What is your deepest longing? What challenge are you facing now that needs resolution? Who would you be when these are realized?

There is a paradigm shift regarding the popular concepts of life purpose. In the past people have been conditioned to focus their attention and efforts in seeking personal happiness and security through affecting external circumstances.

The realization of these goals tends to create denial of current difficulties or denial of internal unfinished business causing painful patterns to repeat over and over. These painful patterns are your life lessons.

In the new paradigm your life purpose is dealing with what is in front of you, now. When you learn to address difficulties successfully you are evolving and your life is on purpose. Addressing challenges is your modern spiritual practice.

From the perspective of becoming a whole person meaning integrating Spirit, Soul, mind and body, your life purpose is to transform your human nature into your Divine nature. The essence of this self-transformation is overriding and overcoming your animal nature, this is not easy!

Human life is a school for learning how to create responsibly by embracing the consequences of actions and translating them into wisdom.

You were born ignorant of who you are and what you are capable of for a reason: To discover yourself by learning your difficult life lessons. The difficult challenges you encounter in life are opportunities for growth and evolution.  Challenges shape your character and, challenges are overcome by accessing hidden potentials latent within you.

Once a life lesson is learned and integrated you have greater strength, love, power and wisdom available to “see” more resourceful perspectives for addressing the next difficult challenge. This is a sign that you are growing and evolving and moving towards fulfilling your life purpose.

Modern life

Life is accelerating. This increasing rate of change and transformation is inevitable due to more information and more sources of information being available. Modern life is confusing, stressful and fast paced unless, you are clear and grounded living by your core values.

To have direction in life there must be a compelling destination. The goal of reaching your chosen destination requires a purpose that gives meaning and value for overcoming difficult challenges along the way.

Growing up: from clarity to confusion

In childhood desires are clear, simple and palpable through the conduit of imagination. Desires are inspirations, messages from your spirit that focus your attention to act and be what is desired until you realize it.

During adolescence accumulated trauma from childhood, hormonal changes, peer and family pressure to conform to society, these factors make life increasingly complicated. Knowing your desires becomes confusing and your instinct of self-preservation drives you to rebel against external authority and submit to it, your inner conflict is born. Adolescence is confusing and many adults are stuck in this stage of development.

This confusion about who you are, why you are here and where your life is going becomes a normal part of adult life. Until pain and frustration are strong enough to get your attention to realize that your life is off- course you will recreate the same life experiences.

When you are faced with unbearable discomfort desires are reborn. If you have matured and are willing to change who you are and how you do things, you will discover good enough and clear enough reasons to fulfill your current desires.

If only following your desires was easy…and it is not. Between childhood and adolescence individuals get mentally conditioned by internalizing other people’s expectations about how they “should and should not be”. Everyone internalizes positive and negative expectations that become positive and negative self-images. In the end it doesn’t matter, both types of self-images lack clarity as to why these expectations are so and why it is important to behave that way.

What happens is that you doubt your desires and mistrust your capacity to fulfill them, until you let go of your self-images.

Your life lessons

“The wise learn from adversity the foolish repeat it” 

Life lessons repeat and intensify themselves until they are learned. The pain of not learning is the greatest motivation to change you and your behavior. Every adversity has a hidden gift to bring you closer to your True Self. St Augustine declared:

“ Lord, I ask not for a lighter load, but for stronger shoulders to carry what is given to me”

Earth isn’t a place to have an easy life unless you hope for a dull inconsequential small life. Many of your life lessons are obvious others are obscured. The easiest way to identify your life lessons is to recognize what is it that you most desire that you can’t be or have or what lies underneath the painful patterns that repeat in your life.

There are five basic areas of human life that offer life lessons:

Your identity: Who you take yourself to be determines how you approach your life. If you are an adult and are stuck in emotional patterns then you are identified with your ego. From this perspective your life purpose is to avoid pain and seek pleasure, at all cost. Either drive is motivated by the need to feel safe and to avoid addressing your ego’s inevitable fear of death. Your basic life lesson is to integrate and transform the unconscious parts of you that have not matured and you disown, your shadow self.

Relationships: There are two seemingly opposite drives in humans, the need to belong and the need to be autonomous. In its immature form these are acted out as the need to merge and the need to separate from others or tendencies to cling to others or isolate. All relationship challenges are derived from a distorted perception of your Self worth. When Self-worth is lacking individuals are insecure and give in to the ego drives for control and manipulation that result in the painful victim-perpetrator game of relationships and self-sabotage.

Work: This is an important part of life. It gives immediate feedback about your life lessons regarding Self worth, discipline, core values and what kind of meaning you derive from what you do. There are two crucial distinctions, your career: a service you perform in exchange for a salary or other benefit and, your calling: a primary interest you can’t resist doing. Your calling in life expresses your creativity, passion, and imagination. It gives meaning to your life and, it captures your attention so completely that you dis-identify from your ego and become your living presence. Some examples are: raising children, any modality of healing, arts, crafts, writing, painting, designing, music, volunteering for an organization or cause that naturally matters to you. Your calling is not a hobby unless it is a service in the form of you extending yourself to others. For instance, when you perform or teach a hobby to others then your hobby is both your career and your calling because it is a source of learning and growth.

Security: The need for security brings up life lessons regarding being responsible, disciplined and courageous to face your fears. Being safe is a matter of utilizing your common sense to act on what you know. Normally people act without thinking or think and not act.

Health: challenges can be utilized to expose toxic unconscious beliefs that promote an unhealthy life style. At a deeper level “genetic conditions” as well as other chronic conditions where suffering is involved are opportunities to focus attention inward and creatively reframe the meaning of the condition so that “it” becomes a source of inspiration and purpose.

Summary: Your life purpose is Self-discovery and becoming your full potential by embracing difficult experiences. This attitude leads to Growth and transformation. For an experience to facilitate your personal evolution it must include some difficulty that expands your Self-awareness. For example, transforming fear into courage, anger into strength, force into power, confusion into clarity, resistance into acceptance, hurt/resentment into forgiveness and doubt into trust, all of these require self-reflection and a willingness to become greater.

When a life lesson is learned it transform into living wisdom. Here is an example: the life lesson of loyalty and betrayal. When the cheating partner matures to take responsibility for how their behavior hurts their beloved the next time they are tempted to sabotage the relationship they will know to decline their drive for selfish careless behavior. The cheater has transformed into a lover aligned with a higher purpose than short-term gratification. The lover that was betrayed can transform their resentment and mistrust into forgiveness and trust.