Find Your True North

Find Your True North

What are you doing here? How do you connect, more elementally, to your deeper purpose? In this world of multiplying distractions, how do we find our way home? In a culture over-reliant on our sense of sight and its associated metaphors, we want to see ourselves down the road to where we think we are going, and so we want sight lines to destinations. We want to be able to see the end of the street, as if it is visible from here. As if our lives will proceed along the coordinates of rectilinear blocks, straight lines. To know that if we graduate from this program, and head in this direction, we’ll arrive where we’re meant to be. But the cartography of the soul isn’t laid out on a grid pattern. Trails in nature aren’t straight. Where we are headed generally isn’t visible from here.

Finding our true purpose is about learning to navigate from someplace other than our eyes, our minds, our assumptions, where we think we are headed. It’s about learning how to trust a deeper compass: that of the heart, the body. It’s about reclaiming our intuitive faculties, and our self-knowing. And like all restorative practices, it arises from mindful awareness: from the felt connection with this moment. At the simplest level, feeling awareness is to notice what feels better and what feels worse. To be able to lean into my inner compass, and observe what gives me life and what takes it away. We are seduced by exteriors, appearances, comparison to others. We are seduced by what we think we should do, who we think we should be, what we imagine will make us happy. And all of this is theoretical, up in our thoughts.

Turn your eye inward, and reach down into the rootedness of the heart, the ground of the body. Feel into your breath and your chest, and notice your yearnings. Close your eyes and give yourself permission to listen for your joy. Learn to listen to the parts of yourself that don't shout, but whisper. The paths we need to follow are rarely obvious. Our calling is rarely scripted. Be skeptical of easy answers: reside in the questions. Hold the question itself as a compass, seeking not to solve it, seeking not for an answer, but to let it guide you. Learn to feel in your body when you are moving toward your own true north, and trust yourself. No one else can do it for you, because no one else is here for your purpose. Each of us is snowflake unique. You are here for a reason.