Living with Purpose

There can be times in life where we find ourselves without a sense of purpose. A life lived without purpose can be a drag, to say the very least.

Illness can appear to steal purpose from us, particularly if we're no longer able to work or participate in other meaningful activities. If you're cooped up in bed or on the couch more often than not, watching TV or surfing the net or reading books, it's easy to feel like your life has lost all sense of purpose.

Perhaps you experienced feeling lost before illness and/or a lack of vitality entered your life. On the contrary, maybe it feels as if your sense of purpose and fulfillment was stripped from you and replaced with a life of dis-ease in one fell swoop. Ka-pow, you ended up with a life that you'd never ever imagined for yourself. Perhaps, a symphony of depression, anxiety, fear, hopelessness *insert other here* arrived with the dis-ease.

What if you could get the sense of purpose back, without having to have your physical health? What if your new your sense of purpose could align with your current life, if it was available to you right here and now?


I want to share my own experience with you, in order to explain. My new sense of purpose arrived in my first week or two of being 'all but bedridden'. It arrived when my appetite was so poor that I couldn't even eat half a piece of vegemite on toast before midday. It arrived when I couldn't stand up without feeling like I was going to pass out or collapse. The only things I could manage were drinking, sleeping, showering (just) and thinking alot alot alot. Right there in the midst of all of that, Inner Beam was born.

Inner Beam was the answer to a question that my wise one posed to me while I was lying upon my 'sick bed'. She asked something like 'If you were to have your health back, what would you do with it?' She also advised me that the idea of returning to my 'current' job would keep me sick, because the truth was that I did not want my health only to continue to live a life I didn't enjoy. The message I understood was that my inner beam would continue to diminish if I didn't listen to my truth- I didn't want the life I had created. On the other hand, I understood that if I listened to my wise one and to my honest answers, I could begin to heal my life and that it would one day mean healing my body.

I decided that some important 'truths' were arriving as I lay in my bed. While everyone I knew was at work, I was alone, stuck. I knew that I might forget these truths that were running through my mind with time, so I decided to document them on a blog. I'd registered an e-mail address for innerbeam many years earlier, when I'd had a moment of inspiration. I knew back then that one day Inner Beam would become my 'work'. So I logged onto blogspot and called the blog Inner Beam. I began to write, responding to the questions I could hear my soul was asking.

This was a sense of purpose found amidst turmoil, anguish, confusion and fear. I listened to a little whisper from within and decided it couldn't hurt to follow, I could type for short periods of time and my laptop made a handy companion in bed. Over a year later Inner Beam still provides me with a sense of purpose and fulfillment. I can come back here and 'remember' what it is that's important to me, I can share it with others and enjoy community. I can feel 'at home' and do what I love, which is express myself through words.

To find your own sense of purpose, allow yourself to listen to whispers from within, do not ask your mind what it thinks, it is so much easier than that, allow yourself to KNOW it, to feel it. Allow yourself to hear answers from within, however irrelevant or frivolous or daunting they might seem, and take a small action, whatever it is you are capable of. Your wise one within will only give you as much as you are capable of right now. Something that feels purposeful and aligned with your heart provides a time of refuge, and so much more. It's a form of healing that is so natural and joyful, your inner beam is fuelled and you walk the path of healing your life.

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