Sunday 28 February 2016

Purpose ~ Do you know yours?

Lately, the idea of ‘Purpose’ has been in my line of focus (I completed a show with Tom Campbell on Purpose). Purpose is this interesting concept that we have. We believe that our purpose is somehow tied up with our identity. So we have this grandiose concept of ‘what we do’ is ‘who we are’. What I mean by this is that we identify with what we do, what our ‘work’ is as part of our identity. And we also believe that as we define ourselves by what we do, our ‘purpose’ is somehow linked to our work. And our ‘purpose’ is our Soul’s Purpose. Our ‘purpose’ is ‘Who we are’, what our Soul has decided to work on in this life.

We also look outside ourselves for assistance to uncover this elusive ‘purpose’ in hopes that someone else can direct us to our living our highest potential and our new ‘work’ will be reflected within this discovery by someone outside ourselves. I always find it amazing that we put our hopes in another’s hands to tell us what our whole life has been telling us.

Every core issue is uncovering our ‘purpose’! Every dream and turn we have made in our lives has been to right us on the path of discovery of Who we are. What we chose as our higher education – even for those who were pushed by their parents into their unfulfilled or chosen field. How we live our lives. Every relationship. All these have helped us uncover this potential of who we are!

The problem of course is that we often are not our ‘authentic’ self and we are looking outside ourselves for our validation in hopes of discovering this ideal. As Tom Campbell suggests our Purpose is to Grow-up and BE Love.

A crystal child in the book “Communication with Children of Now” by Meg Blackburn Losey suggests we have two purposes: a major purpose is to ‘make a difference’ and the other purpose is to enjoy the game. Tom has added to the major purpose of this crystal child to not make ‘making a difference’ the goal, but to be motivated to BE caring and compassionate to others. This may seem like a subtle difference but if you are just doing things like volunteering because it’s the ‘right’ thing to do because it will make a difference in this world, then you aren’t doing it from your heart. Which means eventually you will bring your ego into this process, you will resent that some people get paid, that people are ‘doing it wrong’ and you will try to fix, change, or manipulate the ‘service’ and eventually be very unfulfilled and resentful because your ego is taking over your volunteer work. Offering to do volunteer works because you love it, because you want to care for others, and because you are a compassionate person mean you will enjoy it without involving your ego.

Our purpose really isn’t this elusive ‘thing’ that we do or have to discover. It is the Gift of Who we are! It may carry over into our work but our work isn’t what defines us. In fact, we could fulfill our purpose in everything we do. If we are BEing authentic, if we are BEing ourselves then we naturally are our work. Meaning, someone who is a ‘leader’ will be learning all their lives about leading. They would have had early experiences of both good and bad examples of leading; they would have done both good and bad examples of leading; and they will lead wherever they are or in whatever they do. We don’t just all of a sudden have someone tell us our ‘purpose’ and we have nothing to do with this information.

However, we may not be aware of our ‘gifts’ consciously and this is often because we don’t always have an unbiased view of our world. And we are usually attached to BEing a certain way.  So it is possible that we haven’t seen that from our childhoods we have always loved to communicate, that we have always been very social and extraverted, or that we have always enjoyed writing stories, blogs and exploring other ways to communicate. However, it should be no surprise that our purpose is to communicate because we have had many examples in our lives and probably ‘communicating’ is a large part of the lessons you are learning in your life. Do you see how this works? Our purpose is who we are and what we are learning in this life.

And if we are not be able to see what we do best our friends and family can often be the ones who can tell us what or who we are.

One of the ‘gifts’ in this life is uncovering the magic that lies in our lessons, in our struggles, and in our choices that we have made in our relationships. Experiencing this magic helps us free up so much energy and love within us. Remembering ‘who we are’ is so empowering when we can discover it ourselves when we find the magic in our lessons. And so it is important to know that all the struggles, pain and fears we have endured are part of the process of uncovering our Gifts and Purpose. And when we realize that this is all part of the Divine plan to own who we are and to live our Purpose it frees us from the struggle!

I invite you to find a way to BE who you are and express your Gifts through your Purpose in life. Then we can do the secondary purpose the young crystal child saw, which is to finally have FUN and enJOY the game of life!



Monday 1 February 2016

Love is…

I like to term February as Love Month, but what happens more often than not is that we think about what is Not Love. What do I mean by this? We think about love in February because of Valentine’s Day, which means we are thinking about ‘romantic love’. And most of our definitions of romantic love are constructs of love dictated to us through the use of media and our experiences from our childhood that defined love. Both of these ‘ideals’ are inaccurate and often have nothing to do with love at all, but are rather a reflection of our needs and wants in a relationship. Which is to say; that ‘love’ is what we feel we need reflected back to us through our significant ‘other’ or from any intimate relationship. We are actually ‘in love’ with an ideal of what we believe we can receive from another.

We tend to search for ‘love’ to be reflected back to us in all the wrong places hoping for our ‘ideal’ and then settling for not being alone. But what are we actually searching for?

We are searching for someone to meet our ‘needs’, our conditional expectations that we have set and we have often come with a list of these needs. Yet the only way we can actually have these needs met would be if we met them ourselves.

We ask for physical descriptions, romantic notions, and worse: we ask for the very things we are lacking within ourselves. An example of this would be after experiencing a long list of men who had commitment phobias we want someone who is committed to us. A worthy goal. However, if we have had a pattern of men (or women) who couldn’t commit to us, it is more likely that we have the commitment issue and our partners are just mirroring it back to us. And why would we do this to ourselves?  It may be that we do not feel safe in relationships and therefore choose men who can’t commit!

However, this doesn’t mean that our mirrors are exact replicas; rather it means if someone lacks commitment we attracted them or requested a ‘soul’ contract so that we can learn something about our Soul’s path. When we don’t learn it, we get more opportunities to open us up to the learning our Soul’s choice for us. It may not be commitment that is our issue. It may be self-confidence or it may be that we are learning to love ourselves and in both of these cases having someone with a commitment phobia would be perfect. And something as ‘big’ as self-confidence or self-love would take life times to learn.

The point I’m making is that our definition of “love” is often based on an unreliable source, whether it is [1] a romantic sentiment created through our media culture that is an imaginary ideal that has no truth or authenticity as it is a fantasy that has nothing to do with love; or [2] our definition comes from our experiences of love, often based on our childhood and the patterns we have been repeating since then.

Love isn’t about meeting our ideals or giving us what we need or believe we need, like more romance, safety, commitment or “characteristics” that we often desire in a mate. Love is our ability to share, to give unconditionally, to accept a person for who they are and to take our needs out of the picture. Love is about the other person. Love is about letting go of all of our fears, beliefs and idiosyncrasies that we often blame ‘others’ for and about taking responsibility for all of who we are so that we can love others as well as ourselves. Love is knowing who we are and expressing this to another. Love is infinite without conditions, judgments, fear or resistance. Love is!

And lastly, our search for love has a motivation that we need to identify and understand so that we know what we are attracting and what our Soul’s purpose is. Our Soul in its infinite wisdom chose this life and all the circumstances that have occurred in our life to assist us to know love. All of our relationships are steering us towards our purpose. As I have said many times, relationships are what help us grow the most on this journey. Since we are moving towards love our relationships are all teaching us something about our purpose. So if we could view all of our relationships as a message instead of failure and look at what they are showing us from a ‘bigger picture’ we would be able to have a glimpse of this purpose.

What is our motivation for desiring a healthy relationship (either new or getting a current one back on track)? What are the fears that motivate us to desire love? What hasn’t worked in the past? And what do we feel we have learned through all of our relationships? These are all messages our Soul has designed to move us towards who we are and for the quest for Love to take us to all the right places.

I invite you to take some time this month and examine your choices and desires towards love. Know that everything is perfect for you to grow towards who you are and to express Love in its infinite wisdom. Love is something you share and give to the world. Find a way to express it and Love will find you!

See more at - http://www.intuitivesoul.com