So many people are talking about ‘purpose’ but what actually is it? How many times have we heard that our purpose matters?
It has become popular and sometimes overrated, the idea that our purpose is important to find.
Why has this become such a deep and meaningful enquiry, why has it taken over social media platforms, our many conversations and why has it become a selling tool that means unless we have our purpose we are not whole, complete, healthy human beings?
I’m aware of how some people can be a little tired of listening to this same repertoire, especially if they have a job or particular work that they’re connected to and the idea that one has to go and seek something else can be troublesome.
But I don’t believe it’s quite like that, that we literally have to go and look for a job, a piece of work, something different, something unfamiliar, I don’t believe that that is what is being said. At least by me, or the work I am involved in. I believe that at the root of knowing our purpose, there is an incredible hunger to know who we are.
Without that hunger, we would be numb, melancholic and living as if nothing ever mattered, that we are here to exist and nothing more.
We are all here for a purpose and that is to bring some good into the world, whatever that Good is about, who ever it is to help, whatever it is to change, whatever it is going to empower others with or to prevent harm to the earth.
Knowing our purpose literally means to satisfy that deep hunger, by understanding the changes we are here to create, the solutions for our own dysfunctions or the mending of the broken circles of our lineage.
I know that when I was very, very young I used to ask the question “why am I here” and “who am I,” even before I could read or write and to keep asking that question as I furrowed my brow with a curiosity that could only have come from deepening my undertaking.
I was curious about life, the living, the dead, the dying. I was curious about sickness and health, I was curious about what lay at the bottom of the garden and what’s in the dark and what ultimately I could bring into the light.
I was curious about my ancestors and curious about hardship and untold stories, and I was curious about the differences within culture, I was curious about spirituality as well as nuns and monks, but particularly nuns and why they wore such dark heavy black boots and shaved their heads.
Now when I read about purpose, particularly when someone wants to sell a model on finding purpose, telling us that we need to know what our purpose is, I’m more curious about how they think we might find it, and where that would come from.
And this I don’t often read or hear about. Telling us that we need to find our purpose is a bit like telling us we have to scrabble around in the dark, and find something but we’ve no idea what it looks like, or what it feels like, or what it sounds like and we have no idea where it will come from, or how to go about knowing what it is or anything about it.
This to me seems rather ludicrous, but I still think it’s an important enquiry. If I hadn’t experienced it my whole life I wouldn’t see the importance, but I do. I now recognise that the meaning of purpose is not in what we do, but it’s a quality that we each hold.
It doesn’t have to be a job or a career, it actually has to be the innate quality that lives within us, as the light of our own being, that we are able to find an expression of, and realise in some form where it can be useful, or where it can serve or touch the hearts of others.
It’s like the centre of a beautiful star that begins to shine its light so the others might see.
So I never stopped with the understanding of what purpose is, what the quality is that we each might need to explore, I needed to understand for myself what my purpose was and what my particular light was, and how that could shine and touch others. I needed to explore this in depth, I didn’t need a careers advisor to tell me where I should go to work or study, I needed a soul adviser.
But soul advisers didn’t exist during my educational years. Soul advisors were people I had to go out and seek in communities that were far away from where I existed, I had to reach out to seek, to search to look in places that made me afraid, where the light had been dimmed, but that there was gold hidden in the corners. I had to reach into the very depths of my anguish, anxiety from my painful memories. My fears, my terrors, my darkest moments, I had to remember where I had come from and why many times it had hurt. I had to know myself at the deepest core of my being.
And it couldn’t stop there for there was a quality beneath all of that that called for recognition. The quality that was my birthright, which over years and years of conditioning had masked my essence.
I documented that journey over and over again, I simplified it, I created the story in a form that had a new perspective, I drew its pictures.
And then I gave myself whole heartedly to the process, to embody it myself, to let it inhabit my bones, to find a way that it would touch others, that others might understand the need for a soul adviser, to hold up a torch, a lantern that would guide them through the darkness, to offer them a map, a model, a way of exploring the greatest secret of all time.
I am not afraid to call myself a soul-worker, because I know I have done the work and continue to do the work, the never-ending journey. Not the pretty journey, not the easy journey, not the one that gives great satisfaction in every moment or wears some kind of special badge, but the journey that embraces tears, the journey that meets heartache without tempting the victim, the journey of frustration because it doesn’t always meet my needs, but then a journey that when all of this is painted into the most beautiful of paintings, and woven into tapestries that become archaic as they weave together the blueprint of every living story of mine and others, then those realisations become such a vibration of light and colour and manifestation, that I cannot help but feel the breath of my creator, and the essence and profundity of God.
God gave me life, and in gratitude for that life, I give back what I know is mine to give.
Caroline Carey
Middle Earth Medicine
#middleearthmedicine #soulwork #soulworkers #thewheelofsoulsreturn #FindingOurPurpose #rememberingwhoweare #oracleofmedicine
art Brenda May ‘The Wheel Of Souls Return’ & The Middle Earth Medicine Oracle
