Monday Musings ~ Your Life Purpose Is NOT To Become Your Highest Self – It Is This Instead

The title of this post may come across as slightly (or maybe not so slightly) presumptuous.

How could I possibly tell every single person who is going to read this post what their life purpose is? Are we not all unique snowflakes who have totally different life paths, and thus must have completely unique and separate purpose for being here?

I hear you, and I get that.

I will get to this idea of uniqueness as we go along, but essentially my short answer here is - yes, we all have a unique life path, but essentially the PURPOSE of our lives can all be seen as the same.

You may think that you will only be living out your purpose, once you have become your highest self. The truth? You cannot get to be your highest self by trying really hard to be your highest self. Or trying AT ALL to be your highest self. And You living as your higher self is the RESULT of you already living out your life purpose.

The Short And Long Of It:

I can pretty much sum up your life purpose as this.

It is your job to face all the dark places within you, and to bring light to those places.

Let me explain.

Each individual has a unique set of 'shadows.'

These are areas within your being that you see as bad, ugly, scary, wrong, stupid, painful etc. These are the aspects of you that you have a very hard time facing, that cause you pain to look at, that you hate within yourself and wish would go away. These are generally the areas of you that you are trying to get rid of with self help, self love or other spiritual practices.

Essentially, we all have areas and aspects of ourselves that we have rejected. That we have deemed to be unworthy or unsavoury or unsafe, and we have taken these aspects of ourselves and shoved them into the shadow, in hopes that they would disappear.

The problem is, these parts of you that you have rejected don't go away upon rejection. What happens is they start to express in negative and destructive ways, rather than in positive and constructive ways, as was intended.

For instance, in my own life I decided early on that my sensitivity was a detriment in my life, not an asset. I was born with an innate ability to pick up on what was going on with everyone around me, but because I did not know at the time that this is what was happening, I spent a lot of my time feeling really sad, depressed and full of anxiety. Because of this expression of my sensitivity, I was told that I was too intense, too emotionally reactive, that I needed to learn to calm down and act like everything was fine even when it wasn't. It was made clear that the adults in my life did not understand my sensitivity, and I certainly did not have a good grasp of it, so we were all freaked out by it and wanted it to go away.

As I tried to reject my sensitivity, to shove it into the shadow, I became even MORE reactive emotionally. This sensitivity that I was no longer 'allowing' myself to express became the source of many of my physical illnesses that I then dealt with for the next 20 odd years. I picked up on everyones issues, and had no outlet for the information I was taking in, and thus I turned all of it in on myself. My sensitivity never went away, it just turned into a self torture tool. I became a black hole of self loathing, pain, desperation, depression and aching loneliness. I developed and eating disorder, and I became incapable of having a non-codependant relationship.

This was all because I decided that my sensitivity was bad and must be abolished. Due to the fact that nothing in life can be destroyed, only transmuted, the sensitivity that was meant to be a part of my gifting here on this earth, was turned into a scary monster that threatened to take my life.

Where Do These Shadows Come From?

As you can see from the example above, these dark areas generally come from early childhood experiences where you were told that how you are is not ok. They can come from feeling like your parents or caretakers may reject you if you continue to play out a certain personality trait or behaviour pattern. They can come from you witnessing someone you love rejecting a part of themselves that you mirror, and thus deciding that you too must reject this area of yourself. Sometimes these dark areas have there genesis even before birth. I have talked to people who felt that there was something fundamentally 'wrong' with them from as far back as they can remember. We reject ourselves as a way of surviving - either feeling like we need to be different so our parents will keep caring for us, or that we need to be different so that we wont 'die' in a social context.

Whenever and however it happened for you, at some point along the line (unless you are someone who is fully loving and approving of every aspect of yourself, in which case yay!!) you decided that there were parts of your being that were not acceptable, and you did your best to get rid of them.

The Coles notes here: Your shadow is simply any area of yourself that you have rejected, and now express as a negative, rather than exalted aspect of your being. It either comes out in a way that is destructive for others, or it has caused you to turn in on yourself and become self destructive - or both. This is the part of you that needs love.

What The Heck Is The Point Of All This Pain?

Now, you may be thinking, if everyone goes through this, if everyone at some point decides that they must reject themselves in order to survive, only to have to come back to these painful areas and learn to love them - what is the point of this whole thing? Why can't we all just come to a place where we love and accept ourselves to begin with?

My answer for you is contrast. Here on earth, you are having a tactile experience. You are essentially taking what your soul already know - that you are perfect, whole, acceptable and pure love - and you are having a physical experience of this knowing. In a lot of ways you are solidifying the knowledge of who you are, by deeply playing out who you are not. You are learning resonance through the avenue of discord.

It is not unlike the story of the Prodigal Son in the bible.

In this story, a man has two sons. The eldest son is faithful to his father, remaining on his property and participating in the family business. The youngest son decides to take his inheritance and go off on his own. He sets out to live a life of independence from his family and his father. As he goes along, he runs into hard times. He loses all his money, he becomes poor and hungry and does not have the means by which to come across food. He realizes all that he has scarified in rejecting his family, and thus decides to return home. At this point he is also humbled, and is prepared to repent to his father and take a job as a servant to earn his keep.

Upon his arrival home, his farther is over joyed to see him. He gushes over him, sends for him to be dressed in the finest clothes and to be treated with a lavish feast. When the older brother hears of this, he is pissed right off. He storms up to his father and questions him. "I have stayed here and been a faithful son, I have worked and served you! He left and squandered his money, abandoned us, and now that he is back you celebrate him more than you have ever celebrated me!? How the heck is this fair?"

The father essentially replies by telling his oldest son that he loves him, and that everything that he owns is also his, but that his youngest son was dead to them, and has now been reborn.

We Appreciate What Was Once Lost:

What the father in this story was saying is that when we lose a part of ourselves, it is like a death. When this part returns, we are going to have a whole new level of appreciation for it because we now see its ultimate value. We had to learn to live without it for a while, and so we can now fully appreciate having it back.

Now, if you do not resonate with Christian doctrine, don't worry. The purpose of the above story was simply to illustrate a point.

We all appreciate something much more when we have lost and then re-gained it. It is through this experience of going without that we truly learn the value of things.

You Heal For You, But Also For All Of Us:

This is why it is your job to love your shadows. When you learn to re-integrate the parts of yourself that you have rejected, you heal an aspect of darkness for the collective. Not only do you make your life so much better for yourself - having ended the internal battle against your own being - but you also transmute an area where there was darkness into an area where there is light. You shift fear into love. This has a resonance that reaches far beyond yourself.

We each have these shadows, that only we are able to love. Rather than leaving the task of transmuting all darkness into light, all fear into love, to a few individuals or enlightened beings, it was divided equally among all of us here on the earth plane. You cannot love anyone else's shadow into light, and no one can love your shadows into light. We each have our own portion, and when everyone plays their part this earth will be a place of only love. We will have heaven on earth, one individual at a time.

As you heal your own heart, you heal the heart of the collective.

Here Is Where Your Highest Self Comes In

This brings us to our unique, individual expression.

It is everyone's purpose to love their own hearts, to love their shadows back into light. We are all here on a collective mission to realize the light, and each one plays their role.

From there is the promise of living out life as your highest self. As the version of you that you are trying so hard to become through all your spiritual practices. Through all your self help work. Through all your self improvement efforts.

The problem here is that you most likely have things backwards.

You see, there is a good chance that right now you are waiting to give yourself permission to love you, until all of your shadow aspects have been transformed into the exalted versions you know they should be. You are waiting to love you until you are able to act and behave as your highest self. As your best self. You are working so hard to get rid of all of your negative characteristics, and then and only then will you love you.

Now I am hoping that you can see that this is the exact opposite to the way it works. The truth is, you will only ever be able to act out your life as your highest self AFTER you have loved yourself, just as you are, right here, right now. Love has to come first. 

Your vision of your highest self is true. It is who you are. BUT you will never be able to live as this person UNTIL you love your shadows. Until you re-integrate all the areas of yourself that you have rejected. Because in essence, your higher self is you playing out all of your gifting, all of your unique aspects as the light that they are. Your higher self is you AFTER you have re-integrated all parts of your being back into the light.

You cannot be your higher self until you go back and love the aspects of yourself that you have shoved into the shadow, because when you love these aspects, they come into the light and start to play out as the exalted form they were always meant to be.

You do not have to war with any aspect of yourself in order to become your highest self. In fact, the longer you do battle with you, the longer you will keep yourself from becoming who you know you are. The struggle is lifes way of giving you chance after chance to choose to bring light and love to your dark places. And you get as many chances as you need.

Your shadows are a part of your light. You need them to be your highest self. Only love can set them back as the light that they were always intended to be.

Everything you have shoved into the shadows is a part of your gifting, and those aspects needs to be re-embraced and expressed so that you can be who you came here to be.

All your ideas about your highest self, your highest potential, your dreams, your visions, your ultimate expression of self are all RESULTS of you having already lived out your life purpose of loving your shadows. These things are not a means to and end, but an end in and of themselves.

And you cannot get to this place where you fully live as your truest self, until you have faced your darkness and brought light to it.

To sum up:

It is your PURPOSE to love your shadows.

To bring Light where there is darkness.

Each individual has taken a piece of the darkness (that never really existed) and will live life out repeating things over and over until they take the opportunity to love their shadows.

Once you have loved your shadows, THEN and only then will you live as your highest self.

You do not have to fight or war with any aspect of yourself in order to be who you KNOW you are. All you have to do is love you.

Alright. This has become a novel. I will end it here, but I hope that you will let me know what you think of all this! Does any of this ring true for you?

<3