by Celes | | Email this post

This is part 6 of a 7-part series on how to discover your real purpose in life.

There have been many exercises out there to consult your life purpose. Out of these exercises, I found the exercise to consult your consciousness the most effective. I’ll be sharing how you can do this exercise in detail in this article. (Thanks Steve for first starting this!).

Set aside at least 30 minutes, with no distractions, before you start. If you feel that you are too busy to spare even 30 minutes, consider that 30 minutes is a minuscule investment for an output that will turn your whole life around. Seriously, it is from consciously taking time out to think about my life purpose that I live with clarity today. Shave off those time from what you spend on surfing, chatting, watching TV or any random activities.

Step 1: Consult Your Subconsciousness

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.” Rumi
“Decide upon your major definite purpose in life and then organize all your activities around it.” Brian Tracy

With this exercise, we will be consulting our inner self. Instead of looking towards the world or other people, it involves us looking within and consulting your own subconsciousness.

Steps:

1. Before starting, clear your mind of any clutter. If you feel bogged down, then do the brain dumping exercise first. Do this for as long as it’s needed to get your mind clear. Meditation also helps.
2. Generate a very intense desire to discover your purpose. You have to want to discover your purpose. Tell yourself ‘I want to discover my life purpose‘. This is necessary to generate the most optimum results during the exercise.
3. Equip yourself with a pen or paper, or sit yourself in front of your word processor. You can do this with either your eyes open or closed (if you can type with your eyes closed). I prefer closed as it allows me to focus/concentrate better.
4. Clear your mind and relax.
5. Ask yourself the question ‘What is my life purpose? Why am I here for?’
6. Start writing down all thoughts that pop in.
7. Keep writing and press on until you finally reach the answer that evokes your strongest emotions and resonates with the depth of your soul.

As you do the exercise, remember that…

• Be persistent. Half-way through, you might get the nagging feeling to stop and do something else. Or maybe your mind is drawing up in a blank. Press on; this means you’re getting somewhere.
• Do not overthink. It does not matter if your thought is a short phrase, a long sentence, repeated or seems irrelevant. The point is not to let your logical mind interfere and filter out anything.
• Do not filter. Filtering will affect the progress. Just write down everything that comes to mind. Even if you come up with answers like ‘I want to just do nothing’ or ‘I want to laze away and sleep’, write these down and keep going. What you type here is not important; it is the final answer you reach at the end of the exercise that is your real purpose. In order to get to the final answer, you have to first get out all the irrelevant answers / thoughts.
• Get past the socially conditioned flakes. If you have not experienced any clarity on your purpose in life before, you will find that your answers start off as imposed purposes. These are the flakes of social, media and environmental conditioning that are accumulated in your mind over the course of your life. Just write down them anyway because it helps to get them out of the way. Your liberating purposes will soon start popping in.
• Get down to the core of your passion. As you keep typing, you might find yourself writing a lot of activities and tasks, such as ‘watching television’, ‘hanging out with friends’, ‘exercising’. You might get to certain activities you are extremely passionate about, say, dancing. Get down to the root message behind that. What is it that dancing allows you to achieve that makes you love it so much? Is it because it lets you grow and become a better self? Is it because it lets you utilize your creativity? Is it because it lets you become in unison with your body and soul?
• The answers in the middle don’t matter at all actually. It’s about the final answer. That’ll be the answer where you hit resonance. (next step)
• Keep going till you hit the point of resonance. As you move along, you will start uncovering answers that hit a resonating spot in your heart. Keep moving in that direction and refining your answer along that direction. Get to the answer that evokes your strongest emotions and resonates with the depth of your soul. This final answer is what you are looking for – not the ones in between. It can take as short as 30 minutes, to as long as 2 hours if need be. Just keep typing and get the answers flowing until you get there.

My Experience With This Exercise

When I did this exercise 2 years ago to discover my purpose, my first set of answers were social-conditioning junk, like earning money, becoming slim and pretty, becoming successful, etc. They started to disappear as I progressed through the exercise.

The first signs of my purpose started popping at #20 and I finally arrived at a full answer that fully resonated with me at #80. Some of you might take longer or shorter. For me, I was doing a lot of introspection on my life and flushing out mental waste for the few days before I did the exercise, so it helped facilitate the exercise.

Your Results

Here are some possible outcomes from this exercise:

1. The answer truly connects with your heart and soul. For some, you might be so overwhelmed emotionally that you cry. (I did.)
2. Your answer is a “pop” or an “a-ha!” and connects on some level
3. You might get an answer that’s like “uhhh… okay. What does this mean?”
4. You might not get any answer that connects at all

When you reach #1, you’ll know. If so, proceed on to the next step.

If you got #2, then continue on with the exercise. There are layers deeper that can still be uncovered.

If it’s #3 and #4, you have not gotten the real answer yet. Take a break and try this exercise tomorrow when you are fresh. Follow the instructions above and keep probing and questioning beyond what the answers you are getting. Your mind is like an ocean, and the answer lies at the depth at the ocean. All these answers are the water we are scooping out in order to get the resonating answer at the end.

Note that whether you get to #1 depends on the following:

a) Your breadth and depth of life experiences up till this point

The more contexts you have been exposed, the more likely you would have come into contact with what really stirs up your soul on the inside. As I have shared in my personal life story on how I came to discover my purpose, it was the active pursuit of growth and exposure to different contextual stimulants that allowed me to eventually realize what I truly want to do in life.

If you were unable to generate something tangible from looking within yourself, try looking towards the world on the outside – what have you not explored or seen? Go wild and open yourself to the widest latitude of contexts possible.

The more situations you expose yourself to, the higher the chance of finding what really sets you off on the inside. This is the same as the concept of heuristics – it refers to the process of continuously searching to find the optimal solution to a problem. In a matter of time, the process of trial and error will eventually lead you to your real purpose which clicks within you.

b) Your consciousness level

The level of your consciousness is represented by your knowingness of yourself and the world. This is extremely important because it sets the stage for defining your purpose. If you have a warped understanding of reality, you will have a warped purpose. Read Map of Consciousness for more about consciousness and the 17 different levels.

By properly understanding the landscape of the entire universe you are in, you will be able to more accurately identify your purpose and build it on an unshakable foundation. It’s like getting a bird eye view of a maze, where you have a higher perspective of what’s going on.

Here are some ways to increase your consciousness:

1. Adopt a world view of your life (both time and space)
2. Continuously challenge social constructs and beliefs
3. Drilling into root cause vs. dealing with effects in life
4. Meditation and Brain Dumping Exercise helps as well

At the end of the day, remember that there is no right or wrong answer. Seriously, there is only the answer which is the most true for you. To date, I have never had any client with the same purpose statement as another. Some of their purposes are: “To love myself and others unconditionally”, “To live my best life via being persistent and taking continuous actions on my goals”, “To do the right things right”, “To be my best and touch others’ hearts”, etc. All of you are unique individuals and thus your purpose will be totally unique to you. It is what matters to you.

Step 2: Write Your Mission Statement

Now that you have gotten the answer to your life purpose, now it’s about tidying/crafting it into a proper mission statement. There are no hard and fast rules on how to do this, but below are some good pointers:

1. Simple; 1-2 statements. It should convey 1-2 key points. Keep it within 1-2 statements. Your purpose should be long enough such that it means something to you and concise enough so it’s easy for you to remember.
2. Action-form. It should be framed as an action, such as “To live to my highest potential and be the best I can be”, “To bring love and joy to everyone in the world”, etc. Your purpose is trigger you into action continuously.
3. Use words that resonate with you. All the words used in your life purpose statement should ideally resonate with you.
4. Direction, not destination. Just like how you can never ever reach north, your statement should be an action which is an ongoing journey.

My Life Purpose

Image © pdeee454

After doing the writing exercise with my subconsciousness and consciously evaluating my purpose, I arrived at my purpose below (which I have mentioned in my article on my personal story). The purpose is two-fold:

1) “To unite the world as one single consciousness: To touch others’ lives, enable them to achieve their highest potential and live their best life.”

2) “To reach my highest level of consciousness: To achieve my highest potential and live my best life; To live consciously and freely in truth, love and power.”

Please do share with me your experience and the output you generate from this exercise – I would love to read about it.

After Defining Your Purpose

The most important thing to realize is even after defining your life mission statement, it will change in the future. Just like you evolve as a person throughout the journey, your perceptions of life’s meaning will change too.

Make sure to review your purpose statement periodically (e.g., every 3 months at the beginning, followed by 6 months, then yearly) to ensure that it resonates with who you are. It is possible that you have undergone changes or obtained new revelations in your world beliefs which makes your purpose irrelevant to you. This is just like how companies need to regularly review their mission statement to ensure that it has not been made obsolete.

Now that you have discovered your new found purpose in life, it’s time to integrate it in your life. In the last part of this series, we will discuss on how to reconcile your current life with your new purpose.

This is part 6 of a 7-part series on how to discover your real purpose in life.

1. How To Find Out If You Are Living Your Real Purpose Now
2. 5 Solid Reasons You Should Have A Purpose
3. Why Earning Money Is Not Your Real Purpose (And How To Know What Is)
4. 2 Important Things that Led to My Discovery of My Real Purpose
5. 6 Things to Consider Before Identifying Your Purpose
6. Discover Your Life Purpose In The Next 30 Minutes
7. Living in Alignment with Your Purpose

Filed in: Awareness & Growth, Purpose & Meaning | Posted on Dec 19 2008