Articulating my purpose

(Originally published 6 April 2011) 

I’m reading The Spark [by Spark People founder, Chris Downey] and in chapter 2, CORNERSTONE: Focus, he says on page 20, “Locating your purpose and your deepest life intentions can help you move with greater clarity each day of your life.” This definitely struck a chord. As a budding radical, I gave a high school graduation speech on the themes of relevance and organization. Yet I have sensed for some time that my life has been lacking a sense of true meaning.

Years ago in California, I was working with an alternative therapist who spoke of creating a statement of your purpose with an active verb. To illustrate, she quoted a friend’s purpose “to midwife the Goddess.” That phrase has stayed with me for well over a decade. Sometime later, I was walking across the street to my apartment building, and picked a penny up off the asphalt. I looked at it as I continued crossing, and for the first time ever, registered the word minted there: Liberty. My world rocked. I had my verb: “to liberate.”

Over the ensuing years, I’ve sometimes come back to this idea of wanting to know, to understand, to articulate my purpose. But though I’ve tried various words and terms, nothing resonated. To liberate balance, healing, the sacred, joy—all worthy notions, but no epiphanies, no earth moving. Yet I did seem to understand that I am meant to free something not just in me, but in the world as well.

More recently, I was expressing to my last therapist this yearning I have to know what my purpose is, how I feel there is something important I’m meant to do, to contribute. Her response puzzled and intrigued me; she proposed that perhaps I was already doing it. She knew how jazzed I was about my progress with Spark People, how much fun I was having with my jewelry parties (it was she who mentioned a connection between adorning and adoring), and how I was then contemplating starting my own Spark Team. (This was soon before the Babysteps Brigade was born.)

In fact, it was a Spark Friend’s blog that finally helped me get there. I was so deeply affected by reading how she really didn’t like her looks, that I wrote what turned into a two-part blog—Let Me Be Your Mirror, which concluded with this sentence: “Indeed, you are a goddess waiting to be liberated so that you may bless the world by your example, your actions, your very being.” That was when I knew that my purpose is to liberate the Goddess in every woman.

What does it mean? I’m not sure. But there’s that resonance I’ve been searching for. And for now, I’m choosing to step up as co-leader of a largely inactive Spark team, A Gathering of Goddesses. Seems a good place to start. I’m still doing my Spark challenges, building my streaks, checking off my exercise, organizing and nutrition goals, but now those activities are a bit richer, more imbued with meaning, for they are the steps I am taking to set free the goddess in me.

Blessed Be, Amanda