If you are searching for your life purpose, you are in luck. The search stops here.
It’s become a common thing in our culture to try to “find your purpose.” It’s thought of almost like finding a soul mate: there’s a big epiphany as you discover your one true purpose and then… you and it ride off into the sunset. Now you’ve got career direction, a sense of meaning, and a kind of serenity about finally knowing what your purpose is. You can say to your purpose, a la Jerry McGuire, “You complete me.”
Except I’ve never seen it play out this way. More often I hear people talking about searching for their purpose with angst. They feel like they are missing something — like life will be different if/when they get to x…
Here’s the truth: Your purpose is to bring more love to this earth. It is to heal where there is brokenness. It is to bring light where there is darkness. It is to restore sanity where insanity reigns, kindness where fear has taken over.
That’s your purpose.
That’s my purpose.
That is the purpose of every human being here on earth.
If, in the morning, you find at least one minute, sixty seconds, of silence to close your eyes and humbly say to life, the cosmos, God — whatever you call it –
Please allow me to be an instrument of love today
Please allow me to serve
Please allow me to heal
Please use me for the good
Or your own form of that… then life will take care of the rest. Life will place in your path the most remarkable, tender, perfect, interesting, set of opportunities to do just that.
Yes, there’s this other secondary thing — the thing we normally call purpose. That’s actually the manifestation of your purpose, the form it takes at any given time. That form will change, and the more creative and open to the force of love you are — the more fluid and dynamic and expansive it will feel.
All the time, there is your consistent purpose — embodying love, bringing light, bringing healing — but it is flowing through the unique prism of your changing circumstances — your time, place, resources, personality, personal experiences, sources of inspiration.
When we focus our attention on wondering about the manifestation, looking for the concrete details of how our purpose will be realized, we get off track. It’s as if we are trying to grow petals of a flower, instead of planting a seed, and then watching as the flowers grow.
Planting the seed is dedicating yourself to be of service, to be an instrument of love. If you do that, humbly, every morning, you’ll feel in your heart the call to specific acts of love and healing. Ideas for how you might spread light and change the world will start showing up, vividly, with a sense of calling attached to them.
Center in your big purpose – spreading love, bringing light, healing – and the specifics will take care of themselves.
Love,
Tara
photo credit: Dmitry Bayer
I think you’re right!
Seems kind of simple when you put it like that…
Easy to get caught up in the whole ‘make it in the world’ thing, but I guess one can spread love and light however your career is going. I guess that’s because 99% of us is not really programmed to spread love and bring light. It’s only a tiny little bit of us that occasionally has that insight – but I think it’s right. Just a question of getting the rest of us to follow it!
Thanks for the clarity.
Jules
Beautiful. Perfect. Exactly right.
Love it.
your words stirred something Real within me. i love the metaphor of our individual experiences as a changing prism, refracting the universal Purpose into pictures that are different from one season to another. thank you for this. beautiful.
Beautiful, beautiful, and so beautiful 🙂
I am exactly at this juncture. Too worried about what my purpose is, and so I decided to ask God, ‘how can I serve’ , (just out of frustration for the purpose serve). And I decided to turn to silence and listen. .And amongst other signs, I found your lovely post. Thank you so much for your wonderful words. God bless
Hi Tara,
This is one of the most intelligent discussions of life purpose I have read. That search for “purpose” is poisonous and only takes us down a road of frustration and lack. This I know from my own personal experience.
I love the point you make about what we are doing being an expression of our purpose, not the purpose per se. I have recently given up this search. The intentions you state – to love, to heal, to serve – have always been my intentions. If I look at my life, I am doing fulfilling work, and I am happy.
This is more than enough for me.
This is so true. I need to print this out and put it on my fridge. I feel like I am in that juncture where this whole question of purpose is driving me crazy. This is encouraging.
Love this. Thanks Tara.
Great post! Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, which I keep taped to the wall of my studio:
“I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.”
– Vincent van Gogh
It’s as if we are trying to grow petals of a flower, instead of planting a seed, and then watching as the flowers grow.
————-
The above statement tells it all.
>>Lord Sri Krishna said in Bhagavadgita(Indian epic) its not on the result which we should focus upon… but the effort which brings forth the result. Lets all keep up our efforts to make this place filled with more and more love..
btw Tara it was a great insightful read as always..
I awoke a few moments ago with the thought in my mind “Please God fill me with your divine light and inspiration” and then I sat up in bed… checked my emails… and found your post. Thanks Tara. I am slowly learning to let go and let love. Now I am going to the beach… [grin]
Well put, Tara.
I was about to get all bristly, thinking, “of course we have a purpose!” and then I read further and relaxed. That is exactly what our purpose is, but I guess everyone needs to find that out for themselves.
For many that sort of purpose isn’t enough, isn’t grand enough, or is too ephemereal.
I’ve had a few epiphanies in my life where I realised that my purpose was just that and always, afterwards, I felt silly. Because how can it be that simple?
Tara, thank you for this. Can it really be so simple? You have touched my heart and soul today.
I echo the sentiments of everyone here. Brilliant simplicity. Why this is not the common understanding of purpose, I have no idea.
How did you know?! I wrote about this yesterday! Thank you Tara, simple and beautiful.
Most inspiring! It’s one of your gifts. Thank you for touching my life today.
I love the four things that you describe as our life purpose. I agree that we tend to grind on the idea of purpose in a useless, time-wasting, frustrating way.
The thing about our life purpose is that we don’t need to find it. It finds us.
I think we’re also here to learn and to inform the cosmos through our experience.
And, perhaps too, there are more, hidden purposes.
We don’t find them by grinding away and feeling upset and unsettled. We find them by tuning in, and your four sentence prayer does that well.
Tara, this is so lovely–and exactly what I needed. Thank you. You have such graceful ways of stating Big Ideas that make them approachable & practical.
I hope you don’t mind, but I featured this post for today’s “Spotlight Saturday” on my blog. Here’s the link if you want to see it.
Sending hugs.
This is beautiful and so important to realize. Thank you for putting this concept into words so simply.
🙂
Oh, so it’s to Tara to decree what my purpose is. Funny, she starts out dismissing the idea of finding purpose but then tells me what my purpose is. Well, I see the question of, “Why should life have to have “purpose”? Maybe it just IS. And if my life has purpose, it is to me to say what that is, rather than her telling me.
Giving and Loving is the key to living our life purpose… Awesome! Thanks for sharing.
Tara, would you belive I spent the last six months trying to find “my purpose”! Every day I would say “God, just say something, enlighten me in some way, just tell me what I should be doing with my life, give me a purpose”. I kept nagging Him every day and night. And I felt that He was just silent. Today morning, after reading this, I truly feel that God has spoken through you to me, finally. I cannot describe in words how blessed and empowered I feel at this moment! Often times, the truths in life are really quite simple, but we just have a odd human habit of complicating it! Thank you so very much for your wisdom; you have completely changed my understanding of what the meaning of my life, my being, really is. In fact, what it was all along. May you continue empowering and enriching people every day!
Very nicely said. All of us are healers, no matter what we do in life. I use this very theme in my statement of purpose for an application to graduate studies in information management. There are actions that bring healing even in information management! Better websites can lower user frustration! Seamless user experiences that fill the user with a sense of efficacy and power. In so many ways, we’re all just here to love and heal one another.
This was my favorite part of what you said:
Your purpose is to bring more love to this earth. It is to heal where there is brokenness. It is to bring light where there is darkness. It is to restore sanity where insanity reigns, kindness where fear has taken over.
True. This is so important to understand, otherwise we are only wasting time.
Tara,
Thank you for this beautiful post. I have been spending a lot of time lately on self reflection – thinking about life and purpose. This just shed light on a completely different way to examining this question of purpose. I could completely relate to the angst of seeking the answer, specially when one feels stuck. I am going to make this definition of purpose a part of my morning routine. Thank you!
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You understand sso much its almost toygh to argue with you
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You certainly put a fresh spin on a subject that has been written
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I’ve been surfing online more than three hours today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours.
It’s pretty worth enough for me. Personally, if all site owners and bloggers made good content as you
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I was wondering if you ever considered changing the structure of your site?
Its very well written; I love what youve got to say. But maybe you
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Youve got an awful lot of text for only having 1 or two images.
Maybe you could space it out better?
Tara…I have read so many confusing articles over the years all telling us we need to find our purpose in life and making it so darn complicated and giving us so much anxiety. I have lamented so many times that I didn’t know what my purpose in life was.
Until now…thank you so much for this post…it was clear, simple and just perfect. Just what I needed. Thank you.
Love your article! Like many others I’ve been contemplating purpose recently, as I’ve sometimes felt lost in what can feel at times, like a cold and competitive world. I also recently found a similar article on a site called “Science 2.0,” that attempts to explain purpose in scientific terms, and I found really resonated with my intuition and soul. It explains that “the universal tendency of all life is to produce, protect, and nurture life,” and that “differences between life forms do not seem to affect this tendency.” The author argues that behavior in animals such as rescuing the young of a different species or a human being sacrificing himself for his comrades, illustrate this tendency and exists because “organisms in their natural state feel a need to contribute to the greater good.” And that this sentiment is central to all life. I thought this was a beautiful, and entirely accurate, as I far as I can tell, assessment of life, and serves as a helpful reminder/framework for when one is feeling lost.
It makes that we grow and would think to move to the next level, whatever that is, to climb the corporate ladder and alike. The adults and children that have been revived come back to say this same theme. It is Love, everything is made of love. Not the mushy love stuff, the deep love that some people never get to experience because it was not shared to them. Love is hard to demonstrate when never modeled from others. This is why the prisons are full.