I used to be obsessed with pro-con lists.
Should I go this way, or that way. Here, or there.
In these moments of analysis paralysis, every choice seemed to have so much weight, almost like I had to make the right choice or I would be doomed forever.
I didn’t understand that the path doesn’t unfold in your head, in the margins of pro-con lists. You can’t analyze your way there.
As per Teddy Roosevelt’s quote “Man in the Arena”, it happens when you’re in the arena, “face marred by dust and sweat and blood.”
You try something, you get feedback about what works and doesn’t work, you learn about your preferences, and then you try again.
AND, as much as the path can be as gritty as the analogy above, there’s also a very lighthearted aspect to it.
It’s about following your curiosity, following the bread crumbs.
The places you end up are like nothing you could have imagined from where you began.
And purpose doesn’t have to be grand and finite like: “my purpose is to serve humanity by becoming CEO of an organization devoted to ending poverty and solving the food shortage crisis”.
It doesn’t have to be just one thing, and it doesn’t have to be connected to a career (although if that’s something that you want I think it’s great.)
It can change from moment to moment and be something like “my purpose is to learn how to love myself” or “my path is to learn how to have fun.”
Steps to Finding Your Purpose or Path:
1. Set the Intention
2. Clear Conditioning
3. Follow the Breadcrumbs
4. Let go
⭐ ⭐ → Step 1: SET THE INTENTION. ⭐⭐
Within yourself, out loud, whatever. Doing a ritual around it will make it feel more official, but the important thing to do is to set the intention.
⭐ ⭐ → Step 2: CLEAR AWAY CONDITIONING. ⭐⭐
This is a step that requires a lot of inner work.
Personally, I say if you’re not sure where to direct your energies at any given phase of your life, you can never go wrong in directing it towards self-development and healing. (And not from a place of feeling like you’re broken, but from a place of wanting the best for yourself).
Here are some common types of conditioning to look for:
🔎 Example of Conditioning 1: Love and Validation Needs
Think of the ways you historically received love and validation.
For example, it’s very common to have gotten achievement-based validation (good grades, sports awards, etc.), or to have grown up with parents who emphasized success.
This often creates a belief of “I’m not worthy/deserving/loveable/good enough unless I’ve achieved ____.”
The reason why this can block purpose is because our motivations for pursuing things become distorted when it’s driven by needing things outside of us to fill something within us.
And this distorted drive can get mixed into things that do have a pure motivation:
i.e You have a pure motivation to pursue art, but because there’s conditioning of getting validation from success, you feel like you’re not good enough unless the art is successful at making money.
Think about it: could you love and accept yourself even if you’re fat, have a bunch of warts on your face, are jobless, live with your parents, broke, have no prospects, no friends, no lovers, or whatever thing you your parents your friends society finds totally uncool and unacceptable?
That’s the litmus test: being able to love and accept yourself unconditionally. Unconditional love and acceptance will collapse a huge layer of distortion and the path will become easier to see from there.
🔎 Example of Conditioning 2: Attachment to the Timeline
There’s a very common belief that we need to “be somewhere” by a certain age, mainly because of social scripts/family pressure.
(This is basically a variation of the above “love and validation needs”.)
Pressure, feeling like you need to to hurry up and figure everything out RIGHT NOW, comes from a feeling of not-enoughness or intolerance for uncertainty.
It’s an artificial overlay; inorganic.
Do you think a tree feels bad about herself because her fellow neighbour tree is growing “faster” than her?
Or is she completely at one with the unfolding of her growth according to Nature’s divine timing and wisdom?
“It’s the fallacy of linear time. Physics shows us that time is an illusion, and that really all timelines and all moments are happening at once simultaneously, but we experience time as we do because of our 3-D life.
Time is more circular, and troubles and repeated patterns are more like opportunities for mastery of lessons, rather than evidence that we are damned…
You could slowly and steadily save up money, be highly strategic and make a lot of sacrifices, and retire by 40.
You could struggle with money and debt for most of your 40s, suddenly find your calling and business acumen and become wildly successful, making as much as you did in a year in a couple of months and pay of the debt you’ve had for most of your life.
You can climb the ladder, make ‘practical’ choices, be super successful by 27, find it’s not for you, and start from the beginning.
You can have a family at 18, and decide to go back to school when you’re 30.
You can realize you want kids when you didn’t think you wanted them and go for it at 38.
You can be married for twenty-five years, get divorced at 45, and meet the person of your dreams at 50…
Point is… we have to honour our timelines. Not get caught up in an overly short-term snapshot. And realize we’re not bound by the past, because from a physics standpoint the past doesn’t exist.”
— Excerpt from my “Common Limiting Beliefs” article
🔎 Example of Conditioning 3: Protective mechanisms
Wherever you are in life, there’s an aspect of you that wants it to stay that way.
Even if you perceive where you are as negative.
For example: you hate how you’re stuck in a job position where there’s no chance of advancement.
However: a part of you wants to keep it that way because its afraid of having more responsibility and failing.
By staying in the same position, there’s less benefit, but there’s also less risk–so the secret benefit is that you stay safe.
So if you can’t seem to move beyond a particular situation, ask yourself:
What is the secret benefit to the situation?
Another exercise you can do is to imagine that you have everything you want: money, beautiful house, a spouse, travel, what-have-you.
When you really embody this feeling of all your dreams coming true, do any fears or anxieties come up?
That’s when you know you have a part of yourself invested in keeping things the way they are.
Ask yourself: What is the worst thing that could happen if you had what you want?
Tune into yourself to find the answer.
Once you identify the underlying belief, find a way to rewire it (EFT, meditation, inner child work, working with
a practitioner who works with the subconscious such as hypnosis or theta healing, etc.)
🔎 Example of Conditioning 4: Meeting other unmet needs
I talked about how our conditions for receiving love and validation might lead us astray, but these aren’t the only needs to be cognizant of.
For example: Lacy Phillips of To be Magnetic talks about how her passion for acting was driven by unmet needs of feeling seen.
Another example is, if you didn’t feel taken care of as a kid, you may be drawn to helping professions or in your day-to-day life get your needs vicariously met through meeting the needs of others.
If you realize you have unmet needs driving your ambitions, how to shift this pattern is to meet your own needs through inner child work.
—
❗ Heads up: once you make the intention to find your path, you might find that the conditioning is cleared for you in a destructive fashion.
Jobs, friends, lovers, might suddenly drop out of your life, and you might feel really disoriented as your usual bearings are lost.
It’s a classic “Tower” card moment–it can seem chaotic and depressing AF, but it’s actually showing you the way.
I’m very familiar with Tower moments — I had a whole “Tower” year in 2018 which was extremely shitty at the time, but I emerged so much better for it, and it prepared me to be a coach and healer.
I also had a Tower moment in December when it became clear that I had to quit my job after a crazy conflict occurred.
I was dead set on staying for at least a year, and slowly transitioning to coaching full-time.
But once the conflict happened, I knew I couldn’t stay.
That also felt shitty at the time, but now I see how necessary it was to free up my energy in order to channel it into where it truly needed to go.
The Universe knew I was never going to leave before a year if things were chill enough, so it went all O.P. on me and engineered a situation where I knew I must leave.
⭐ ⭐ → Step 3: FOLLOW THE BREADCRUMBS. ⭐⭐
What are breadcrumbs?
It’s the little nudges. It’s following a trail of curiosity.
You’re at the bookstore and a book jumps out at you, you read it and are inspired to attend this seminar, you attend this seminar and meet a guy who invites you to go fishing and you’ve never gone fishing but you’re like “sure why not”, you go on the fishing trip and you slip and hit your head, and while you’re at the hospital you strike up a conversation with a fellow patient who has an epic job lead.
The trail of breadcrumbs is not linear.
In fact, if you’re attached to having every action that you take “get you somewhere”, you might miss the trail.
But don’t fret if you miss one of the nudges. You will get another one. An analogy that many have used is, it’s like a GPS that continually reroutes when you miss a turn.
“You can’t miss what’s meant for you.” — Arden Leigh
🍞 Follow the Breadcrumbs Tip 1: Pursue Your Random Interests
An example from my own life, particularly for people with a lot of interests (looking at you Manifesting Generators, Gemini-placements, ADHD folks, creatives, etc.!)
I’ve pursued a lot of interests that didn’t “lead anywhere” in the traditional sense, and for the most part was completely fine with that.
I did photography, radio, music, comics, filmmaking, writing, read a lot of self-development literature, hosted workshops, what-have-you.
I set an intention the summer of 2019 to find a job that was flexible, felt fun, involved interacting with people, and left me with enough energy to pursue my interests on the side.
Instead of what I was expecting, a traditional job, the breadcrumb trail led me to the rabbit hole of coaching.
And it so happens, that coaching weaves together all those interests that seem random on the outside:
I get to apply my knowledge of self-development and healing principles, channel my love of writing into posts such as these, use the photography from the photoshoot hangs with my friends for those posts, and interact with people on a deep level during sessions. Filmmaking led me down the rabbit hole of theta healing, a skillset that has majorly upleveled my work.
So yeah, the moral is: follow your random interests.
There’s intrinsic value in doing so, and you never know if there is a larger picture weaving a common thread between them all.
🍞 Follow the Breadcrumbs Tip 2: Cultivate Somatic Awareness (aka Interoception)
As I mentioned before, you can’t analyze your way into your path.
I mean, you can, but it’s maddening and often produces not the best outcomes.
I’m not saying the mind is completely useless here–you can use its considerable power for good–but its pitfall is that it’s the most susceptible to programming.
When you practice gaining a felt awareness of your heart and your gut, though: you can use them as North Stars.
Like, your mind can tell you “Hey you should do that thing it will look great on your CV”, but your gut will be like “Um… bro, you actually hate doing that thing.”
(Okay, it won’t tell you in so much words, your gut will just contract in consternation and you’ll just have to interpret that as a no go.)
Another example is from my crazy job situation.
Capitalistic conditioning says: bosses are allowed to just act like assholes and it’s not really a special cause for alarm, you should just accept that.
This is the kind of conditioning that lives in the mind and “logics” its way around until eventually, you’re somewhere that is completely unaligned.
It would have been so easy to fall prey to capitalistic conditioning, but because I a) had enough experience with toxic situations to be able to recognize the signs and b) was connected to inner knowing and somatic awareness, I saw the trap for what it was.
I was lucky enough to have savings (aka Lacy’s FU fund), and supports so that it wasn’t a matter of staying versus not having basic needs met.
But even beyond a survival situation, I think a lot of us are trained into learned helplessness from capitalism and we forget that we can say no and hold out for something better instead.
(If you are in a toxic job and it’s a survival situation, I’m holding space for you. Enlist help for an exit strategy, and put out into the ether that you intend to release this situation and call in something else. Rewire the part of yourself that is used to and has normalized the toxicity. Rewire any learned helplessness. Remember, even though a whole-ass system has been built to wear you down, you are not a victim. You’re more powerful than you can imagine. Good luck.)
⭐ ⭐ → Step 4: TRUST/LET GO/SURRENDER ⭐ ⭐
Did I become the wooey witch I am today overnight? No. I used to be a hyperrational bro, and through a series of insane happenings in my life I had no other conclusion to make but “Damnnnnnnnnnnn. Magic is real.”
In all instances of allowing a magical unfolding to happen, there is A) an element of letting go and B) embodying the state before it arrives.
For example: in the spring, during the height of COVID, I was feeling anxious about earning money and wanted to call in a job.
Logic said I “should” put my resume into a resume hole of doom, but subconsciously I resisted doing that.
Instead, I followed a nudge to go to a park and connect to the Earth.
I did a “melting into the Earth” meditation I learned from Ritual as Justice school, and let all my anxieties melt with it.
After connecting with the Earth and doing some journalling, I felt a solid sense of security, being supported, and that all was well.
As I was leaving the park, I ran into somebody that I had a tumultuous past with.
She mentioned a job lead.
(Unrelated, but this person also ended up majorly triggering me which catalyzed me to try theta healing, but that’s another story in a post called “Theta healing is cool”.)
I followed up with another friend about the job lead (Hi if you’re reading this!) and long story short, got the job.
As far as jobs went, it was a pretty awesome job, until I had to quit, lol.
I have countless examples of this, where I just let go and trusted, and things showing up pretty much instantaneously.
So practice letting go, trusting, and embodying a state of “all is well.”
⭐ 🍞 🔎 ⭐
I hope this was helpful. If you have some tips of finding your purpose and your path, feel free to share them in the comments below!
And heads up: my $50 intro theta healing + coaching session special ends tomorrow at midnight, January 16th! If you want to majorly clear some conditioning and make room for your destiny, this is a powerful way
to do it.
❤️
Remember: The fact that you’re alive matters. Your mission matters. When you embody who you’re meant to be, when you own your power, when you shine your light on others and light a spark in them, when you cause a chain reaction of upliftment that spreads through the planet: you move the cosmos.