Meaning, Purpose, Mission

What is it to live a meaningful life? And what does living life with purpose mean to you personally?

We live in a world of polarity, and our sense of meaning comes from how we manage the contrast between pleasure and pain, between what’s limiting and liberating. If life is too easy, if everything is handed to you on a silver platter, not only does life feel meaningless, you never develop the resilience necessary to process challenges with grace and ease when they do arise. And when life is too difficult, when you’re abused and oppressed and stuck in poverty, the pain you experience can be so overwhelming that there’s simply no room for a sense of meaning. When you’re in chronic pain, it can feel like the entire universe is pain.

The world we live in is marked by contrast, and a well-lived life naturally includes challenges and setbacks. I would argue that your sense of meaning comes directly from how you manage your challenges and setbacks. Through the principle of polarity, painful experiences and difficult challenges help you appreciate the positive qualities in your life. Without challenges you take comfort for granted, and the sense of meaning is lost.

Please understand that this does not mean that you must seek out pain in order to find meaning. Challenges will emerge naturally in your life. There’s no need to instigate them in order to feel meaning. By training yourself to stand in gratitude, you can appreciate all the good in your life without needing pain to remind you of it.

You chose to incarnate as human, and you came here for a reason. And as I’ve said before, the reason you took on human form is not to have a non-human experience. As human beings we are endowed with the full range of human emotions, including anger, jealousy, shame, and envy. These emotions may feel unpleasant, and they’re extremely limiting when you get stuck in them, but they are not anti-spiritual. They are essential aspects of your emotional guidance system, and if you can listen to their messages without getting stuck in them, the joy and fulfillment you experience in life can be magnified greatly.

Your purpose in life, what you chose to come here for, is probably something abstract, such as to experience joy, or to bask in music, or physical healing, or to create peace and harmony. But once again, please understand what this means in terms of polarity. If your purpose is to create peace out of chaos, then you may go through life creating chaos in order to have something to work with. If your purpose is to embrace healing, you may subconsciously invite illness and accidents so you can have something to heal.

If your purpose is what you’ve incarnated in human form to learn or experience, then your mission in life is to share that purpose with other people. If your purpose is to experience joy, your mission is to share joy with others. Whatever your purpose, we’re all called to live a life of service, to help other people and make the world a better place. In the coaching industry there’s a common expression – “your mess is you message.” Whatever challenges you’ve faced in your life are precisely what you’re most qualified to help others with. However, this doesn’t mean you must continue to embody your mess in order to have a message.

Furthermore, having a mission and being of service does not mean being a slave to other people. Broadly speaking, your mission is to help uplift the world. It’s not your duty to save the world singlehandedly. It’s not your responsibility to save everyone everywhere, and if you tried you’d probably exhaust yourself and fail. By trying to help everyone you end up serving no one. And so you need to find a point of balance between your purpose and your mission. For example, if your purpose if to experience joy, and your mission is to spread joy, if you take that mission so seriously that you sacrifice yourself to make others happy, you’ll end up killing your own joy. That is, your mission can stifle your purpose.

For some people the point of balance between purpose and mission is the dividing line between a hobby and a career. I know of many energy healers and life coaches who would like to build a thriving business, but they operate at the hobby level because they fear that they’ll no longer enjoy it if they turn pro. If this sounds like you, please recognize that your fear may be based on limiting subconscious beliefs, and you can shift them. Now it’s true that while hobbies are fun, running a business is hard work, but that doesn’t mean you’re not up to the task. In fact, you probably have skills and gifts you’ve never given yourself credit for before, and you won’t know what they are until you step into them.

Therefor it’s up to you to figure out what that threshold is, that red line beyond which your vocation begins to lose its joy. And bear in mind, if there are aspects of running a business that you dislike, you could always hire an assistant to do the not-so-fun stuff.

This brings us to the topic of vocation. Whatever your purpose and mission are, your vocation is what you do in your day-to-day life to accomplish your mission. If your mission is to help people heal physically, your vocation is what you do to heal others. Jobs that reflect your mission can be deeply fulfilling. Some careers will resonate with your mission and others will not. But your vocation does not need to be a job – it can simply be you being yourself and radiating your energy, sharing it with anyone who’s willing to receive it. And likewise, your job does not need to be your vocation. It’s perfectly fine to hold a job to pay your bills and bring you security, as you express your vocation in other ways.

With respect to an empowered career, I have four questions for you to consider. Please take the time to think about each of these carefully, so you can choose a profession that fits all three. You may even want to write down your answers and revisit them again in a few days.

First, ask yourself, what do you enjoy doing? What are you passionate about? And of course, this doesn’t mean what would make your parents proud, or what will impress your friends, and so on. The question is literally what pleases you the most.

Second, what are you good at? What are your talents? What would you be willing to take the time to learn? And please be aware that you may need training to hone your talents, and that training might be expensive. Also, please be specific. Something like “I’m good with animals” is a wonderful quality, but it may be too vague and broad to help you pin down a career.

The third question is what can benefit the world? What can you do to have a positive impact on the planet and your fellow human beings?

And fourth, what can make you money? When considering the question of what can realistically earn you money, it’s important to think about the difference between what people want and what they need. These are not the same thing, and sometimes they stand in direct opposition to each other. For example, I can say with certainty that a lot of men could benefit from a course on toxic masculinity. But the ones who need it the most are the least likely to sign up. In fact, I have taught such a course, and it was one of the least popular courses I’ve ever taught. I have since learned to fight toxic masculinity in more effective ways.

When you piece all of this together, you’ll be able to create a list of potential vocations that you can be passionate about, but that are grounded in practicality as well.