The wisdom in the Metaverse says: "I want to leave the world better than I found it". I found this phrase quite inspiring, and I imagine anyone looking for purpose would agree with me. Losing one's compass is tricky and causes many discomforts because one feels lost; a sentence like this is an abstraction one can cling to.
For more than a year, I searched for my purpose in my activities and work. Unfortunately, after a sequence of failures and increased frustration, I surrendered. Making an impact would have to wait, perhaps in another life.
By the time I decided I no longer cared (which wasn't true), I was drowning in data on well-being and purpose. I decided to test all that knowledge while experimenting with my day-to-day habits and routines. I didn't want to disrupt my life, so I started revisiting my Home Within and exploring how to integrate well-being basics in a comfortable flow. I connected intentionally with my entire ecosystem and learned a lot. In my new experience of my Home Within, I found my compass as if by accident. Here are some insights into my entire process:
Insight 1: Vocation vs Nature to serve
It is in our nature to want to help others, and I, with my inner critic, judged myself until I made the distinction between wanting to serve and having a vocation to serve.
Not all of us have the vocation of giving ourselves to a transforming cause. Looking at Myers-Briggs' 16 personality types, I understood that serving is in everyone's DNA. But serving has many nuances, so it was essential for me to abandon the need to put measures and parameters to my definition of purpose in serving others.
Insight 2: The trap of looking outside: our imagined happiness
During the year in which I intensively searched for purpose, I looked for ways of making an impact while I devised work projects aligned with my values. I followed the guidelines in the book Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life written by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, both design professors at Stanford University, which says one can design one's life by prototyping life projects.
Stubbornly, I imagined that life would show me the way and invested a lot of time between optimistically planning-developing projects and then, pessimistically, frustrating and derailing them. Each stumble thwarted me until I exhausted my energy and my creative resilience.
Why weren't things flowing in my life? Why?
In a moment of honesty, while reviewing my experiences, I realised that everything I planned collapsed because of subtle gestures of self-sabotage. While working on interesting ideas, I pulled invisible strings stopping my chances of success. Self-sabotage is a perverse conflict between our minds and emotions, and we tend to minimise it when it happens.
I was puzzled; Why did nothing I did feel real? What was the nature of the heart that I should be giving priority to? The feeling was not one of depression but rather of disorientation, like wanting to open a book to read it only to discover that it contained blank pages.
In The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle says: "You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realising who you are at the deepest level." This is a complex concept to grasp. What was my deepest level!? It was instinctive to go back and revise some basics. I found three dimensions in my existence and started working around them:
My Story, Present Moment & Home Within.
Insight 3: Back to basics in my Home Within
I stopped planning my future (my Story) when I realised I wouldn't succeed because of my pattern of self-sabotage. A part of me was not integrated into my reality, and I had no idea what it was. I began to review my day-to-day life and consciously connected with the most basic parts of me. It was a mental reset that allowed me to flow into something tangible.
In her book Integrity, Martha Beck discusses the need to learn to discern what is true about us. "At the deepest level, you know what makes you happy and how to create your best possible life. That knowledge is encoded in your very nature. But your nature constantly clashes with a force that can tear it apart: culture." Our environment fills us with false ideas; it provokes and distracts us. External input feeds our Story; it also feeds our identity, which is our armour of opinions and judgments that has nothing to do with our essence.
Identifying the truth in ourselves requires education and perseverance to question our identity. Inhabiting my Home Within allowed me to create the conditions to find the cracks in my armour and review why my life was not flowing.
I spent months reconnecting with body, heart, mind and soul. I ended up reviewing the architecture that defines me, and I have come to glimpse a dimension of love and joy on the other side of the thick fog of who we think we are. I discovered my purpose; honouring who I am and freeing myself, little by little, from the unnecessary weight I accumulated in my Story.
Insight 4: Flow!
I stopped searching for my purpose when I eventually felt good by living consciously. Instead of emptiness, I felt peace. "If you get the inside right, the outside will fit. The primary reality is inside; the secondary reality is outside," says Tolle. My growth came from learning about my Home Within.
Learning to find what is TRUE in me has led me to understand: I can live and regulate myself, not from the mind, but from a state of consciousness.
By honouring my inner Home, I deal better with whatever is outside of me. The world has not changed since I started to look inside: my work, my history, my vocation, my friends and my circumstances are still the same; what has changed is that I live them with a calmer feeling.
Knowing ourselves has the magic of allowing us to serve others as we flow with coherence. Tolle says, "Being a spiritual person means taking responsibility for who you are, and for the energy you put out into the world". Home Within is an approach to taking responsibility for whom we are.
Note*
Well-being wisdom in the metaverse inspires us because it gives us the feeling that evolving is easy. Nevertheless, integrating wellness into our lives is a process that has to be lived in our bodies over time; it requires work. How can we smoothly integrate ideas of well-being?
My next post describes a step-by-step of how I designed and connected with my Home Within. I focused on making it easy; we are already exhausted! Change occurs only when we want it, without measurements or parameters, but rather when it blends organically into our reality.
If you want to learn about it, register here.
Have a great Day!
Adriana