WHEN WE LOSE PASSION FOR WHAT FELT TO BE OUR PURPOSE
[When our purpose loses its purpose]
I believe everyone, or at least nearly everyone goes through a period in our life where we feel what we have been believing in, fighting for or creating with so much passion and conviction seems to have lost its meaning. Usually, it starts inconspicuously on the subtle levels of our consciousness, ‘in the back of our head’ and we keep going, attributing our diminished focus and motivation to ‘maybe I’m tired, I need a break’. We take a break, get back on track and everything feels fantastic again for some time.
At some point, we will call it burnout and likely blame it on having given too much, emotional depletion, etc. This happens to those of us who cling to what we have defined as our purpose because we believe our entire worth lies solely in that purpose. Very often, as it was in my case, there will be deeply rooted beliefs underneath:
I have to justify my existence.
I have no right to be here.
Everyone would be better off if I died.
I am a burden.
I am in debt to others.
When I discovered such beliefs in my Self, and then explored the lessons coming from them, my Higher Self told me this:
“What you call a purpose, a calling, is but a form of what you have come here to express, i.e. to give and receive. In other words, a physical form of what you came here to experience because an experience is an event of giving and receiving of a particular frequency. This particular physical form (situation, people, objects, surroundings involved) is capable of providing an individual with that particular experience.
The learning process, the experiencing, is intuitive at its core. That is why you FEEL your purpose, you FEEL CALLED. You KNOW you are EXPRESSING your Self. And so, as long as the physical form of that expression, e.g. mental health advocacy, being a windsurfing instructor, a police officer or a bartender aligns with what you came here to learn, you will feel on track, fulfilled, living a life of meaning, and all feels good.
The friction starts through the constant drive of the carnal mind to control: to analyse, modify, question. Yes, these are tools of growth and survival, you want to use them. They create friction though because they are run by the mental and emotional programmes of the mind which are limited by experience and intellect, as opposed to Intuition — the consciousness of our Higher Self, the pure expression of Consciousness itself.
When these limiting programmes kick in, attachments to our purpose are formed and become like a dam obstructing the flow and changing the course of a river. A river whose course has been forcefully altered loses much of its vitality and ability to restore its own health and sustain the health and life of those depending on its open course.
The new course becomes its new purpose but now it is one forcefully imposed by limited, intellectual calculating and planning. Over time, more effort and resources will be needed to maintain the flow as desired because such a river can neither replenish itself nor can it nourish the lands and life along its banks.
From naturally taking the course of its organic intent, it became a mere tool of control.
This is what happens when you attach to a role you have originally chosen in order to fulfil your intent. Suddenly, all the activities related to the role, e.g. a mental health advocate, or a therapist that felt like a cool, pure refreshing stream in your arteries, now seem to be sucking out all your energy and vitality.
For an arrangement to align with your organic expression, it needs to remain without attachments. You have been feeling blocked as a partner, a healer, a human. Release all the attachments feeding your belief that you have to be a healer, a partner, a feminine beauty to experience what you have come here to express, and the form itself will lose its confining contours.
When a purpose, like a river, loses its natural life force and vitality, your Soul will look for a new, unobstructed expression. If you keep re-creating the attachments, you will keep running in place, losing passion for one form (‘a purpose’) and attaching it to yet another meaningless form, over and over again, losing the actual purpose — the expression of what you have come here to learn, to give and receive.”
As challenging as releasing attachments can be in just any area of our lives, I believe attachments related to our purpose are the hardest to let go of. We invest our emotions, relationships, time and all sorts of material resources. Most of all, we identify with it: I’m a mental health advocate; I came here to heal others; Working with children is my life purpose, etc. We build our personal story around it and condition our value upon its impact measured by external recognition of some kind.
I know, the ego will cringe at it: I serve others without expectations, but there is no purpose without expectations. It is, in fact, the expectations that manifest the particular form of our purpose, whether we motivate millions from the stage, are home-stay mother, serve coffee and smiles from behind the counter.
Expectations are the banks that give the river its course, they are the keyboard or pens that make it possible to write the story in the first place. It is only when we attach to these expectations and instead of allowing them to metamorph naturally without resistance that we lose our direction, our intended expression.
The feeling of having lost our purpose is our Soul’s survival mechanism, just like the body makes us feel too weak to move when it needs to heal, to re-balance. In that, it is our superb navigation tool ringing the alarm we got off the course.
A monstrous part of my anxiety has been gone since I took my focus off the form of my purpose and let myself be guided by what poses a challenge or revitalises me physically, mentally, and emotionally. It may appear formless and thus threatening to the rigidity of the survival mind which relies on the known, the defined, the recurring. By the natural law of magnetism, however, the form comes to life at some point. The less resistance, the more fluid and harmonious its contours are.
It may seem that in this way we will not be able to finish any project we associate with our purpose if the form of our expression has no firmly defined edges. This is, however, the thinking of the mind attached to the form over the expression, as I wrote above. Surrendering to the opposite was particularly challenging for me as I struggled with completing my enterprises my whole life, mostly due to racing thoughts and fragmented cognition.
It helps when we remind ourselves that it is the very attachment to the form of our expression, such as being a healer, or a social justice warrior, etc. that separates the form and the expression as they no longer align when our fears take over from our Intuition.
At this point, I can see two reasons why I have lost my sense of purpose during various endeavours of mine. One, as described above, when my attachment to the form made it no longer possible for my Soul to express its intent through it. The second is when the particular expression has already served its purpose, i.e. I have learnt and experienced what my Higher Self intended for my Soul.
The survival mind always wants to set up an intricate scaffolding of attachments to make sure that wherever we settle down for a while, physically, emotionally and mentally, we recreate the exact same house of beliefs. The carnal mind has no interest in expanding its walls or redesigning them, let alone accepting a fluid construction!
It does take the consistent practice of releasing attachments for our survival mind to realise that a flexible structure offers much more stability and resilience than a hard-line framework and that such a fluid structure retains its individual expression. But where does this stability come from when we detach from where we have anchored?
Anchoring in our Soul’s intent, detaching from the form
The fluidity of the form I am talking about is harmonious and thus offers balance (stability) because it is aligned with the expression intended by our Soul. This intent is encoded in what is commonly known as human archetypes. There are different schools that explain how archetypes work and how to find the one(s) we have been subconsciously and unconsciously living throughout the mundane and the extraordinary occurrences.
An archetype is what anchors our Soul in this physical life because it is the archetype that offers cues as to where our shadow and light fall on our relationships, goals, health, interests, prosperity, etc. As you can imagine, an archetype is a universal guideline for any individual within the entire humanity. Yet, when an individual comes across their archetype, it strikes us with such accuracy and resonates so deeply, we feel as if it was written specifically for us. How come?
The guiding power of archetypes lies in the fact that they are not bound by the form of their expression, but only contain the nature of an experience, i.e. the default perspective embodied in the archetype’s tendency. In other words, challenges and ease an individual will keep encountering on their path until resolved. For example, a Saviour archetype may manifest their shadow part as a controlling mother, a political extremist, a raging activist, etc.
The form itself is neutral: a mother, a politician, an activist, etc., and only provides the context in which an individual can express themself and resolve their conflict, learn a lesson. When the context is not providing the opportunity for one's intended growth anymore, the Soul detaches itself from it, and we may experience a loss of purpose.
The ‘know thyself’ can be the best remedy - instead of re-evaluating the whole time and effort we have placed into our calling, or rather its form, it brings relief when we let go of the idea of 'life purpose', as in finding a particular form for its expression for the rest of our lives. It is also helpful when we let go of the idea that we wasted our time and energy because we believed it was our purpose but now it does not feel so anymore.
The first questions to ask are,
How did I respond when I felt particularly challenged physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually?
How did I respond to similar situations afterwards, did I always react in the same way, or did I learn something from those repetitive experiences and apply these lessons on future occasions?
This is so much more rewarding than calculating our time and effort spent in the past, which is utterly pointless as we will never recover it in any way possible. Nothing ever gets wasted. We create one reality, and then we move on to creating a new one. Ideally, we have fun doing so!
A pragmatic, appreciative evaluation will also give us the answer to why we no longer feel aligned with our passion, as well as recalibrate our focus for a new opportunity to grow and co-create in alignment with our Soul’s intent, rather than an obsessively preconceived form. It is as soon as we surrender to this intent that it begins to manifest its highest and best physical form.
Our sole purpose here is to be mindful of emotional intentions as we take inspired action, following our heart. When we remain mindful, our emotional intentions become our green and red lights of alignment. Noticing an emotion and intuitively asking ourselves why it is there (its intention) will help us identify and stop, or even let go of an attachment in its tracks.