Posted on August 22, 2011 by Deah Curry PhD, CPC

These tumultuous times we are living through are causing many of my clients to question their purpose or life mission. You might think that worrying about your true mission is something that only the most altruistic do. But right now, highly driven, fast living, ambition chasing individuals are slowing down — or being forced to — and looking at exactly what they are contributing to the betterment of humanity, on micro and macro scales.

There’s nothing like having the familiar structures of a materialistic life evaporate to cause us to question why we are on this earth, and what it is we are really supposed to be doing.  Asking these questions and changing your life based on the discoveries you make is what spiritual coaching is all about.

Finding your mission in life is directly related to knowing and truly living out your values.  If you say you value families, for example, how do your smallest, every day choices support that value? Where and when are you inconsistent? Why?  Is there another, deeper value that is really in control of your actions?

Take a moment to list your top 3 values. Then examine how they are really operating in your life. For example, one of my values is freedom, which I act on by being self-employed. BUT when I work 14 hours a day, eat meals while blogging, and take 5 clients in a row, that’s not freedom — that’s being held hostage in some way, and if allowed to continue, would disrupt my ability to be effective in my mission.

Another way to find your mission is through inspiration and example of others. But sometimes, reading the autobiographies of successful or sainted people, we get the impression they always knew or had a sense of what their mission in life was, or that they discovered it at a very young age.  This is annoying to many of us — myself included — who have long had the deep, intuitive but vague feeling that we have a mission to perform, but we just haven’t been able to bring it into focus, so we keep waiting for one of Dumbledore’s owls to deliver the instruction book.

Two words in the thesaurus help us respond to questions about finding one’s mission:  calling, and lifework. Having a calling is something quite sacred, and it has a unique bodily-felt sensation when on the path towards its fulfilment.

A calling shapes everything else in your life. It’s the energy that pulls you forward when you’re too tired to think or to choose. It’s the un-shake-able knowing that something is as necessary to your existence as breathing.  It may or may not be defined as religious but is often experienced as spiritual. A calling will be felt as something that is needed for the greater good of those people or situations you care about. A calling doesn’t have to be huge, or operate on a macro / global scale. It doesn’t have to save the world. It may be micro in scope, and only serve to impact your local neighborhood, or your own family.

Knowing that your calling could be to impact something on a small scale, how does that shift your sense of what you are supposed to do with your life? Maybe it’s to bring joy to just one person, or to make life easier for your community.

Lifework — or one’s life’s work, or one’s Work in the world — are the skills, talents, and achievements that are used and created in responding to one’s sacred calling. It is the putting into action that inner sense of of being driven or pulled by your calling. Maybe your lifework is to persistently but invisibly change the environment around you through gardening that brightens the block and gives natural habitat a place to thrive.  Maybe it’s writing uplifting poetry, or volunteering your time to care for the chronically ill and the dying.

I think we risk getting off track when we expect our mission to be some crystal clear, hugely important Something that will make a difference to humanity at large, or make a ton of money. It might, but it’s just as possible, as author and speaker Caroline Myss has said, that one’s mission is to bloom where you’re planted – that is, to simply be the best you can be in every given moment while still allowing yourself to be humanly imperfect.

A starting point is to think of a calling as if it were a magnet.  To what do you feel magnetically pulled toward? 

 As you think about that, try to be aware of the sensation of that pull in your body – where is the pull located, and what are the sensory qualities of the feeling of the pulling?

To some, finding your life mission may sound too nebulous a goal to even pursue, and yet in my personal and professional experience, without being clear about your mission, it’s impossible to craft a sensible or satisfying action plan.

How will you start?