Alignment To Purpose: Do You Have One..?

The Inner Orchestra – How Many Different Tunes Is Your Life Dancing To?

If you put a pizza in a freezer all that happens is the fixed, cool protective environment will keeps it fresh for a while. A freezer is designed in such a way that nothing else will happen to the pizza – it will stay exactly what it is, ready to be consumed. Put an idea in a human mind, and it will keep changing and evolving. This is because the phenomenal range of faculties that live in a human are anything but fixed.

Imagine for a moment considering whether to go to a movie tonight. Your mind evaluates the proposition against everything else that needs to be done. Your emotions will charge you with energy. Your brain will get excited. Your habit life will want to know if there is a movie showing that falls into your ‘like’ category. Your body might complain that you have been sitting down too much recently and think it would be better instead to get some exercise. Your psychology will comment that it can’t handle the spontaneity. Your spiritual aspect may generate a need for a quiet time of self-reflection…

And the list goes on, because the human is not a singular entity. We are made of an incredible range of inner lives, each with its own nature, function, needs and orientation. One of the great challenges is to align all of these incredible faculties so as to serve our purpose in life, rather than have them all pulling in different direction. It’s a great challenge but if accomplished creates the most wonderful states of inner settlement, inner stillness and inner harmony that keep a person close to oneself and one’s purposes.

Because of the unrelenting demands, pressures and trials of life we are often driven to have to be effective in doing things we would rather not do, to get involved in situations we would rather avoid and to be forced to strain our thinking in matters that have little relevance to what is really important to us. These repeating occurrences create states of inner conflict and confusion, where different members of our inner orchestra – such as mind, mentality, instinct, brain, emotions, psychology, and habits – become clogged with ways and habits that cause us to function at lesser levels than our natural calibre and capability propose.

This challenge becomes accentuated when a person has a self-declared purpose that requires the whole inner orchestra to be able to engage in producing the concerts of one’s success – concerted actions, concerted thoughts, concerted efforts, concerted learning, all towards achieving an important aim. The big question, therefore, is how to align the whole of oneself to one’s purpose so that all of one’s faculties are working together in harmony and synchronisation?

If at this point you are thinking this is a lifetime’s work, you are absolutely right – it is indeed. However, there are simple ways to get going on the task of self-training, so that one’s incredible inner orchestra – in the form of all of one’s natural qualities, talents, capabilities and inner lives – eventually team up to enable a person to accomplish their purpose.

And it begins by asking oneself some very simple questions:

What is really important to me?
What do I really want?
What do I value?
Where and how would I want to make a difference?
How would I want to be remembered?
What are my long-term objectives?

The way forward is to set a little time aside every day to think about any of the above questions. Get a special notebook and write whatever comes up in you to record the traces, trends and evolution of your processes. Do not limit what you think about – give yourself the freedom to explore, to be visionary, think big, think different, think out of the box, think out into the whole universe of human possibility… Do not aim for a result – aim for a continuing process.

The human has two basic modes, the doing part and the being part. Let these processes happen in the being part. Be sensitive and observant in order to detect how they shape your thinking, behavior and responses. The more you deal in what is really important to you, the more you will connect to yourself and discover natural powers, talents and qualities that exist in your being and of which you may only be partly aware of.

It’s the simple exercises that when done with some consistency, creates a big inner impact.

And once more – don’t try to answer the questions. Just have some process about them. Answers will arrive in their time and in their way and the process will make you ready for it. You may end up discovering a more fulfilling purpose.

David Gommé