In my coaching courses, as an exercise we wrote out life purpose statements. Here is mine:
To gather, synthesize, and share human experience.
Like I do, I packed the words with meaning and they need some elaboration. The gathering includes all the exposure and learning, through listening to people, traveling outside my bubble, consuming art, and giving due to my own experience. The synthesizing is making my own meaning, models, stories, trying to understand the richness and variety, to capture both the simplicity and the complexity. I'm still working on how the sharing plays out, but it partly means to express the prior two components in all the ways, compensating for the imperfectness of expression through doggedness and trial-and-error. Finally, I'm repetitive, but human experience aims to be as broadly construed as possible.
My performing spiritual service as a profession feeds all parts of this purpose. When my coaching courses asked me what the impact of my life purpose would (hopefully) be, I answered:
To help people belong to their being human and to see fully that they hold it in common.
Any instant our minds are receiving numerous signals and our attention is sifting them. Some signals are filtered due to the sheer complexity, and others are rejected because they are undesirable. We do not perceive visual artifacts, and we can go long periods tuning out our tinnitus. We live in denial of plain-sight truths, disassociate from sensations that are too intense, and work hard to keep parts of ourselves hidden even from ourselves. In short, our experiences are never fully integrated, and this is especially so when we live unintentionally.
When I lost my grip entirely, one of the things that helped me most was to become as open as possible of the entire range of what I was experiencing, to let it all in. As I learned to hold a compassion for my unique overwhelming combination of senses, I became able to accept that this was first and foremost what it was like to be human, that my uniqueness made me no different. My focus naturally softened and broadened, and what mattered less was my own suffering in detail, but that this was a process that had happened before and would happen again. It would give me a means of relating to other people, rather than further distinguishing or separating me.
I believe the most powerful, best form of social cohesion follows from our cultivating the ability to see and honor our commonality. I aim in my coaching to help people discover not only their own authentic selves, but how their authentic selves are relatable to everyone around them.