When it comes to your life purpose, there are two main parts to that. There is your personal life purpose that is unique to you as an individual, and your universal purpose as a soul.
Your universal soul purpose is to learn the spiritual lessons that all persons are here to learn, whether in this incarnation, or the next. Leaning into learning about your spiritual nature, loving others, being compassionate with yourself… these things lead to a sense of living a meaningful life. Every person is traveling the same journey towards enlightenment - some are further along that journey than others, but the destination is the same. You may not know what your personal purpose, the role you play in the physical world, is yet… but leaning into remembering you are a soul is the most important, and is often a large part of what that shows you what your individual purpose entails.
Some examples of universal lessons that all persons have to learn are:
Realising you are an expression of consciousness, and the essence of what you are cannot die
Learning how to love others unconditionally
Learning how to be at peace whatever is happening externally
Learning how to be around unconscious people and act consciously
Learning to set healthy boundaries
Learning to respect yourself
Learning to listen to your intuition
How to lean into your universal soul purpose:
Be willing to see the truth.
Be willing to love - (including loving yourself - as you open to the state of love it points you towards a sustainable path that includes self love)
Be willing to surrender anything that isn't of the highest good
Be willing to see the truth
Being honest with yourself is one of the most important skills to cultivate during your spiritual journey. The human ego is inherently dishonest, or disconnected from truth. The ego tells you to be afraid of things you don't need to be afraid of. The ego can go into denial about important things to avoid pain, and can lead to you seeking pleasure in destructive ways. The ego can try to protect you in ways that are actually unhelpful. Only by being willing to look honestly at yourself will you be able to tell the difference between thoughts and behaviours that are programming you’ve picked up (e.g. from family members, school, friends, society etc) that are fear based reactions, vs. noticing thoughts and behaviours that come from the pull of the soul towards love, towards peace, towards awakening. Without the willingness to see the truth you may make decisions with poor judgment and hurt others along the way. Simply living with a genuine attitude of being truly open to keep aligning yourself to truth will begin to illuminate the truth both in terms of circumstances (e.g. working out if an opportunity is a good idea for you or not, or if you can trust someone) and universal spiritual truth (understanding the nature of reality).
Be willing to love
It can feel challenging to keep loving in a world where there is so much unconsciousness, but the only way out of suffering is to keep choosing love. It’s about choosing the state of love: sometimes you won’t have the energy or emotional reserves to give to others, and in that case being loving to yourself is the most positive choice. Being loving is not about giving to the point of burnout. Being in the flow of the energy of love is a sustainable state. Sometimes you are sharing your love out in the world and sometimes you are in an inner state of resting and receiving from life (and perhaps physically resting and withdrawing into solitude). How do you work out what is the most loving action at any moment? It’s about connecting with the universal energy of love and inviting your intuition to guide you, being totally open to whatever is the highest good, even if that means taking a course of action that is quite different to your usual habits. Sometimes being in the state of love means taking a nice nap. Sometimes it means taking more time to be by yourself in solitude so you can decompress, relax and have time to process. Sometimes being in the state of love is reaching out and apologising to someone you never really made amends with. Sometimes it's buying a homeless person a meal. Sometimes it's about sending someone a message just to let them know you care about them. Keep nurturing yourself and include practices in your life that help you to connect with your heart, to feel love for other living beings in the world, and yourself. Love is your true nature, and once all illusions have been removed, loving is the only remaining motivation.
Be willing to surrender anything that isn't of the highest good
Surrendering anything that isn't of the highest good is letting go of attachments. It's being willing to let go of anything that isn’t true, anything that isn’t loving. To align with your purpose you may benefit from surrendering a mental position (a false belief), or be willing for that perspective to expand into a more nuanced and enlightened truth. The flow of love can also only move through you fully when you surrender judging others and judging yourself. You may also benefit from letting go of trying to control of what's not in your control. You may find inner freedom from letting go of an outcome and letting what Is, Be, and letting things unfold of their own accord.
Your personal life purpose:
Your personal soul purpose is what you as a unique individual are here to do. Your unique path will call upon your gifts, your personality traits and your life experiences. Your personal life purpose is the way that you can best use your experiences and personal qualities to be an example of love to the world, and something that is deeply fulfilling. Your personal soul purpose may not be always easy or joyful! If you are truly living in alignment with your purpose you are likely to face challenges because it will involve in some way or another, dissolving your ego. If you are truly living in your purpose you will also be doing some things that are not following the status quo. Even if you have a 'traditional' job, living in your purpose will mean finding ways to do that job as consciously as possible - and may involve suggesting some changes to the way things are done. Whatever you are doing, if you are living in your purpose you will sometimes be choosing new ways to do things with love, and this out-of-the-box approach may lead to some external resistance from other people along the way! You are undoing old conditioning in the world, inviting people to see things differently in some way.
Your personal life purpose is not only about the career you choose. That's some capitalist thinking and not from the soul! Your career path is, however, likely to be a significant part of it (unless you are elderly, or unable to work. The real work is love and being peaceful whether earning money is involved or not. Your life is no less purposeful if you are in such a position). Another a part of your personal life purpose is your choices around having a romantic life partner / children. Your other close relationships also play a part in living your purpose. Other hobbies, interests and causes you get involved with are also part of it.
Living out your individual purpose to your highest potential has to do with core energy themes, which are different for each person. Every soul comes into this life with some specific themes that they are ideally meant to focus on more than others. (An example of some of these themes could be: fairness, nurturing, courage etc). Learning important life lessons around these themes will teach you gifts and wisdom that you can pass onto others. For example a person who learns a lot about fairness might do well in a job where they have to make big decisions and do their best to make the decisions morally. Maybe it becomes part of expressing their personal purpose to be part of a committee or to attend council meetings and voice their opinion as a member of the public. A person who learns a lot about nurturing might do well with a job with children or animals or owning a pet, or it might be part of their soul purpose to have a child that they can raise with a nurturing attitude.
Your personality, gifts and life experiences mean that what is right for one person may not be right for another person. E.g. For one person, becoming a lawyer is a positive karmic choice. It is something they genuinely feel passionate about and they have a deeper motive to help people. Maybe they even personally experienced some form of injustice and want to help people in similar situations. For another person, becoming a lawyer could be an act of self betrayal: Maybe it's not really what they want to do. Maybe they feel pressure from family members to follow that career path, because their parents want them to have a 'secure', 'highly respected' job or perhaps they feel pressure to follow in family member's footsteps. Or maybe the person is attracted to wealth and status and chooses their career in law for self serving purposes. The choice in that case is motivated by fear, not love.
Choices that are generally considered the socially acceptable thing to do may not be the right thing for some people, although they are right for others. For example, for some people, getting married and having children can fit nicely into their soul purpose. And there are other people who are not meant to have children or a romantic life partner. There are people who come into this life with a soul contract that they will never become a parent. And some people have a soul contract that they definitely will have a child/children! (As a side note, many people marry or have children before they are truly spiritually ready. It is wise to start your spiritual work before becoming a spouse or parent if you can! But sometimes life happens differently - you only awakened spiritually later in life or you had an unplanned pregnancy and now you're a parent… all anyone can do is to do the best with the circumstances that you have right now and do your best to respond consciously to this moment right now. And that is enough).
Another area where you might feel a soul pull to a non-traditional lifestyle could be your job. Some people are following their purpose by travelling, working odd jobs, being self employed, working a job that pays less, joining a monastery… The goal of the soul is enlightenment and this may not fit in with a 'normal' career path. Equally well, some advanced spiritual seekers are in more 'normal' jobs, and this is a great environment for where they are at. And also some people have non-traditional jobs but they are not particularly conscious people! There are travelers who travel because they are trying to escape themselves and choosing a lifestyle that helps them temporarily to not to confront their emotional unavailability, and it would be wiser for them to settle in one place for a while and work on building meaningful relationships with others. There are even some monks in monasteries that would be more likely to move towards enlightenment faster if they lived out in the world! One reason being that the monastery doesn't give them the best opportunity to notice certain areas where they are unconscious - other people and situations can be powerful mirrors that give them valuable feedback. Maybe that monk feels an inner pull to leave the monastery but stays there because it's what tradition told them they 'should' do to move towards enlightenment. But that, in this case, would be a fear based choice too.
In all areas of your life you want to be making choices for the right reasons: from the soul and not the ego.
These are all facets of your personal soul purpose:
You are here to be your authentic self
You are here to build relationships that rest on a foundation of mutual compassion and respect
You are here to use your skills to help alleviate the suffering of others in some way
You are here to put yourself in situations that expand your consciousness (e.g. a job where you can learn and grow, close relationships that are a soul-to-soul meeting that transform you etc)
You are here to experience joy and share that joy with others
General advice for finding your purpose:
Follow your curiosities - be open to discovering new parts of your purpose that you didn't know about!
Follow what genuinely inspires you
Let go of pleasing others - living a life someone else told you you 'should'!
Learn to muscle test so you can ask specific questions about your unique purpose (or book a session with me and we can explore these questions together and muscle test the answers)