Life's Purpose, No Pressure

I’m pretty sure I was going to write a great story.  Or a great poem.  Or something.  I can’t remember.  I only know it was going to be great.

They say that before our soul incarnates it has a great purpose, a plan with focus.  Then the soul enters the body and the body enters the world and all but vapor-like traces of this great purpose are forgotten.  And so life is a process of remembering what we once knew but have long since forgotten. 

I can barely remember where I put my car keys so you can imagine my angst regarding remembering my life’s purpose.

As my dear friend Julie says, “Doesn’t remembering your LIFE’S PURPOSE just feel so BIG?  LIFE’S PURPOSE.  Geez.  It’s like on one hand how could you miss it and on the other where the heck is it?”  

When I imagine that my purpose is a “thing” or a “great creation” I really feel the burden of “finding” it.  Actually, let me rephrase.  For many years I experienced straight-up anxiety brought on by the whole ‘remembering your purpose’ perspective.  I felt like I was chronically missing something. “Oh my god...did I miss the bus to my purpose?  Am I anywhere near finding my purpose?  Did I take a wrong turn?  Am I close?  Not close?  Marco?  Pollo?  Marco?  Pollo?  Help a sister out!“

It only took about 10 years of living with this low grade anxiety and self-imposed spiritual pressure to recognize that living in a state of constant ‘seeking’ was unsustainable for my nervous system and my overall enjoyment of LIFE!  Looking for my purpose was definitely making it difficult to experience contentment here and now.  

So...(not that this was an over night process) I re-framed LIFE’S PURPOSE from some THING that I had to remember to my moment-to-moment WAY OF BEING. 

Exploring purpose as a WAY OF BEING immediately invited me into the present...again and again.  Now instead of asking ‘where’s my Purpose’, I ask myself ‘how am I experiencing, expressing, receiving, letting go, enjoying, resisting, embracing, denying’ this moment’.  These are my questions of BEING. 

My way of being is something I can adjust, steer, and gauge unlike playing hide-and-seek with this mysterious PURPOSE-I-LOST thing.  Oh the pressure.

What the world needs that I can bring is a PRESENT HEART, a present listener, a kind and honest wife, mother and friend who has CREATED space in her body/mind to BE PRESENT while changing diapers and while changing careers, to be fully attentive while nursing the baby and comforting a friend in turmoil. 

It is in the simplicity of being fully present that I experience 'greatness'.  

Recently I met a man waiting for his wife and daughter outside of the yoga studio.  He shared these simple words with me, “Perhaps one of the greatest factors informing your life will be whether or not you know that you are enough.”  

I can not understate the ease that has come from letting go of the story that I had to find something that wasn’t already here!

Right now.  We are enough.  Just as we are.  We are enough.