Visualizing Your Life Purpose

This exercise comes as a compilation of ideas from Shakti Gawain's book Creative Visualization (1995). Visualization is a tool that can help us connect to our life purpose. If we know what this purpose is, we can visualize being in alignment with it. Otherwise, we can visualize what it would be like to know what our life purpose is.

To use visualization as a tool for accessing information about your life purpose, Gawain suggests that you start by relaxing your body. You can then focus on what your goal is (i.e. finding out what your life purpose is or aligning with your life purpose). You can then create an idea or feeling of the goal. After focusing on this idea or feeling, you can come back to it often. When you do this, you send positive energy to your goal, helping to further create it.

Looking At Your Choices For This Life

Joanna Macy offers this exercise in Coming Back To Life (1998). Macy states, "This process focuses on our individual lives and helps us see how their basic features and conditions can serve the healing of the world—almost as if we had chosen them for that purpose." (130) For this exercise, we begin by imagining the state of the world during the time that we were born. Perhaps we imagine the states of the environment and the human population. We then ask ourselves further questions about the circumstances around our birth. Where were we born? What was our family like? What gender did we decide to be? Asking these questions and any others that come to mind can give insights into one's life purpose.

Tonglen Practice

This is a Buddhist practice that can help us to connect with a greater sense of self by being present with our emotional suffering and the suffering of the other forms of life on earth. Instead of running from suffering, this practice helps us to embrace it. This awakens our hearts and helps us to be with our underlying feelings of suffering. Joanna Macy states, "With Shantideva, the Buddhist saint, we can say, ‘Let all sorrows ripen in me.' We help them ripen by passing them through our hearts...making good rich compost out of all that grief...so we can learn from it, enhancing our larger, collective knowing..." (http://www.joannamacy.net)

To create this rich soil, we can begin by breathing in feelings of pain, grief, and sadness. We then exhale feelings of peace and lightness. We continue to breathe in suffering and breathe out peace. It is as if we are a purifier for the suffering in the world, transforming it into peace. Whenever we get deep into the feelings of sadness and grief through the in-breath, it is then time to breathe out peace. In this way, we learn how to flow between peace and sadness. This is a profound practice in that it helps us to awaken our hearts and our Buddha nature, which is one of compassion for all beings.