I’m part of the beautiful circle of beings that have committed to meet monthly, for an hour, to facilitate a series of sessions for one another, exploring the theme of Wholeness.
Today I facilitated a session on 'How might we identify and live in alignment with purpose?'.
I’m sharing some of my reflections on the experience and my own responses to some of the prompts and exercises that I prepared for the group.
The purpose myth?
‘Purpose’ is an uneasy theme for me in many ways. I’ve never subscribed to the idea that we have one purpose in life and used to find the idea of ‘discovering your purpose’ quite anxiety inducing. What if I don’t have a purpose? Or don’t ever realise what it is? Is everyone else living a life of purpose except me?
These days I’m more relaxed about it and tend to think more in terms of finding meaning and making a positive contribution. As a business coach, I believe that defining your ‘business why’ is essential. It’s part of your brand positioning, your promise to your customers and provides strategic direction. But when it comes to ‘personal purpose’ however, I’m less convinced.
The self-help social media industry has created a purpose monster – a sense of lack and need that’s not helpful in enabling us to find peace and harmony. Donna Mcarthur writes about this very theme in her recent post The MYTH of living a life of purpose. Reading her words provided some light relief during my research for useful perspectives, links, resources.
So why did I agree to run a session on purpose if I feel this way? Well, curiosity really and to stretch myself. I was keen to pick up this topic from the longlist of ideas that we’d collectively generated and find new ways to explore and think it through. Here’s what happended:
Everyday magic
I wanted to start with a check in that reminded us how meaning can be found in the everyday, in the so-called ‘small things’ in life. We began with an exercise called Everyday Magic. The invitation was to:
Get comfortable and close your eyes.
Take three deep, slow breaths, breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth.
Now imagine that a spell has been cast upon you, sending you into a deep sleep (think Sleeping Beauty).
To awaken yourself from this slumber, you’ll need three ingredients.
Things from your everyday life that hold meaning or provide fulfilment.
They might be smells, sounds, tastes, people (or the essence of people), touch..
Anything that, when you sense them, might bring you back into your body and awaken you.
Pieces of everyday magic.
When you have your three things, open your eyes.
My own three ingredients of everyday magic were:
The sound of my cat purring when he comes for a stroke in the morning
The smell of orange blossom from a tree I’ve been nurturing for 3 years
The taste of cacao prepared lovingly by my partner
It was a lovely reminder to me that not only I can find meaning in the everyday, but that I do have purpose in the everyday - in my role as a cat mother, gardener, and partner. We just need to take the time to notice, to remember and values these aspects too.
How do we know when we’re in alignment with purpose?
We’ve got into the habit of sharing prompts on WhatsApp ahead of each session so we can spend the short time we have together sharing, discussing, and reflecting. I began with this question:
I shared an example of feeling aligned during a coaching session with an artist. Focussing on how it felt helped to unlock some really useful insights. It was a fun and playful exchange. It felt both effortless and challenging at the same time. I felt in tune with them and able to ask the right questions at the right time, putting my gifts as a coach to good work.
Things have felt out of whack this month when I haven’t made time for my own creative practice, which includes writing here. It felt like a lack of agency, which I take responsibility for. Writing my reflections on the session today is an attempt to break through that resistance (let’s see how long it takes to publish :)) and reset my priorities. I’m reminded of the link between mastery, autonomy and purpose and the sense of fulfilment that comes with putting words on the digital page. My writing itself doesn’t have a greater purpose. The purpose is to become a writer.
Using Ikigai to help discover purpose
I’m a great believer that, as facilitators, we must understand the origins of the frameworks and tools that we use and take a critical approach to applying them. With that in mind, I shared this article - Ikigai Is Not a Venn Diagram - by Nicholas Kemp, before going ahead with a prompt to use the popularised Ikigai framework (a version of which is below). Kemp points out that the this was first published by Andrés Zuzunaga in 2012 inspired by his work with natal charts. His ‘Venn Diagram of Purpose’ was later merged with the concept of Ikigai by Marc Winn and popularised in 2014 blog post. Good to know (I didn’t until recently).
I do like the simplicity of this venn diagram and have used it – or versions of it – to help folks distil and articulate their core (business) offer. The question on ‘What you can be paid for’ naturally draws you into thinking about work and career/work purpose, rather than taking a broader, more holistic view. That said, I do think the questions, collectively, are useful prompts. So despite some reservations, I shared this invitation with the group to reflect upon:
I completed my own Ikigai map several years ago and while it didn’t exactly help me define my purpose, it did help to articulate the golden threads that connect the different aspects of my work. This time some new components emerged:
What I love / what the world needs: reconnection with nature; spaces to imagine new futures
What I’m good at / what I can be paid for: curating and convening communities of practice
I need to sit with these ideas for a bit longer to see if and where the connecting points might be. But I’m glad I took the time to complete the exercise. I sense something new emerging.
There wasn’t time to deep dive into the Ikigai concept, but we did spend a few moments in the session thinking about Ken Mogi’s 5 pillars for Ikigai from in his book, The Little Book of Ikigai:
Pillar 1: Starting small
Pillar 2: Releasing yourself
Pillar 3: Harmony and sustainability
Pillar 4: The joy of little things
Pillar 5: Being in the here and now
We’d already shared some thoughts on ‘The joy of little things’ in the Everyday Magic exercise and ‘Being in the here and now’ arose in sharings around mindfulness and getting into flow.
‘Releasing yourself’ is the pillar in this model which speaks to me the most and which I think, if mastered, can make the most profound difference to us. Mogi says:
In a nutshell, in order to be happy, you need to accept yourself. Accepting yourself is one of the most important and difficult tasks we face in our lives. Indeed, accepting oneself is one of the easiest, simplest and most rewarding things you do for yourself — a low-budget, maintenance-free formula for being happy.
Whether being ‘happy’ is the goal is questionable. But still, self-acceptance, surely, is the work? And a work in progress for me, although something I’m improving in all the time.
Purpose Playlist
I love a playlist. Creating one as part of a collective learning experience is such a powerful way to explore personal interpretations of a concept or question. The invitation was simply:
I chose Like A Mountain by Deep Throat Choir. What I didn’t know when I heard first this, was that it’s a reworking of the 1970’s protest song, “You Can’t Kill the Spirit”. Originally written by Naomi Littlebear Morena in 1977, it became the leading anthem of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp - a live-in occupation and protest movement against nuclear armament, spanning over 20 years. It’s both rousing and gentle, defiant yet generous. There is something magical about the arrangement, the collective power of the choir is palpable and the image of a steadfast mountain in the face of challenge or oppression really moves me.
Multiple purposes versus one universal purpose
There was some discussion about purpose being multi-layered, changing over time, and showing up differently in the different areas of our lives. At this point, a really interesting provocation emerged:
Do we need goals?
Before the session I’d shared a link to Hunter S. Thompson’s Letter on Finding Your Purpose and Living a Meaningful Life as optional reading. I discovered this piece of writing in my late 20’s and it was a game changer for me. What if our goals are the means and not the end? What if our purpose is simply to be? Or as Thompson puts it ‘to strive to be ourselves’. What if we let our intuition lead and trust that the path will be ‘on purpose?’.
To quote Rumi:
As you start to walk the way, the way appears.
In the past, I’ve interpreted this quote to mean ‘jump and the net will appear’ or as a mantra to just get started, even if we don’t know what the outcome of an endeavor might be. But it came to me today and think it can be applied to purpose too - a process of emergence and becoming.
So what purpose mean to me now?
Being in flow, alignment with values, choosing what is life-giving, making a contribution, experiencing fulfilment from big and small things, the importance of following intuition and doing what feels right in our bodies were all versions of purpose that emerged today. I can relate to all of them.
But what really landed with me was the concept of becoming. I have an image of Russian dolls in my mind and the idea of both peeling back and shedding old layers whilst simultaneously revealing new ones. The interplay between becoming and releasing is what I’ll be sitting with over the coming days.