On finding your life’s purpose

Most people never find purpose in their lives and are forever searching. I’d argue around 95-99% to people alive today experience life that way. And I think that’s a major contributor to many difficulties we’re facing today. This wasn’t always the case. As Bill Plotkin writes, in nature-based communities, nearly every single initiated adult would discover their life’s purpose, in part through the help of the rituals and ceremonies of their tribes. Including an acceptance of death of those that weren’t able to encounter their life’s purpose. The timing of this most commonly is in the early teenage years, compared to Western purpose encounters that tend to happen much later, usually the late 20s and again the mid-40s.

Purpose as the poet David Whyte writes is “the truth at the center of the image you were born with.” Allowing ourselves to connect with it, given the societal lives we have, isn’t always easy, although it is fairly simple.

What complicates our relationship to our life’s purpose is the twisted understanding we’ve developed with it: Which is the idea that you can find your purpose in life if you just look, work or try hard enough. Contrary to that, I believe you can’t find your life’s purpose, no matter how hard you try. But you can encourage it to find you. This is a regular response I give people that come to me wanting help to find their life’s purpose. Some people are perplexed when I tell them that. Some are relieved. 

Most of us get taught that we can get some career advice, vocational training, coaching, therapy or other outside help to figure out what it is that we want to do with our lives. I haven’t seen this work out authentically for anyone I met yet, so I deem it not the right strategy and not the right framing altogether. We can also not sit down and answer some questions from the internet about “how to find your purpose”. I don’t know why that is that way but I believe deeply that that’s not the nature of purpose, based on both my own experiences and research into it.

When purpose does arrive for someone, it is nearly always reported not as a rational, logical experience, but more as an intuitive, emotional, magical, mystical one. Bill Plotkin, whose work deeply inspired my thinking around the topic of purpose, calls them “soul encounters”. Some examples of people finding purpose:

• “I received this strange image that I am the last plant on earth. I still don’t understand it fully but I see this as my life’s purpose.” – a friend of mine
• “At the time of my first soul encounter, at age thirty, I was given the image of a cocoon. Although the meaning of that image was mysterious to me at the time I received it, I immediately recognized that weaving cocoons would in some way be a central task of my life.” – Bill Plotkin
• “a bay horse greets Black Elk and tells him that he will tell Black Elk the life history of himself and others. The bay horse makes a circular turn in the four directions, north, south, east, and west. Twelve horses are in each direction, each group of 12 matching in color: the horses to the north are white, those to the south are buckskin, to the east, sorrel, and to the west, black. The bay tells him that the horses will take him to his Grandfathers. The sky then fills with dancing horses who change into diverse animals and flee as the bay and Black Elk walk on, leading a formation of the horses from the four directions. They come to a cloud that changes into a tepee with a rainbow for a door. Inside the tepee the six Grandfathers are waiting.” (read the full encounter here, it seems to me that given this extensive of a vision, it is easy to understand how that deepens one’s understanding of purpose and meaning in their lives) – Black Elk, the Lakota holy man
• “I am lifted up, high over the world, which is so far below that I cannot see it. Yet I am also at the heart of the world, and a giant wheel is turning — and the manner of its turning is the secret of all things. I am on it, spread-eagled across its spokes, my head near its open center. Sometimes it seems I could be the wheel, I’m so inseparable from it. I feel the spokes shudder through my body with alternating and intensifying sensations.” – Joanna Macy, activist, author, scholar

How can we encourage our life’s purpose to find us? 

Since we can’t find purpose, what can we do to encourage it to find us? 

It’s the same question as: Since we can’t make a tree grow, how can we encourage it to? Concerning trees, we can water it, give it plenty of sunshine, a rich and nourishing soil and so on – that’s when the growing can take place, on its own, it’s decoded in the trees DNA. 

For humans and purpose, it is much the same, we can compose an environment and experiences that will make us more open for a visit from our life’s or soul’s purpose, that is already within us. 

There are quite a few more variables for us humans to encourage a visit from purpose, some I won’t go into here since they are too obvious (eat, drink enough water, etc.). What follows is a list that are most directly correlated (but not caused) with experiences of finding ones purpose or guiding light in life. 

The following list can be easily mistaken as a “how to”-guide (it isn’t), there are however certain practices that have been observed to clear obstructions so that purpose may find its way to us. They are no guarantee, but coincidentally nearly all people that have encountered their life’s purpose in my experience have done so by engaging with one or multiple of the following: 

• contemplative practices (meditation, yoga, journaling, poetry, art)
• deep mentorship (coaching, therapy, counseling) 
• psychedelics (mushrooms, lsd, ayahuasca)
• deep nature exposure (vision quests, vision fasts, wilderness retreats)
• fasting, sweating, cold exposure
• trauma work (Somatic Experiencing, IFS, Grinberg Method, other trauma therapies)
• conscious sexuality
• deep dreamwork

This is, of course, a very partial list and humans over past millennia have developed many, many more methods. If you look at that list, notice which of them you already feel intuitively drawn toward. Those will likely be the best fit for you to explore more.

An observation on trauma

The first step when clearing obstructions for purpose to come into our lives (most commonly observed windows in the western world are in the late twenties, or in the mid-forties, much earlier (mid-teens) for nature/tribal communities) tends to be trauma work. This means, coming face to face with our own old pain and suffering and subconscious pattern. In buddhism this is called “the first noble truth”.

Without this step of engaging with the trauma that still lives on in our bodies today, the thicket of our own past unconscious patterns handed down to us from previous generations is so strong that it’s nearly impossible for a moment of deep, purposeful vision and insight to reach us. It’s not impossible, and with everything in this article, nothing is a “must”, it just seems highly unlikely.

My personal encounters with purpose

From personal experience I can count three encounters with my life’s purpose so far that I’m deeply grateful for, supported by LSD (1), mushrooms (2), meditation (3). The images and words I received were these:

• A woman being crowned and stepping onto a throne, me standing in front of her as a servant/warrior (Age: 26)
• A crow picking me up from a hellish looking place, dropping me onto moss in a beautiful forest (Age: 28)
• A line I asked (an entity) about my life’s purpose. Answer: To help people that are searching, to find nothing. (Age: 29)

If you’d have shown me what I wrote here a few years ago, I’d rejected it as non-sensical, esoteric BS. Having witnessed and experienced multiple of these mystical experiences myself, it’s something that despite not understanding it well, has given my own life much more meaning and direction. It’s therefore something I enjoy talking and writing about.  

If you had specific encounters with your life’s purpose and are willing to share them below or with me via email (l.widrich@gmail.com), please do, I love hearing about it.