For much of my life I’ve been trying to be “better.” My freshman year of college I made lists in my journal:

1. Quit Smoking

2. Eat healthier

3. Get a job

4. *Work harder and do my best in school *

5. Set time for myself everyday

6. Read more

7. Start meditating

8. Take better care of myself

Yes…this is actually a list I made. I was 18. And yes…there was an asterisk on #4 for special emphasis. I did actually quit smoking, got a job, and started meditating, and I could’ve just as easily written this list, or a very similar one, yesterday.

Lists such as these come from a sincere desire to grow and realize your own purpose and potential. They come from the force of life pulling at you to fully live. We all have our “lists,” and we all need them. We need life to pull us toward a deeper experience of living. That’s why we are here.

But all too often this can become a subtle form of self-aggression — a constant drive to be better, different, more than who you already are. Like #8 in my list, this vague notion of “taking better care of myself” has eluded me for years. I’ve spent a lot of time and money going in circles trying to figure out what that even means, and have often debilitated myself doing so. How do you know when you are “better”? And “better” than what? Who or what is the comparison?

This kind of intangible goal and the cycle it creates can leave you lost and wondering what you have to offer the world and what it has to offer you.

You lose your sense of purpose, or feel like you’ve never found it and it’s never found you.

The truth is, you’re already living your purpose. You simply have to see it.

Seeing Your Soul’s Story

You are here for a reason. You are not a blank slate or a random conglomeration of molecules that came here to be shaped by the world; you came to shape the world — to be a co-creator in the truest sense of the word.

The narrative of our modern world says otherwise. It says:

“You must make something of yourself or risk becoming a nobody.”

You can never be a “nobody.” This is a false comparison.

Writer and mythologist, Michael Meade, says,

“Set within the seed of the soul is not just a fleeting image or a vague pattern but a lifelong story enfolded within, waiting to be cracked open and lived all the way out. Rather than the question of which kind of career to choose or the dilemma of what kind of person to become, the true issue is how to give birth to the life-seed that the soul already carries within.”

You carry within you a story that is living itself out. The work of our modern world is for each person to “give birth to” what your soul already carries within. This is where “sight-training” comes in.

You must build your muscle of seeing further into your life than you can currently see. You must develop your ability to see in the dark — the dark times you’ve already lived through and the dark times you may currently be living in.

As the poet, Theodore Roethke penned, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see…”

The dark houses the unseen. You must see deeper than what is on the surface or what lives in the light of day, and you must learn to see the sacredness of your own life and how every moment and detail of it is you living out your soul’s purpose — or at least attempting to.

One of the ways you see your soul’s purpose, according to Meade is during your youth — signs of who you are meant to be and what is seeded in your soul start appearing when you are young. Often unexpected and accidental things awaken it.

On his 13th birthday Meade received a book on Mythology from his aunt. While shopping for it, she meant to grab the history book next to it on the store shelf and mistakenly grabbed the wrong one, but it turned out to be the right one. It was the exact book Meade needed and wanted even though he didn’t know it until he ripped off the wrapping paper and saw the Pegasus on the cover and it awakened something in him that lead him on a life-long path of myth-making and story-telling.

When I was young I moved frequently and my mom was chronically ill with a blood clotting disorder. One day while waiting for her in a doctor’s office waiting room, my Speak-N-Spell’s batteries died. I was bored. I randomly picked up a HOME magazine from the table. As I flipped through the pages, something awakened inside of me. I saw spacious, luxurious, light filled rooms that made me feel a sense of ease. Each person or thing in those rooms seemed to belong and be in their “right” place, and to know it somehow. I wanted that. I knew in that moment, I wanted to build a house someday so I could create that kind of assurance in the face of changing and unknown circumstances. I did build a house by hand when I was 23. When I was 34 I lost the house to bankruptcy and foreclosure.

What started as a desire to build a literal house of belonging turned into a life-long inquiry to find the home within. This is what has led me here today, to this moment, writing these words to you. The life-seed of my soul is to help others come home to the story their lives are here to tell and the purpose and meaning it conveys.

Being able to see your soul’s story is about remembering the dream you had as a kid — the one that came after you had your first experience of being disappointed by life or when you first brushed up against the truth of aloneness, change, or death and it scared you. It’s the dream that was tucked deep inside you that you didn’t share because you didn’t have language for it or didn’t know the form it really wanted to take, so you held it close and kept it for your own.

That dream, and what it houses, is the knowingness of your soul. It is the place that comforts you when no one or nothing else can. It houses your living purpose.

Being able to see your soul’s story is about remembering the dream you had as a kid — the one that came after you had your first experience of being disappointed by life or when you first brushed up against the truth of aloneness, change, or death and it scared you.

How You Can Use Writing & Sharing to Open Your Eyes

Writing AND sharing your story allows you to remember the dream of your soul and opens your eyes to the life-seed that’s been present, growing and revealing itself throughout your life.

Both writing and sharing have to happen for you to fully see it.

Using writing and sharing as tools to open your eyes is a three-fold process.

Writing

Writing is how you give expression to what is already within you. Writing brings your interior essence into form and becomes a vehicle for visibility so you can see what’s there. When you write, you naturally tap into and express what you have to offer the world.

Step 1: Acquaint Yourself with What’s Here

The first step of the process is to use writing to acquaint yourself with what’s here now. This starts with writing into what is going on outside and inside of you — What’s happening in your life? What conversation are you having with the things and the people in your life at this moment? What story are you telling and what story is being told to you?

When I lost my house to foreclosure, I started to write about value because I felt trapped by a story that said I was not a valuable member of society because I no longer owned a home, the bedrock of the American Dream. And not only that, I had lost my home and was now, a “defaulted” one. One day, as I lay collapsed on the floor crying, after being turned down on a rental home I thought my family and I were going to get, I yelled out, “But I’m worthy, I’m valuable…I belong here…why can’t you see that?”

I got up off the floor and began to write about how every single person has value simply because they are alive. I had never articulated this so clearly before. This was the story I needed and wanted to tell the millions of other people who were losing their homes to foreclosure in the Great Recession.

It was the story I needed to tell myself.

Step 2: Go Into Memory

The second step of the process is to use writing to go into memory. When you write and express the experiences of your particular life, especially the moments, people, and events that had a strong impact on you, you have the opportunity to see things that reveal the way your purpose/life-seed has been unfolding and growing all along. Memoir and autobiographical writing is a way to gain a second sight into your life, and as the saying goes, “Hindsight is 20/20.”

After writing about value in a broad and abstract way, I began to write memories from my life that had to do with how I felt valuable or not valuable, which essentially boiled down to the times I felt at home and the times I did not. I began to write my life’s story of home.

I remembered that during recess in first grade I moved rocks around to make a pretend couch in a pretend living room so I could feel at home in my new school. I remembered being in the doctor’s office discovering HOME magazine and then buying a subscription with my allowance so I could build my dream of belonging. I remembered details about each of the 11 houses, in 6 cities, in 5 states I’d lived in by the time I was 17, and I began to see a pattern.

At every moment, in each house, I created home. My dream to find belonging and assurance in the face of changing and unknown circumstances had actually been happening and unfolding everywhere I went, and it still is.

In the dark time of foreclosure, I saw deeper than I had seen before. I saw the true nature of my life’s purpose and how it was already present in me.

Writing AND sharing your story allows you to remember the dream of your soul and opens your eyes to the life-seed that’s been present, growing and revealing itself throughout your life.

Sharing

Sharing is how you come to see more clearly what your story really means and the impact it can have on others. Sharing allows you to see beyond yourself. As I frequently say, “You can’t see yourself by yourself.” We see ourselves through others and they see themselves through us. When you share your story, you offer a unique reflection of what the world is, and the world offers back to you a deeper understanding of who you are.

The key is to share without expectation. Sharing IS the validation. Sharing is allowing yourself, your life, your story to be seen. Through sharing, you say, “this matters enough to write down…this matters enough to be seen and shared…” In other words, you say to the world, “I matter enough to share the value of my story.”

The response you get doesn’t create the value. Sharing does. The only response that matters is the world witnessing and receiving what you have to give. Sometimes the response will be praise and validation, recognition of shared experience, and connection. Sometimes it will be the opposite. All of it, every response, whether positive or negative, is the world reflecting back to you the truth that you are here, alive, in the “right” place belonging to your life and the human household.

Step 3: Create and Share Your Content

The third step is to bring the now of your life together with the then of your life’s memories and experiences through sharing. What you’ve seen, done, learned, and lived through comes together with what’s happening now and something new is created. It’s your response to it all. It’s your meaning. It’s your content, which is the substance and matter of the conversation your life is in.

Creating and sharing your content is how you live out your purpose and get even clearer on what you have to offer the world and what it has to offer you.

Once I started to see the sacredness of my own story by writing it down, I started to share it. I started my own website and blog and began sharing what I was writing. I committed to writing a book — a memoir of my journey to find and create home. I started to have more conversations about home, value, and belonging in our economic structure of exclusion and people started to express interest in hearing what I had to say.

At first I wanted to help people write about their own home loss, especially people who had or were going through foreclosure, but then I realized that was my story. Each person has a story to tell. Each person can awaken a deep understand of their soul’s life-seed and purpose by writing into and sharing their own story of losses and impactful experiences. So I created an 8-week writing course so people could do just that. That was my soul inspired content.

This became my business, Write In Power, where I now offer ongoing writing programs, workshops, retreats and coaching to supporting people to come home to themselves, their purpose, and the meaning already present in their lives through the process of writing.

This is where I am now. I am living my purpose AND I see it. The more I continue to write and share my own story, the more I support others to do the same, and the more I build home — a home than can never be lost or taken away.

If that isn’t taking better care of myself (and supporting others along the way), I don’t know what is!

It doesn’t matter if you are a barista at Starbucks, running your own business, or the CEO of a giant company, your purpose will still be true. It doesn’t go away. It’s with you wherever and however you are.

Your Purpose Doesn’t Go Away

Rather than making lists, spending time and money trying to be “better,” or trying to figure out what kind of person to become, it’s time to see and express the purpose your soul already carries within.

This is what writing and sharing your story can do.

This is what it means to live your purpose. This isn’t simply a job, a career or vocation. It is the expression of your soul’s story that has happened and is happening at every moment of your life. The only work to be done is to see it and live it.

It doesn’t matter if you are a barista at Starbucks, running your own business, or the CEO of a giant company, your purpose will still be true. It doesn’t go away. It’s with you wherever and however you are. There’s actually no way not to be living it. The key is to be able to see it.

When you see this, you get to experience what I longed for in that doctor’s waiting room and now live — you feel a sense of ease, you know that you belong and are in the “right” place.

You stop trying to be somebody or to get somewhere and you finally come home.