Caroline Myss says she is often asked this question of those with whom she has worked - "For what purpose was I born?" An age-old question. And the guides that we get on answering this question come from our intuition. What floors me is that we don't have to make the choice to follow our life purposes - that we can get waylaid by all sorts of other plans that others seem to have in mind for us. So how do we make the right choices to keep moving with what serves our highest purpose in life? How do we make sure that we are going in the right direction?
The Power of Choice - our greatest power. The human will. To exercise the human will means merging the heart with the mind.
From Sacred Contracts:
Choice is your greatest power. It is an even greater power than love, because you must first choose to be a loving person. For example, take the simple matter of someone apologizing to you for having spoken thoughtlessly or hurtfully. In that one instant, the power of transformation rests entirely with you. You can transcend the density of your anger and choose to forgive, transmuting that instant into an exchange that restores energy for both of you. Or you can repress your divine nature and cause that potential opportunity for healing to become a contaminated energy transaction. Choosing to act in accordance with your divine potential consolidates the power of your many "faces," your inner and outer worlds.
Your divine potential can often be heard speaking to you through your conscience, which lets you know when you have acted inappropriately. We all have felt the heavy, gut-wrenching sensation of guilt when we have judged another, broken our word, or passed up an opportunity that came our way. If you look closely at this feeling, you can sense that it is the result of repressing or acting against your divine potential. Conversely you can also recognize the feelign of cellular harmony and health that comes from acting with love, compassion, generosity and friendship.
Acting through your intuition, your divine potential always alerts you to "look alive" when you are in the midst of a "choice point," a significant "Contract moment," or a recognition of someone with whom you have an agreement. Because each contractual relationship in your life is carrying a fragment of your spirit, just as you carry a fragment of others' spirits, when you feel strong energy responses to a person or place or in a situation, it is because you have come upon a part of your spirit that lives outside of your being. The atmosphere around you and within you becomes heightened. Your emotions and pulse race more rapidly, and your reasoning either becomes clearer or heads into a fog bank. Your body transmits noticeable physiological responses. As I tell people in my workshops, if you were to stop in the midst of these types of responses and immediately read your surroundings symbolically, you would interpret the events or relationships occurring in that moment from an entirely different plane of reality. You would notice your inner Warrior emerging, for example, in the form of your temper. Or you would sense the Lover filling your senses as you merge with the seductive tranquility of an evening sunset.
Your divine potential also speaks to you through your dreams. It is a desire to get more out of life, but not just accomplishments or material gain (although these things can sometimes manifest as part of fulfilling your potential). Your divine potential is the fullest expression of your spirit; it is discovering the depths of your capacity to create and to express love, compassion, forgiveness, generosity, and wisdom. Your divine potential becomes more audible as your release your need to know why things happen as they do. It becomes more perceptible as you decide to look beyond the physical plane of life, past what the Hindus and Buddhists call maya, or illusions. Never revealing its full measure at once, your potential motivates you to discover the greater purpose and meaning of your life. You are not born knowing how great an artist or how powerful a healer or how stalwart a friend you could be in this lifetime. You are not born knowing how deeply you can love and care for another. You have to learn to act with courage, self-confidence and faith. These are potentials you need to discover within yourself. These are spiritual qualities that must be earned.
Like heroes in a mythic journey, we are meant to struggle to make the right choices. Our divine potential calls us to rise above the Self's basic needs for survival in the physical world. We're called to grow beyond our Self. But we can't grow spiritually only by using our intellect. Divine order and divine logic are different from earthly logic and reason and cannot always be perceived by our minds. Think of the many scriptural stories or myths in which the Divine revealed itself in full: When the Lord appeared on Mount Sinai, he told Moses to warn people not to look on Him or they would perish. Saint Paul was thrown from his horse and temporarily struck blind by a vision of the risen Christ. The elephant-headed Hindu deity Ganesha's human head was burned to cinders when his moter, Parvati, invited the god Shani to look at him, forgetting in her pride the destructive power of Shani's gaze. These accounts indicate the deeper truth that divine consciousness is not easily apprehended by our human faculties.
