I’m here to tell it to you straight. I want as many people as possible out there to come to full awareness that you are worthy. You are beautiful. You have gifts. There is a reason that you exist.
And that’s really what we tend to get hung up on at times, isn’t it?
Why am I here? What’s the point? Who am I…really?
I am quite certain that every one of us have asked these questions at one point or another while on this journey of life. I am quite confident that those questions have been asked by humans for centuries.
What is the meaning of my existence?
What lights me up?
Why me?
All of the questions, all of the days of our lives.
Those questions don’t end when we grow beyond four years old, my friends.
We are constantly asking those questions. If we are engaging at all in taking an active role in our lives, we are asking those questions and more. It keeps us in that growth mindset, and for that reason alone, it’s perfectly fine to keep asking them.
Because the answers you provide in your twenties may not be the same in your forties or in your sixties, and that’s okay too. Just keep going and keep growing.
And I personally think that one of the very best questions we can continually ask ourselves as we grow is, “who am I?”
We’ll get some very interesting answers to that when we really sit with ourselves and our thoughts about who we really are.
I mentioned the movie “Soul” last week and that it would play a little bit into the concepts of this topic. Let’s do that now, since we’re talking about spark.
I’m not going to give too much of the movie away if you haven’t seen it yet and you still want to, but I think it’s safe to tell you this about it. Surely you know that the concept of the movie is that a man dies before he believes it’s his time to because he was just on his way to realizing his lifelong dream when he died. Like, literally on his way there.
And so he fights like hell to get out of the queue for the Great Beyond and finds himself in the Great BEFORE…which I thought was absolutely wonderful, because I was already on board with the idea that our souls choose to come here and they have their purpose when they do, it’s just that we humans forget what that purpose was because we get sucked into living life on this planet.
In fact, one of my favorite quotes from the movie comes from 22, another soul who really just wants to stay where it is says, “Don’t worry, you can’t crush a soul here. That’s what life on Earth is for.”
In the movie, before a soul can get the green light to go to Earth and inhabit the body of a human, it has to find its “spark”…or what is eventually going to become its purpose. Its very reason for being. For existing. Aaaaaaah!
And there are so many names for this, but another one that I’ve drawn to for awhile is dharma, which has its origins in Hinduism, and essentially means…your purpose; your path of “rightness”. Not righteousness, but rightness.
I love to use the term dharma as well, especially since I’m reading a book about it now. Look, everything can’t be about self-help in my world. Sometimes I need it to be about self-discovery.
Really, when I talk about our journey, these days I’m really thinking of it as a path of self-discovery. Not always rainbows and sunshine. Sometimes there’s some darkness, but as you know, that contrast is necessary in life.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand over the past few years of really digging into that existential question of who I REALLY am.
I found out all of the things that I am not.
I am not my trauma.
I am not the sum of my experiences.
I am not who I was as a child.
I am definitely not who I was as an adolescent or a teen! Thank god.
I am not a daughter, wife, mother.
I am not a former well-rounded IT professional.
I am NOT an amazing coach with a lovely podcast baby that is celebrating her first birthday.
I am not other people’s opinions of me.
I am not my thoughts about me.
I am some of those things some of the time, but ultimately, I am much greater than that.
There is such a deeper meaning to who we really are than what we do for a living, who we partner with or don’t, who we parent or don’t…there is so much more. There is a way of being and a way of knowing, that I promise you I am only beginning to scratch the surface of, but I’m on the right path…because I know that I am.
For example, it’s fascinating to me how I came to be a coach in the first place. I had lost my job and I felt like a failure, but I also had a knowing that I didn’t want to get back in the market. I knew that. I was repelled at the thought of it.
Around that same time, I had a conversation with a friend – I was definitely seeking something, and she dropped the term life coach as a “by the way”, and I had another knowing. A deeper knowing, that showed up like butterflies in my stomach. Almost like you get when you first fall in love with someone. Yes, like THAT. As soon as I got home, I Googled, “what is a life coach.”
It’s that.
Or that time thirteen years ago that my husband and I had an honest discussion about how we were going to proceed on this path to parenthood, and we said, ‘how about adoption?’ and I had another feeling exactly then, knowing that we were going to change course, that this was the right course.
Adoption for us was a rightness.
Life coaching for me is a rightness.
This deep sensation in your body that comes with a knowing that your answer in this moment needs to be a HELL YES.
That is your inner being…as my friend Christine calls it, your inner goddess.
Maybe it’s your soul stirring, waking up and getting freaking excited because you are finally remembering what you are here for.
Maybe it’s your dharma.
Maybe it’s source energy.
Maybe it’s god.
Maybe it’s all of those things.
Whatever it is, it’s something that we tend to suppress as humans.
We are REALLY good at that.
We are much better at tuning out than tuning in, I can assure you.
Numbing away all of emotions; trying to escape instead of really feeling into them.
We’re not that good at contemplating or really tapping into our creativity, because we’ve decided we’re too busy for that.
Still, we make time to scroll social media and compare our lives to others. We can find ways to do that all day, every day.
We tend to define ourselves by how we think others see us. Or by our profession. We might even spout off a well-rehearsed elevator pitch. Or by one of the many roles that we play in our movie: daughter, wife, mother, entrepreneur.
We define ourselves by the roles we are playing because it’s what we do as humans. It simply allows us to understand each other intellectually, emotionally, and sometimes spiritually. These roles aren’t the core of who we really are. They are just a way that we communicate with one another and come to a surface level awareness and understanding of our commonalities and yes, our differences.
Go ahead and make a list of all of the roles you’re playing in life right now. Simply writing them down can go a long way toward helping you see that this list is just that. It’s a list. Of words, notions, concepts.
Because we tend to seek all of the answers outside of ourselves.
And I know some of you identify with religion and that resonates with you. Great! You don’t have to compromise your beliefs in god or the bible or whatever written texts that you believe in order to take these messages in.
Being with yourself and truly listening to yourself, I truly believe could only strengthen your practice in any belief that you are aligned with.
Just think about being open.
Because every time that I allow myself to be open to alternate viewpoints, I find another nugget to take away and further form my own truth and understanding of what it means to navigate within my self.
I get one step closer to finding my authentic self. Not the one that society wants me to conform to or identify with or align with, but the real me.
And I have to tell you, that feels so very beautiful and perfect.
Listen to the signals and that inner voice of longing. Not the mean bitch that represents ego and societal norms, but the one that nudges you in a certain direction.
The one that nudged me to find the child that was meant for us.
The one that nudged me to explore coaching as a way to help others to heal.
The one that lit up when I saw that my friend was doing limited astrology readings and my thought was, “hey, that sounds kinda cool,” but something inside of me was saying, “DO IT.”
And do you know what else came out of that reading?
That I am here to help people build something real.
And that the key to doing that is to allow myself to experience joy. This is from the notes I took during the experience. The intensity part, I’ve got down. Nailed it. My work is to find ways to be loving and gentle with myself. To come to the knowing that basking in compassion is regenerative.
Let me say that again because it really spoke to me.
Basking in compassion is regenerative.
That is the exact phrase that my friend used, and I felt so connected to that.
I think if that’s the direction that I’m going (and it does feel like rightness, because I’ve spent plenty of time in the deep, dark holes of self-loathing), that you should come with me.
I can’t think of a better path to follow right now.
I do think that our paths will change and evolve over time and that we will continue to grow and evolve with time, because that’s why we are here. To continually learn about ourselves and others.
We think that we are done learning when we have completed all of the requirements of the man-made institutions that we are told will make us successful in life.
Most of us probably checked those boxes a long time ago and are sitting here thinking, “now what?”
Well, I think there’s a part of you that knows full well “now what”. There’s a part of you that will absolutely light up when you see a post on social media that is a call to action. Or you meet a new person for the first time, or someone says something that resonates in a way that you didn’t even expect.
It’s there for you if you are willing to listen. Everything you are seeking is right there.
“There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen. “
Rumi
Indeed.
This post is a partial transcript of my podcast, What Lights You Up – Episode 52. I invite you to enjoy the full episode and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or Audible!
Sunny and Raw 