Keeping true to your purpose
How often has your heart been broken by friends, family or colleagues?
How often have you been betrayed?
How deep a sense of loss did you have when things changed?
How often have you betrayed yourself?
How bitter have you found yourself when you did not get the desired position or promotion you expected to get after investing so much of your time and effort into a job? Did you find yourself broken after having given something your vital life force; that part of you that dreams wild and passionately about how you would like to change the world?
How attached are you to your job title, post or certificates and degrees?
Who exactly are you?
What defines you?
Over the years, I have repeatedly asked myself these questions as I shifted from place to place, reinvented myself, followed my heart, flowed from new career to another, sought to learn more and add to what I knew, and strove to become more than who I used to be and explore who I am.
In the course of all this, I have learned to let go of my expectations from the external and I learned to be more in tune with myself.
Things change: circumstances change, people change, and even I change every moment of every day. I have experienced stillness and movement. Staying the same and changing are facets of the same consciousness: change is the only constant (which is a wonderful paradox).
Even after I carefully laid out all of my plans, I didn’t end up where I intended to. There are times I adjust, make shifts and move along. However, if I remain steadfast and true to my purpose, I can carry on my life mission anywhere: in any space, place, organisation, institution, association, etc. When I no longer feel fulfilled, content and satisfied with where I am, it is time to change, shift, learn something new, re-examine what’s going on, reinvent myself and move on. Why? Because I have outgrown that space, those people, those circumstances which no longer serve and benefit me. Yes, there is a sense of loss, the feeling of leaving things behind, but stronger still is the yearning for something more, the call to move further along in my quest. There is the pull of my purpose.
The fire that burns inside of me is fuelled by my molten, incandescent, brilliant, burning purpose, attached to, and rooted in, itself, instead of being fed by external sources and circumstances. Once I have this clear, I can easily overcome delusions and disappointment caused by external factors and create and recreate projects in alignment with what I am here to do.
It is not a group or an institution that defines me, but myself.
No one can betray me but my own expectations of how things ought to be. I am the only one who makes the choices to accept or reject, to be resistant to or flow around whatever comes my way. I seek what I want to come my way.
Whatever I choose in the moment is true for me.
Whatever I choose in this now will lay the foundations of my tomorrows. The best part is that whatever happens, it is all wonderfully, amazingly, marvellously, fantastically and intrinsically good!
The Achologist is the official online publication for Achology, the Academy of Modern Applied Psychology for professional practitioners and life coaches.
