Purpose Needs a No-Lie Zone

The truth, the whole truth, and the truth behind wholeness.

One of the things I notice in people who are driven to live a purposeful life, is that they also tend to value wholeness. That made me very curious: if purpose and wholeness keep popping up together, then how are they related? It took me a few years to find satisfying answers to that question, and now the results are in.

I have some good news to share about that, and also some bad news.

The good news is that purpose and wholeness are indeed intimately related, and that you’d be getting both of them. The bad news is that you have to stop lying if you are serious about your purpose.

How come?

Wholeness is a measure for how you are organized internally. It’s the degree of your structural integrity. The better your parts are aligned and cooperating, the more wholeness you experience. The more you are internally fragmented, the more your self-expression is distorted.

Sabotage

We’re all fragmented to some degree, and while we don’t notice that fragmentation directly, we do experience the effects. It shows up in various forms of sabotage, such as addictions, perfectionism, scattered attention, or holding back.

Sabotage is a distorted expression of your purpose, caused by fragmentation. Wholeness, therefore, is not just a nice feel-good effect of true purpose manifestation. It’s a prerequisite.

We do as we are, and we are as we do. That means that our actions follow from the way we are structured, and that in turn our structure is affected by our own actions. Our actions follow from our choices, and each choice either increases or decreases our fragmentation.

Shadow Work

There is a lie, a false belief, at the root of every form of sabotage. Shadow work is the ongoing process of getting to the root cause of your sabotage, detecting the way you have been deceiving yourself, clearly seeing the truth that is buried within the deception, and shifting your behaviour accordingly.

Every change in behaviour is a restructuring, a change in who you are. The direction of these changes is wholeness, integrity, trustworthiness. The result of cultivating integrity, is that you can’t help but express your true purpose. What else is there to do?

The vessel trough which you manifest your purpose requires maintenance and repairs. It’s the inner work to complement your outer work. As far as I can tell, it’s completely up to you how far you want to take it. But for your purpose to be expressed authentically, you have to have integrity. That’s just how it works, technically.

So purpose and wholeness go hand in hand. There is one more key ingredient, however, and that will be the topic of next week’s post. Thanks for reading, and be sure to subscribe if you haven’t already!