I know I have a Mission, How do I become Aware of it?

Taken from The Tenth Insight by James Redfield & Carol Adrienne

As a growing soul, your mission is to perfect your ability to love, although we try to make it more complicated than that. There are four common ideas that we tend to have about a life mission. The first is that this mission or life purpose exists somewhere ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered. Second, that our life purpose is a specific, nameable occupation or activity. Third, that once we have it, our real life will begin. And fourth, that we probably need to do something to change ourselves in order to find or deserve it. Without the certainty of the named occupation, we tend to say, “I am so confused. I don’t know what my mission is. I don’t know what I’m good at.”

This searching is our desire to remember our original intention or birth vision.

Internal Motivation
First, your mission exists within you in the form of your natural inclinations, desires and motivations. Look at what you love to do. What activities bring you joy and satisfaction? What did you do for hours on end when you were a child?

Just for fun write down on a piece of paper all the activities that you did as a child or that now ring you pleasure. Let’s say you write down that you enjoy working crossword puzzles. Now take it one more step. Ask yourself, what is it about working crossword puzzles that makes it so delicious that I will spend hours doing it? Perhaps you like doing them because you work alone in a quiet environment, and you have plenty of time to thin, and look up words in the dictionary. Maybe you have an exceptional memory or an uncanny way of pulling out the right word. Maybe you enjoy the tangible sense of closure when you finish the puzzle. All of these ‘little pleasures’ are motivating factors that make this activity intrinsically worthwhile to you.

List each interest and talent you have and look at why you like it so much. The reasons why you do something are the motivating forces of your unique personality. If you work in alignment with those motivations, you will be living part of your life purpose. You may not want to make a living doing crossword puzzles, but the nature of that activity shows what you are inherently attracted to. Therefore, your purpose is within you. Watch carefully to what and where your attention is drawn.

Finding and Living your Purpose is a Process, not an End Result
The second idea is that purpose is a nameable occupation. Generally most of us think that our purpose comes packaged as a career, like airline pilot, real estate broker, dental hygienist, vice-president of marketing, social worker, or interior designer. Consider the idea that your purpose may be to learn to be more compassionate in your response to all beings. Your purpose may be to mentor one special child, create an industry, or be the Rock of Gibraltar in your family. Realising that your life purpose is revealed over the course of your entire life journey opens your heart to accepting all that comes to you as part of your purpose, not just that which you do to earn a living.

No Waiting
It is not helpful to assume that until you find your purpose, your life is on hold or is insignificant. The present moment is the only moment you have to fully touch and be touched by life. No abstract idea of success and attainment can substitute for the incredible range of experience that each day brings to you. Look for the purpose of each day’s events, and trust that you are in exactly the place that you need to be. Let go of the struggle and confusion to find your purpose, but hold the intention that it will be revealed to you. Surrendering to life’s timetable and fully enjoying the present can be the most liberating thing you ever do.

You are a Self-Organising System
Your purpose is unfolding. It’s not helpful to hold the attitude that something is wrong or that you have to change yourself in order to find your destiny. Your guidance lies within you and is working at this very moment. Your soul’s desire to be a part of the world will attract to you the right opportunities for the purpose to unfold. Your job is to (1) stay alert to your internal energy flow (2) pay attention what comes naturally (3) do the work that is yours to do (4) trust that you will be provided with what is necessary for you to perform your ‘business.’ A rose does not question whether or not it can perform functions of a rose. A beaver does not try to be an owl.

As Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield says in A Path with Heart “In many spiritual traditions there is only one important question to answer and that question is : Who am I? When we being to answer it, we are filled with images and idea – the negative images of ourselves that we wish to change and perfect and the positive images of some great spiritual potential – yet the spiritual path is not so much changing ourselves as it is about listening to the fundamentals of our being.

Pat Brady Waslenko’s letter Seattle, Washington to The Celestine Journal reports, ‘Sometimes the results of spiritual growth are subtle, without concrete highly visible changes that affirm we are on the right path. For those of us with damaged self-esteem it is easy to believe that we’re doing something wrong or that we don’t deserve to have good things happen easily in our lives. I am one in whose life promises are fulfilled slowly and at subtle levels. Two techniques are most helpful to keep me moving forward in my evolutionary process : (1) reminding myself that as long as I am completely willing to do God’s will, my every action is holy. This rather than outcomes, is the part I am responsible for (2) reviewing my week and listing, on Friday evening, all the synchronicities I have experienced. Without this conscious effort, many gifts would go unnoticed.