Uncover Your Life Purpose with Meditation — Part 2

The second part of this series continues with using emotions as your guide. Find out how to decode the messages behind your recurring emotions with meditation and reveal your true calling in life

How would you describe your feelings most of the time? Do you use words like peaceful, at ease, tranquil, happy, blessed, satisfying or grateful? Or would indifferent, anxious, stressful, uninterested, miserable, uneasy or depressing fit you better?

While no one feels the same way every day, if you usually tip the balance toward the other end of ‘peaceful’, then it’s time to take a good, hard look at your life.

In this second part of Uncover Your Life Purpose with Meditation, we will look at another indicator which tells us whether we are in line with our higher purpose — our emotions.

2. Understanding Your Emotions

‘Negative’ emotions are another set of tools used by nature to tell us that something is wrong.

Do you often feel listless and apathetic about life? Is your mind constantly preoccupied with worries and fears? Do you often flare up and vent your anger on things that bear no relevance to the real issue? Or are you confused and lost at what you should do most of the time? Do you regularly use alcohol, food, tobacco or drugs to distract yourself? Is there a persistent sense that something is not quite right but yet you can’t put a finger on? Is inner peace alien to you?

If you answer yes to one or more of the questions above, then it’s likely that there’s something that you need to address or deal with. Emotions are part of our internal feedback system that surface in response to the way we perceive the world around us. When you get not-so-pleasant emotions stirring inside, instead of trying ways to suppress them or let them all out explosively, try staying with them and feel them completely.

Rather than treating them as enemies, try seeing your ‘negative’ emotions as well-meaning messengers which have something to tell you. Maybe there’s something that you should do more or less of. Or perhaps there’s something that you need to get into or out of.

In Living at Peace with Your Emotions, I have elaborated this approach in greater details. Do take a look if you haven’t.

Besides shifting the way you see your ‘negative’ emotions, you can also practice the Meanings of the Past Meditation to help increase your understanding about yourself and your life purpose. This meditation is most powerful if you keep a daily record of your experiences. You’ll know why from the following description.

Meanings of the Past Meditation

Sit comfortably and begin by taking a few slow and increasingly deep inhalation and exhalation to relax and calm down.
When you are fully relaxed, bring to mind your experiences in the last seven days. Recall the people you’ve met or want to meet, the work you’ve done or not done, the words you’ve spoken or withheld, the activities you’ve engaged in or wish to do, and most importantly, the internal experience that you’ve gone through as a result of all these events. Include as much details as you can: the sounds, visuals, taste, smell and any physical sensations.

You’re not likely to remember everything and that’s fine. Only those that made an impression will surface. You will be surprised that seemingly trivial and forgettable events would surface in your mind during this meditation. The task of recollection can also be made easy by keeping a daily journal of your day-to-day experience.
Looking at your experiences as a whole, try to identify any commonalities between them. Are there recurring pattern of feelings, words, sensations or events that appear a number of times on different days? What can you learn from this recurring pattern? Note that something can be triggered by different events, but yet it has an unmistakable familiarity that you experience over and over again.
Now zoom out from your experiences further and try to see it like a movie director. Can you see where your life is heading? What is the direction of its flow? Do you see the cord of meaning that ties them all together?
At the end of your session, take down the insights that you have gained during the meditation. In the beginning, it won’t be easy to see the interconnectedness of your life episodes and the meaning of it all, but by consistently staying open, you allow them to be revealed to you over time.

From the insights you’ve gained, let us dive deeper with the help of the questions below to help us identify our true calling:

From the recurring pattern of emotions, thoughts, words and events, what are the life events that allow me to be myself and be truly happy? And which are the ones that make me feel uneasy, forced and distressed?
Is my life flowing in the direction of more authenticity and happiness, or is it going towards more pretense and distress?
What changes do I have to make in order for my life to flow towards more authenticity and happiness?
Am I ready to make these changes?
If I am not ready yet, can I work these changes into my life over the next one to two years?