Your purpose is not about you

Your purpose in not about you. Your purpose is about the way life wants to move through you.

Many people want to know their purpose these days, almost to the point of obsession. However, wanting to know your purpose is just a phase.

Most people seeking purpose are really wanting to know what to ‘do’ with their life. Yet purpose is not about doing at all. Purpose is about being. Your mission or life's work may be what you 'do' but your purpose is much less ego-centric.

Purpose isn’t something to be found or conquered; a box to be ticked to make you feel better about yourself. Embodying your purpose (aka soul) feels like surrendering and decomposing all the layers that are not you. Removing all the identities and attachments that get in the way of your beingness; your true nature.

Your mission is what makes you feel good and accomplished, perhaps even providing a sense of meaning but your purpose is what makes you feel alive. There’s a difference.

Being alive means allowing all of life to flow through you. Without judgement, without flintching. In devotion to a bigger picture that you were sung up to serve. Even if you have forgotten. Even without needing to know.

What we actually long for is to feel the pulse of life moving through us, to let go of control and allow the earth to dance us. To remember our belonging through rhythm, and take up our place in the ecological web.

This is why seeking your purpose is just a phase.

As mythologist, Joseph Campbell said, "People say that what we’re seeking is the meaning of life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive....that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”(paraphrased)

To be alive means to be animated by life, to acknowledge the animate forces that breathe life into your being, and rid yourself of the loneliness as a libation to the true human experience.

In a world so devoid of belonging, we’ve been running around gathering materials and titles in an effort to fit in and feel better, yet belonging is already given.

It feels like the ultimate cosmic joke.

If true purpose is actually what you seek, then you must be willing to strip yourself bare and detach from the need to be special. Yes, your unique gifts are absolutely needed but never forget where they came from in the first place.

Because purpose is not what you do - it’s not the fancy Instagram bio that feeds the ego’s addiction to acknowledgement.

Purpose is who you already are. Without trying. Without effort. But with innate responsibility.

Purpose is the presence you gift just from being alive.
It’s the breath that animates you.
Thus what you truly seek isn’t purpose itself.
What you seek is just to be yourself.