Life becomes a daily celebration when we learn to live it on purpose
A great spiritual teacher Patanjali, once said:
“When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds, your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world.”
Once upon a time my life was not as blessed as it is today. I grew up in an emotionally deprived environment that did not allow me to fulfil those primary care needs that all children are entitled to by right of birth, that is what I believed for most of my adult life at least. My childhood was full of searching and finding ways and means to get those needs met that I was craving.
When you are a child you don’t have the ability to understand that the love you crave cannot be found in external sources, nothing can substitute parental love. As a consequence, I embarked on a journey – a path of self-destruction that went from various process addictions to substance addiction to love addiction in its most damaging forms to finally recognising all the faulty patterns that spiralled all the way down to depression. It took pain to let me ponder on human ability to change. There must be another way, I thought in my heart.
The truth is I had misplaced my purpose in an impossible quest: to find that unconditional love that circumstances had denied to me in external sources of various nature.
What I did not know is that that purpose was not aligned to my pure essence, to my higher being, to the person I ultimately wanted to be, that was hidden already inside me by all these wants demands and needs.
That purpose was fuelled by a desire to experience the truth but the reality was that I could not see what the truth was.
I stumbled across days, weeks, months, years, living through a process of physical recovery which allowed my self confidence to start taking shape until one day a miracle happened. A little tiny, beautiful being came into my life and from the moment our eyes linked, the most breath-taking and revealing experience was about to kick start the second phase of my life. That of realisation!
My daughter… my true purpose. I allowed those feelings that were rattling in my whole being to start taking shape until I understood fully what unconditional love was.
I would never let love be missing from her life.
That day I understood what I had been desperately trying to create outside of myself, thinking that love was everywhere but in me, it was in fact part of who I was. It had always been there… I just did not know how to recognise it.
This story takes me to the subject of this post, purpose. My daughter gave me the biggest gift life could ever give me, Introspection.
Carl Jung said: ‘Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams, who looks inside, awakens.
This is exactly what happened to me that day. I was gifted the chance to look inside my heart and what I found was that love I had been searching for.
I aligned to my purpose, to be there for my daughter, for my children, to give them the tools I had not been given as a child. I wanted them to be surrounded by that unconditional love so that one day they would not need to go through the steps of my struggle.
I wanted their own purpose to be higher than mine. I was determined to give them a better starting point through the new-found love that I had been unknowingly treasuring in my heart.
I learnt that living for giving rather than for taking was my real purpose. I began this journey of discovery and awakening through my daughter’s eyes and it expanded and unfolded to a greater desire to help as many people as I could.
I wanted to make a difference not just to my children’s life but to as many lives I was able to touch. And that is what I have been doing for more than a decade now in the form of life coaching, but to be totally honest, I hate titles of all types.
Life has turned around for me. What I did not know when I discovered the desire within me to love and express my gratitude for the journey I had been travelling, magic started to happen.
When I let go of the craving of receiving love and decided to give it instead, love started to pour into my life. When I chose to work to help others, success and wealth found their way to me. I did not ask for that… it was a by-product of my found higher purpose.
I know now, fully integrated within my spirit, the meaning of those words I opened this post with. I know how to look into my heart. I know that I am still a soul having a human experience and therefore still attached to the earthly ego, but I am aware of my striving desire of being the best I can… always.
I have learnt to make decisions that defy the fear of failure because there is no failure. There is only learning, all the while accepting that our fallibility is in fact our biggest asset as it takes us to explore and grow.
“Dormant forces, faculties, and talents become alive and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.”
This is the truth of living on purpose. The great Patanjali saw it long before I did.
Certified Transformative Coach with 25 years of experience helping people live a better life.
