[This is an introductory article of sorts, which aims to lay the groundwork for a life-changing adventure through the topic of life guidance which Janet touched on in her blog post Revisiting Your Personal Values and Core Beliefs.]
What is life guidance?
To appreciate what I mean by the term “life guidance”, imagine being able to look, ahead of time, at the life that you are about to live – to see all the circumstances that will unfold before you, every choice that will be made available to you, and every consequence that will result from making that choice.
Now imagine being able to evaluate all those possibilities to arrive at a single set of circumstances, decisions and consequences that you would want to live through more than any of the others.
The life guidance that I’m after is what would enable you to live THAT life, allowing you to look back on your life with approval and without regret, secure in the knowledge that you have lived the very best life possible.
This is, of course, impossible to achieve.
We are not in possession of a finely tuned guidance system from the get go. Nor do we have full grasp of the situations in which to use it. In practice, it’s about coming as close to that ideal life as we can, given where we are now and the time that we have left.
Two Different Kinds of Life Guidance:
- Unique life calling
- General life guidance
Unique life calling describes your mission in life, the principal vision for you to realise. It is highly personal – one person’s life calling might not even be comprehensible to someone else, let alone appear desirable. Once uncovered, it becomes the prime source of inspiration for what to do with your life – what to seek to accomplish, and how to go about it.
This type of guidance seems to reside in the realm of vocational counselling. Unfortunately, vocational counselling tends to approach the subject from a career-oriented perspective, which causes it to confuse a vocation (what to do) with a career (how to do it). I’ve had better results with mediumship and hypnosis, whose practitioners recognised the deeper question and were able to assist me with answering it.
I have described my life calling in my introductory post – Dreaming Impossible Dreams. It amounts to creating a new foundation for society.
General life guidance can be seen as a way of living that sees beauty and meaning in every situation, no matter how seemingly mundane or gruelling. It shows you how to respond optimally to the great diversity of circumstances that you’ll encounter during the course of your life.
Many people and organisations endeavour to provide this kind of guidance. There are numerous religious, spiritual and self-help books, articles, videos, courses and retreats that seek to assist in this area.
The guideline that I use can be summarised as an attempt to answer the question “Who am I?” in experiential terms. I strive to answer it by examining my experiences to decide which ones describe me accurately and which ones do not, then seeking out matching experiences and keeping away from those that misrepresent me.
By stringing together a series of authentic experiences, I aim to fashion my life into a statement of who I am. This allows me to both experience the truth of my being and demonstrate it to others.
In other words, the guideline that I follow is to answer the question “Who am I?” with my life, as I’ve lived it.
Looking back on my life, I hope to be able to recognise myself in my memories. Instead of them being saturated with apathy, confusion or regret, I’m hoping to find them worth claiming as my own.
Metaphysically, the two guidelines can be seen as:
Spirit-sponsored life purpose (general life guidance). If Spirit is understood to be the underlying substrate of existence, or the substance from which everything is made (Brahman in Hinduism), then general life guidance becomes an answer to the question of why the universe exists, why humanity exists, or what is the point of human existence or life on Earth. It is a general answer that is applicable to all people, though different people find different flavours of the answer easier to relate to.
Soul-sponsored life purpose (unique life calling). If Soul is understood to be a tiny fragment of Spirit (Atman in Hinduism) that corresponds to a single person, then unique life calling becomes an answer to the question of why you are currently living this particular life here on Earth. It is a specific answer that is applicable only to you. Different people will arrive at different answers, not merely different formulations of the same answer
Unique life calling and general life guidance complement one another:
- Unique life calling tells you where to go. It provides direction for major decisions in life, but doesn’t cover minor ones
- General life guidance tells you how to thrive wherever you happen to be. It covers every situation, but tends to be reactive rather than proactive
Together, these two guidelines provide the most comprehensive life guidance system that I have thus far discovered.
The post What is Life Guidance? appeared first on Butterfly Maiden.