Choosing a Purpose-Driven Life

It’s easy to get caught up in routines, everyday demands, social media, and scarcity-driven behaviors and mindsets. It’s easy to fall into familiar ways of thinking, being, and doing.

(Sunset, photo by author)

But remember, comfort can lead to complacency and can keep you in a rut, preventing you from realizing your potential (see Plato’s Allegory of the Cave).

I’ve always wanted to be a writer and to pursue a healing and spiritual path. But I barely pursued these goals for decades because, I told myself, I needed to make a living after all. Yet I chose the easiest routes that I found worked for me personally to make an income and told myself that one must live in the present.

I couldn’t fathom myself ever making a high income, and this froze my ambitions. I stayed frugal in many ways by living with roommates and foregoing a car by relying on public transportation and my bike; but I also splurged on things I saw to have value (music shows, traveling, lots of schooling) as well as those expenses I saw as obligatory (trendy fast fashion, alcohol-fueled nights on the town with friends). I started investing in myself far too late, in financial terms but also in spiritual terms.

Only once I was able to adjust my mindset, to begin to see myself as worthy, and to begin to heal from childhood wounds, was I finally able to start to re-evaluate and re-align my life. It feels almost absurd that I didn’t pursue my writing or my spirituality further for so long, as these are such core parts of my sense of purpose. I would say that finances were a key part in this, but that is not the whole truth.

Self-belief has been the biggest factor that served to suppress my drive. It was just too hard, too impossible to make a living as a writer, I told myself, so I barely tried. And when I did try, I barely got anything submitted for publication and nothing that was published paid beyond a nominal fee. My writing goals were just a childhood dream to be put to bed, I told myself. And as for spirituality, well I found release mostly through drinking and physical release, and so it floundered.

But those core values, the core ideas that you hold to be key to your purpose, exist for a reason. I am beyond grateful to have made it out alive from a reckless life in my 20s and much of my 30s in NYC. And gratitude is one of the keys for spirituality and a positive mindset. With the gratitude and increased wisdom that motherhood brought me, I was able to shift toward a healthier way of living and begin to see the value and inherent worthiness in myself.

It was only in the year or so preceding pregnancy and then motherhood that I had finally learned to largely replace my reliance on alcohol with the use of cannabis and psychedelics. The shift wasn’t without its crashes or setbacks, but it steered me toward a healthier, more conscious and embodied way of living.

I believe it is no coincidence that as mental health issues and addiction rates are at an all-time high, cannabis and psychedelics are finally becoming recognized and incorporated into mainstream culture. The green wave and the psychedelic renaissance have arrived because these medicines can be suppressed no longer.

Michael Pollan’s book, How to Change Your Mind, was instrumental both for me personally and for our larger culture to start to shift the narrative from seeing these substances as stigmatized, underground, and illicit, with questionable value, to therapeutic and medicinal with enormous healing and transformative properties. Pollan’s research and perspectives validated my own lived experiences and helped to propel me further in my healing and spiritual journey.

And now, having awakened and gained such extraordinary insights and healing, I finally have been compelled to work toward living my purpose-driven life. For that is what I came here to do. Living a purpose-driven, intentional, and authentic life is iterative and takes practice. I’m not making a huge income yet from my healing work or my writing, but I believe in the snowball effect, the importance of my mission, and the value of hard work.

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References:

Merry Jane. (2021). The CBD Solution: How Cannabis, CBD, and Other Plant Allies Can Change Your Everyday Life. Lauren Wilson, ed. Chronicle Books: San Francisco.

Pollan, M. (2018). How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/529343/how-to-change-your-mind-by-michael-pollan/