Why the Highly Sensitive Multipotentialite Finds it Hard to Discover Their Purpose

How Knowing the 3 Stages of Spiritual Evolution can Help You, the Multipassionate Polymath.

I think the key issues here are:

1. Pleasure Versus Meaning.
2. Passion Versus Purpose.

Your Passion is Not Your Purpose.

Let me start right off by saying that your Passion is not your Purpose. And your Purpose isn’t the one single thing you’re supposed to do either.

I think the biggest sticking point/challenge for us multipotentialites is the whole world telling us we should pick only one thing — and nothing else! I think only ants are here to specialize. We are not ants. Lol (No offense to ants. They are awesome).

Your Purpose is really a collection of your Genius, Super Power, Deepest Virtue, community you’re here serve, problems you were born to solve, and solutions you’re here to co-create. Together, they make up your life “theme” or main question you’re here to explore. This theme can have many different expressions such as your many varied passions and the many different questions that arise out of your main question which in turn inspire many different projects.

For example, I paint, draw, sing, write, coach, heal, make mental mental models, and so much more! But they all serve my “life theme” of “Mutually Nurturing Sovereignty”. I am here to co-create a new Resource Exchange System to help us co-create a new “Nurturance Culture”.

Ultimately though, I want to express and implement one meaningful idea after another. When strung together, they create meaningful income and a meaningful life. I am fascinated and turned on by ideas, especially those that are visionary or leading-edge. I imagine you are too. Right?

So let’s talk about Meaning next:

Pleasure Versus Meaning.

In her book “The Power of Meaning: Finding Fulfillment in a World Obsessed with Happiness”, Emily Esfahani Smith writes, “And yet, there is a major problem with the happiness frenzy: it has failed to deliver on its promise. Though the happiness industry continues to grow, as a society, we’re more miserable than ever. Indeed, social scientists have uncovered a sad irony — chasing happiness actually makes people unhappy.”

And she goes on to express this thought-experiment:

“Nozick was a happiness skeptic. He devised a thought experiment to emphasize his point. Imagine, Nozick said, that you could live in a tank that would “give you any experience you desired.” It sounds like something out of The Matrix: “Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain.” He then asks, “Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life’s experiences?” If happiness is truly life’s end goal, most people would choose to feel happy in the tank. It would be an easy life, where trauma, sadness, and loss are switched off — forever. You could always feel good, maybe even important. Every now and then, you could exit the tank and decide which new experiences you wanted programmed into your head. If you are torn or distressed over the decision to plug in, you shouldn’t be. “What’s a few moments of distress,” Nozick asks, “compared to a lifetime of bliss (if that’s what you choose), and why feel any distress at all if your decision is the best one?”

Yet most people would say no to a life of feeling good in the tank. The question is, why? The reason we recoil from the idea of life in the tank, according to Nozick, is that the happiness we find there is empty and unearned. You may feel happy in the tank, but you have no real reason to be happy. You may feel good, but your life isn’t actually good. A person “floating in the tank,” as Nozick puts it, is “an indeterminate blob.” He has no identity, no projects and goals to give his life value.””

She also goes on to reveal this real-life research that proves that we actually prefer meaning over momentary pleasure and happiness:

“Yet research suggests that the meaningful life and the happy life can’t be conflated so easily. The differences between the two were revealed in a study from 2013, in which a team of psychologists led by Florida State University’s Roy Baumeister asked nearly 400 Americans aged 18 to 78 whether they were happy and whether they thought their lives were meaningful. The social scientists examined their responses alongside other variables, like their stress levels and spending patterns, and whether or not they had children…”

“Happiness without meaning,” the researchers wrote, “characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desires are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided.” Leading a meaningful life, by contrast, corresponded with being a “giver,” and its defining feature was connecting and contributing to something beyond the self. Having more meaning in life was correlated with activities like buying presents for others, taking care of children, and even arguing, which researchers said was an indication of having convictions and ideals you are willing to fight for. Because these activities require investing in something bigger, the meaningful life was linked to higher levels of worrying, stress, and anxiety than the happy life. Having children, for instance, was a hallmark of the meaningful life, but it has been famously associated with lower levels of happiness, a finding that held true for the parents in this study.”

So this brings us to my model of:

The 3 Stages of Spiritual Evolution: Happiness, Freedom and Fulfillment

First Stage: Happiness and Momentary Pleasures

Second Stage: Freedom

Third Stage: Fulfillment

Let’s start with:

Happiness/Pleasure/Peace

Wanting to be happy or peaceful all the time is like wanting to eat dark chocolate or cheesecake all the time. Sure, it’s delicious but there are so many other options to eat — such as lentils, salsa, cookies, soup, quinoa, rice and so much more!

Likewise, our emotions are similar: there are so many other options for us such as feeling powerful, centered, free, expansive/spacious, cozy, quiet, boisterous, moved, passionate, fiery, watery, grounded, and so much more!

Why limit ourselves to one emotion?

And obsessing over happiness (and other positive emotions) also limits our entire range of experience. For example, by numbing sadness, we also numb happiness. By numbing anger, we also numb being passionate. Instead, we settle for a numb contentment and momentary pleasures masquerading as the “happiness” society wants us to feel — that really we don’t actually care for that much!

And also: what’s the difference between feeling sad and feeling moved anyways? Sometimes, there’s a thin line between a so-called “positive” emotion and a difficult emotion that we label as “negative”. (I go into more detail regarding all this in my article on “The Positive Uses of Negative Emotions”).

The key is to give ourselves the freedom to feel everything which brings us to the second stage:

Freedom/Sovereignty

This is when we get clear on our “Core Desired Feelings” — the feelings we most want to feel (which also brings us clarity on what we don’t want to feel. This heightens our sensitivity even more to situations that violate our boundary violations, thus helping us create an even strong container for our personal sovereignty/freedom as we keep closing the leaky holes. For example, I had a client who finally stood up to her ex always fondling her breasts whenever he hugged her. She finally told him to stop because she realized this was the complete opposite of what she wanted to feel).

So yes, when we are in our private space, it’s important to give ourselves the freedom to feel everything so that we don’t stay in constricted suffering. But the great irony is that this also makes us even more sensitive to what’s clearly wrong for us — so that we can stand up for ourselves more.

And although Freedom is who we are — you can’t understand this intellectually but can be felt on a deeper level when you have your Awakening — it’s also paradoxically a life-long journey of becoming more and more free because the entire system is set up to ensure that we don’t embody that Freedom we are!

This is because of systemic oppression such as racism, sexism, childism, ableism, heteronormative ideals and neurotypical bias. (Side-note: I could be wrong but I bet many Highly Sensitive Multipotentialites are also demi-sexuals: we need an emotional connection for us to be sexually turned on/attracted).

Giving ourselves the freedom to completely BE who we are right now therefore will help us break all of the dominos of resistance and self-judgement. When we feel bad, we feel guilty for feeling bad, and so we resist it. And that feels so bad that we resist that too creating multiple layers of resistance: this is why allowing ourselves to simply BE, sitting in silence, doing absolutely nothing, giving ourselves a break from the conditioning of constantly doing and fixing ourselves, is so important. I go into more detail in these 2 videos:

This video on the “Non-Meditation” will also help you become more free:

And its actually easier for the Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) to awaken precisely because of our sensitivity. But our sensitivity was turned inside-out and upside down — turned against us by having it turned towards our conditioning. This is much greater suffering for us because of the sensitivity.

But this also means that we are just as sensitive to Awareness — and more sensitive than the majority of the population. But Awareness IS Who I am. It’s both How I know and Who I am (Whereas Attention is how the Mind Knows).

This is why it’s easier for us to turn around and have the Awareness look back at itself and become aware of Itself — ourselves! This is the essence of Awakening. It’s that simple!

Knowing the difference between Attention and Awareness is Key. It takes more than just words on a screen to know though. That’s why I made this 11-minute video for you to have a direct experience of it. I guarantee this is life-changing for you. So please watch it and follow the instructions:

Now it doesn’t have to be either/or False Dichotomy. It’s about having the mind’s powerful Attention cooperate with you as Awareness instead of having you as the awareness be lost/trapped in its imprisoned conditioning. So eventually, it’s about learning how to shape Awareness with Attention — this is at the heart of learning how to focus. This is what I mainly help clients with in my sessions these days.

In our quest for Embodying the Freedom we already are to become sovereign beings, we also meet similar friends and mentors on our path, thus creating an informal community, one of the key pillars of a meaningful fulfilling life, which brings us to third stage of spiritual evolution:

Fulfillment.

Unlike happiness, you can’t get fulfillment from watching babies laughing on Youtube all day. Nor do you get it by meditating alone in your room (or holing yourself up in a cave in the Himalayas).

Fufillment comes from Contribution, Community, Compassion, and Empathic Connection with others: us “HSPs” are also highly empathic. So this does come in handy now!

Fulfillment is actually also not something you “get”. It’s a spontaneous arising of your being coming alive into fullness as as it connects with others when it’s fully met.

And you feel most fulfilled when you’re contributing from and towards your “life theme” we mentioned earlier.

I highly recommend my long-term program “the Alignment Code” to help you discover and embody all these different aspects.

However, diving deep into the 4 Pillars of Meaning documented by Emily Esfahani Smith can also be a great support for you in the meantime:

The 4 Pillars of Meaning

These 4 Pillars are:

1. Belonging
2. Purpose (This is where I come in. This is one of the 2 pillars I can most help you with). Read my article on “the 6 Stages of Visibility” for more details.
3. Storytelling (“Story Genius” by Lisa Cron is the best resource to help you understand story. “Winning the Story Wars” by Jonah Sachs will you make sense of it on a macro historic scale — besides also helping you with marketing your skills as a multipotentialite).
4. Transcendence (This is my Zone of Genius). My article on the 6 Levels of Knowing Yourself goes into more detail regarding making transcendence a regular part of your life.

I hope this helps. Feel free to click clap up to the maximum 50 times if you liked this article because it helps more people see it. And please do share it, highlight and tweet it. Thank you very much!

About the Author Kundan Chhabra

“Trained in Pranic Healing, Divine Openings, Akashic Records Readings, Uzazu, Embodied Awareness Practices, Deep Storytelling, and more, Kundan Chhabra helps the highly sensitive multipotentialite discover their Purpose, be recognized for their impact and create meaningful income, relationships and life!

He has the unique method of combining coaching with awareness-based interactive meditation practices to help the client create a unique customized tool that brings a solution to any problem they face. They can use this tool forever.

He is also an avid researcher on many different subjects, finding the root causes and connecting the dots for many people.

He specializes in helping people heal from the personal problems created by systemic oppression, deception and manipulation. Having grown up in a manipulative military dictatorship, he’s able to see through many different patterns of manipulation and its effects on the individual. From this place of healing, he helps you deeply understand the many layers and levels of yourself and the most meaningful idea you’re here to express in the world — your deepest Purpose — so that you can live a deeply meaningful life!”