A dance with purpose.
Someone asked me last week “What gets you up in the morning?”
Let me catch you up. . . I’m not a person that jumps out of bed at 6 am bright eyed and ready to go. I’ve historically been more of a smoldering creative who wrestles with projects into the single digit hours of the morning and, as an inevitability, have a slower rise.
Regardless of what time I wake up, or how fast I jump into the chaos, it’s the purpose that drives me to get up at all that was the focus of my friend’s curiosity.
It’s an interesting question, particularly because most of my life was lived from a place of ‘hustle”, pounding the pavement and “getting shit done.” But something has shifted and replaced the grind with a higher view of work. Now, in addition to the hustle, I have profoundly rounded out my approach to my purpose.
Where before my day was to-dos and a larger-than-life vision that informed my tasks, I have welcomed a different, more receptive approach to work in the world — The Intuition-Driven Life.
The Intuition-Driven Life doesn’t necessarily dream up a bucket list of foreign sports cars to own or exotic vacation destinations. It doesn’t push to imagine larger and more pristine mansions filled with influential celebrities and wild parties. It doesn’t even push for the eradication of poverty or disease. You heard me right. It doesn’t need to heal the world in the most magnificent ways.
Instead, when I practice The Intuition-Driven Life, I pull all of those desires together and ask them what they have to say about what I really want. I don’t just accept the impulse at face value, but rather let them point to deeper truths about what I feel like I’m missing.
For instance, when I look at my own desires to change the world or “empower people” or whatever, I can say honestly that even though I DO care about helping people, I would be just as happy to just be seen as being a great savior of humanity WITHOUT having to actually do the things that would warrant me praise.
So I ask myself, “What is my desire to change the world REALLY about?” Is it mostly my own need to feel worthy and loved, and less about whatever altruistic project I’m pretending to be 100% aligned with? Again, don’t get me wrong, I still care about helping people, but in some ways, I would be just as happy to be seen as helping people even if I didn’t do anything.
Dark, right?
Maybe, but I’m pretty sure expending more energy judging myself about it isn’t going to get me anywhere positive any time soon. I’ve found that the more I can just let a piece of my shadow exist without judgment, the more I can examine it, ask it questions, and get at the deeper truths, the desire for acknowledgment and love. The desire to be accepted and to be good enough.
All of these desires are core the experience of humanity. For the most part, we’re all made up of the same wants and needs when it comes to love.
Once you realize that each of those initial desires for travel or stuff or being a hero are just pointing to a desire to feel love, it opens a massive amount of emotional and energetic space so that we can get to the actual desire that our hearts want.
It is, to me, the most profound question I can ask in my life. “What can I do at this moment to follow love?”
Following the Ribbon
Lately, I’ve been playing a game with myself in the privacy of my imagination. I picture that there’s a red, silk ribbon that runs through my heart — almost like a spool of magnetic audio tape running through the play head of a cassette player. Only instead of the ribbon being spooled, it’s moving toward me from every which way in any given moment. The ribbon is how I visualize the path of my Intuition-Driven Life. It’s the imagery of following love.
Since, for me, I can sense love best in my heart, (I feel it in my chest), my work is to keep my heart as open as I can and bring as much attention to it as possible.
I keep remembering to bring my awareness into my chest and relax. That’s really half the work — staying “open-hearted”. Open to guiding, open to intuition, open to love.
Then I just follow the words and actions that feel aligned with that ease, relaxation, and expansion I feel in my body. That is how I bring An Intuition Driven life into this plane of existence. It’s the practical how-to of my path of love in the world.
I simply check my thoughts against the feeling in my chest and observe if there’s an expansion or contraction, I move and say words in a way that, similarly, feel like keep me aligned with that ribbon of love.
As I participate in this dance of intuition and love, my life’s purpose starts to form and become more concrete. I follow inspiration, joy, and expansion into opportunities for jobs or partnerships. I dance myself into projects that light me up. It is in such a dance that I find my highest purpose in the world.