Breathing and purpose

Purpose is like breathing; it doesn’t stop when your mind wanders away from focusing on it.

I feel incredibly fortunate to have a strong sense of purpose in this life. I know that I am here to move towards my most authentic self and support and guide others on the same path. My purpose is to bring healing to myself, my lineage and all the people I collide with in this life. I am meant to do this through a deep understanding of pain and suffering and how these concepts impact the mind and body.

If that feels like a lot to you, trust me, it feels like a lot to me too! This sense of purpose has floated in and out of my life for as long as I can remember. I was not fully conscious to it for most of my life though. As I have slowed down and quieted my life over the past few years, I have been unable to avoid this truth. I have found clarity as I began to listen to my heart and soul over my incessantly chatty mind. However, clarity does not always bring comfort and ease. It can often bring hard decisions and challenging experiences.

It truly is a blessing to feel this deep sense of purpose and sometimes I also wish I could return to ignorance of my truth. I say that while knowing I do not mean it one bit. In yoga, the term avidya means ignorance of truth. It is considered the root of all suffering. This confusion or denial of the truest part of our self leads to attachment, fear and eventually suffering. Many of the things we do in this life to avoid listening to our own inner knowing and maintain ignorance are what cause pain. A pain that begins internally and often gets expressed outward to all those around us. We are living in a world filled with pain at the moment, and it is breaking my heart while reminding me of my purpose.

It is my path to dive into pain with every ounce of my being. My journey has led me to study pain from many different aspects including the scientific and spiritual. I know that it is my work to blend it all together and make it digestible for myself and others. I have a gift for doing this and I am incredibly proud of myself for this ability. It soothes my soul when I get to witness and hold space for others as they integrate what I share and lessen the suffering in their own lives.

I am also struggling with how to show up and do this work every day. There is so much noise happening right now in the healing spaces. Capitalism has bled into every aspect of our lives, especially the wellness sphere. It has become a commodity to heal. Something you can buy if you have the privilege and ability. If you can use the trendy healing and spiritual language, you can collect a following and make vast amounts of money. I have watched it become more and more costly to participate in this work over the years.

I wholeheartedly resist this model and it is making me feel as if I am failing at moving forward with my purpose. When I quit my full time job over a year and a half ago, I had big plans. I was determined to write a book, offer online courses, host retreats and workshops and so much more. I thought I could seamlessly move from doing work I loved but exhausted me towards doing work that would fulfill my purpose and light me up. I thought my purpose would become my job in a capitalist sense. It would provide for me, keep me busy, and nourish me along the way.

For some, this may be an effective path towards their purpose. For me, it was filled with resistance. I started my book a million different times and never got far. I brainstormed course content and wrote hundreds of outlines and then promptly forgot about them. I planned retreats and then abandoned them before they could come to life. But in all this, I also forged a path forward. I wrote a blog that is still dear to my heart. I hosted several very successful workshops. I supported five amazing women during my first official retreat. And I had the honor to facilitate a portion of a 300 hour yoga teacher training.

To be completely honest though, I have been feeling lost a lot of this time. It is comical because as I write those words, I instantly question why I feel that way. Because I also feel more grounded, more content and more at ease with where I am, what I am doing and who I am than ever before. Both are absolutely true in every way and that is what makes life irritatingly beautiful.

It all brings me back to the first sentence above; purpose is like breathing; it doesn’t stop when your mind wanders away from focusing on it. One essential part of life is the breath. Humans can survive weeks without food, days without water but only minutes without the breath. If we are alive, we are breathing. Most of this time, we are not actively thinking about making this breath happen, yet it continues. The beauty of the breath is that we can also manipulate it. We have the ability to alter our breath at any time. We can slow it down, speed it up and play around with it in so many ways. We can adjust our breath to calm ourselves, to wake ourselves up, to release stress or challenge our physical and mental limitations.

When we are focusing on our breath, we hold conscious power over it to a degree. We feel connected to our body in new and different ways during breath work and this heightens our awareness. With patience and practice, breath work can alter our natural rhythm of breathing in positive ways. When we consciously work on our breath, there is potential that our breath quality will improve on an unconscious level. In this same way, when we spend time focusing on our purpose, it allows us to let go of control and simply live into our purpose without conscious effort.

For most of us, it is not realistic to be consciously aware of our breath at all times. Life demands so much of us that we simply do not have the capacity to live in this way. Perhaps a monk, void of external responsibility, can spend days focusing on nothing other than their breath. But even then, at night, their conscious awareness will slip away and their breath will return to unconscious control until they wake. In this same vain, I do not believe that it is practical or possible for anyone living fully in this world to constantly focus on their purpose. Eventually conscious control will falter, either from exhaustion or external life circumstances. There is no shame or fault in this at all. In ways, if we are constantly conscious of our purpose, it becomes a job rather than a purpose. Again, capitalism has leaked into the spiritual and wellness space a bit too much for my comfort.

I have been shaming myself a bit for not expending as much focus towards my purpose as of late. I have felt as if I have wandered away from this path that I see so clearly now. But I have awoken to a deeper understanding of how purpose works. It flows seamlessly from consciousness to unconsciousness in a cyclical nature. But simply because I lose awareness of my purpose, it does not mean I am not doing the work well. By pouring effort into it consciously for so long, I have shifted how my purpose expresses itself through me, even without my awareness.

Just because I haven’t written a book or created the course content I dreamed of, it doesn’t mean I have not impacted many. Because I have not chosen to make a living from my purpose, it does not make me a failure. By living, by breathing, I am moving my purpose forward. I have had several beautiful reminders of this lately and it is a gift every time. In daily conversations with people who have walked into my life over the past few years, I am fulfilling my purpose. Even when I don’t intend to, lessons about pain and suffering fall out of me. When I show up as my most authentic self, I inevitably am creating purpose all around me.

I needed to spend time consciously focusing on my purpose. I needed to study pain and suffering with intention. In doing so, I could let go of all expectations of how my purpose will unfold. Rather than fight through the resistance that my ego is creating around my clarity of purpose, I am choosing to surrender. I am living my purpose of bringing healing to myself, my lineage and all the people I collide with in this life every day. If I am breathing, I am living my purpose.

It may look more like honest conversations over coffee, pulling tarot cards while sitting in the park or four hour FaceTimes rather than structured workshops and courses and that is okay. I may not complete the book that is still stuck inside my mind but the people who need it are getting paragraphs and pages of it slowly. There is no right way to live your purpose, it is not a job. It does not have to be all consuming to positively impact the world.

So I will continue to breathe, with awareness when I am able. I will lean into my purpose, with intent and love. And I will also continue to breathe and live my purpose in every moment in between. There is an intense amount of beauty in the letting go of conscious control of it all.