet sessions of simply being creative.
My husband, Patrick, is highly energetic by nature, which at times can make it difficult for him to calm down. The creative effort he naturally gravitates toward during more stressful periods is work in the garden. Whether he’s pulling weeds, planting flowers, laying brick borders, or arranging flower boxes, he gets quiet and relaxes.
Sometimes when he’s restless, his ego has been known to start trouble, just to get things stirred up because he’s bored. He becomes argumentative and controlling, sticks his nose in w
here it doesn’t belong, and offers opinions no one wants to hear. Early in our marriage this drove me nuts. I thought that he was just a troublemaker. Although it took a while, I eventually saw through the surface of his behavior and recognized that all this drama was being stirred up because he didn’t know that he needed to be creative. Once I pegged the issue, I knew what to do. Rather than fighting it, I redirected it.
I bought him paints, brushes, and canvases for Christmas. I asked him to make us holiday cards, write poems for my Website, and cook gourmet meals for dinner. And he did. The minute he engaged his creative Spirit, the drama stopped and he was happy.
Many who have suffered life’s atrocities have found a saving grace in their creativity. I once knew a woman named Lydia who had lived in Bulgaria, where she suffered many social, emotional, and political indignities while the country was under a Communist regime. Yet, although she lost much and had little, she was able to knit. And knit she did—so well, in fact, that she became a master. Eventually she moved to Canada with no more than the clothes on her back and her knitting needles.
It was slow at first, but soon Lydia had those needles clicking away for hours a day. Her work was so beautiful that she sold her creations instantly. In two short years, she had her own shop and two employees. She sold her wares and taught classes. “It’s my love to create something beautiful,” she told me when I met her at a workshop in Toronto. “I was born rich with my ability to create.”
Wow! Now that was a Spirited comment. And her beaming smile also attested to her Spirit.
My grandmother—my father’s mother, Antonia, who died when I was five years old—was very creative and filled with joy. She cooked, sewed, sang, danced, decorated, and celebrated. Because she was so creative, she was confident. Rather than fear or suffer deprivation, she used her creativity to look for a way to fill the lack. And she found it.
The Answer Is Simple- Love Yourself, Live Your Spirit! Page 10