Mission Possible?

What's Your Mission?

“Even more often and more insistently, I'm asked, 'Why am I here? What is my real purpose? What should I be doing with my life?' This lack of self-understanding and direction is a health problem itself, in a sense, for it can lead to all sorts of emotional distress, including depression, anxiety, and fatigue...It's not only your mind that wants to know your mission—this knowledge is vitally important to your body and spirit as well.”

                               Caroline Myss (Sacred Contracts)

Caroline Myss is a medical intuitive and author of several books about energy anatomy and disease. She connects the spiritual world with the physical world, and maintains that our 'biography becomes our biology.' In other words, we are shaped, not only mentally/emotionally by our history, but physically as well. It is her belief, her 'reading' if you will, that each of us comes into a lifetime with a sacred contract to fulfill. Some of us know from childhood what that contract is, and resolutely pursue it. Some of us stumble across it along the way, and know it is our mission because we feel at home there. We say, 'this is what I was born to do.'

Some of us grope in the dark and never find it, and some of us run the other way. (I think of Jonah and the whale story from the Old Testament.) Life has a way of tracking us down and redirecting us toward our sacred contract, not always gently. Often, when we know there is something we're supposed to do that we're resisting because it's uncomfortable, it dogs our days and interrupts our sleep and won't let us alone. It is that persistent tap on the shoulder asking, “Isn't there something else you need to do?”

Howard Thurman, theologian and Harvard professor, said, “There are two questions that we have to ask ourselves. The first is, 'Where am I going?' and the second is, 'Who will go with me?' If you ever get these questions in the wrong order, you are in trouble.” Fulfilling our sacred contract is an individual, existential mandate. We may find others to support us, others whose mission is the same, but first and foremost, we are here to fulfill our own calling.

We need at some point in our lives to ask and answer the hard questions. According to Myss, “because the details of how we live our lives accumulate to create health or illness.” Is our mission here to accumulate wealth? If so, is there a purpose beyond our own comfort in that accumulation? I think of Bill Gates, who has untold wealth and is now using it to provide health care and opportunities to end poverty for people in developing countries around the world. Warren Buffet and Melinda Gates are helping in this endeavor.

Finding your path, and walking it faithfully--that is the purpose of this one, sweet life. When you do that, the whole universe lines up to assist you.

                                      In the spirit,

                                      Jane