Finding Your Purpose

You most likely yearn to know your purpose in life. "How can I find my purpose?" is the question that I am asked most often. The questioner often elaborates on his or her dilemma by saying, "I would be happier if I could be on purpose, but I just don't know what my purpose in life is."

My response is that you came into this world with absolutely nothing. You will leave this physical world with exactly the same. All of your acquisitions and achievements can't go with you.

Therefore, the only thing you can do with your life is give it away. You'll find yourself feeling purposeful if you can find a way to always be in the service of others.

Purpose is about serving. It's about taking the focus off of you and your self-interest, and serving others in some way. You build because you love to build. But you build to make others happy. You design because your heart directs you to. But those designs are in the service of others. You write because you love to express yourself in words. But those words will help and inspire readers. If you don't yet know your purpose, you'll continue to seek it throughout the various stages of your life. There are many different models that describe the stages of life. Here, I'm using the four archetypal stages of athlete, warrior, statesman, and spirit to briefly show what your purpose is in each stage.

In the athlete archetype, the focus is exclusively on the physical body and how it looks and performs. The warrior archetype wants to compete, defeat, and collect the rewards. The statesman archetype emphasizes fulfilling the desires of others by asking, "How may I serve?" At the final stage (and the highest that we know) is the archetype of spirit. At this stage, you realize what is meant by being in this world, but not of this world. The spirit part of you knows that neither the body nor this world is its exclusive domicile. This spirit archetype invites you to minimize your material-world concerns and to put more of your energy into the essence of life, which is love and service.

As you progress through these four archetypes, you'll find yourself thinking less and less of your own self-interest and more and more about how you can make the world a better place for all. In this way, you discover a great truth. The more you chase after your own goals and pursue your self-interest, the more these aims will elude you. But when you turn your thoughts and then your activities, regardless of what they are, to serving others, those things that you used to chase after will follow you wherever you go. When you get yourself out of the picture completely, the forces of the universe will seem to conspire to provide all that you previously sought for yourself. And then, because you're not attached to them any longer, they'll flow in and out of your life freely.

In essence, I'm urging you to stop taking your life so personally. You can end any and all suffering by reminding yourself that nothing in the universe is personal. Of course you've been taught to take life very personally, but this is an illusion. tame your ego, and absolutely free yourself from ever taking anything personally.

Keep these thoughts in mind, particularly when you feel lost or are unsure of your purpose: "My purpose is about giving. I'll direct my thoughts off of me, and spend the next few hours looking for a way to be of service to anyone or any creature on our endangered planet." this will bring you back to a realization that it doesn't matter what you do, as long as you're able to give. In order to fully give and be of service and ultimately feel purposeful, you must be able to say, "Yes," when you ask yourself, "Do I really possess what it is that I wish to give away?"

(Source: 10 Secrets for Success and Inner Peace - Wayne Dyer, 2001)