Tag: authentic being

I wrote this piece to examine how we respond to traumatic, life-altering events—specifically, how we might remain engaged after irrevocable change disrupts our intended path, and whether such turning points are accidental or purposeful. I aim to explore how we maintain meaning and agency in the face of unforeseen upheaval.

The following discussion is limited in its exploration of these ideas, but it provides a starting point.

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If I do what I agreed to do (follow my soul’s intentions), will my life unfold smoothly?

This is not the astral plane where injury can’t happen. On the physical plane, your intentions often clash with others’, leading to conflict and even destruction. These obstacles don’t mean you’re on the wrong path; instead, they illustrate that purpose does not guarantee ease. The main question persists: how do we stay connected to our purpose when our path meets resistance? Stay committed to what you believe is your unique purpose, even in the face of external challenges.

In other words, following your intentions doesn’t mean you’re not going to have to work hard. When tracking your purpose, your choices and actions will align with your beliefs and goals, not with what others expect of you. When you are true to yourself, you gain clarity and the deep satisfaction that comes with being on the right path.

Your soul intentions will cause discomfort.

Indeed, following your soul’s intentions often brings discomfort, which is necessary for growth and change. Discomfort forces us to seek solutions and propels us from inertia. While seeking comfort won’t automatically lead to fulfillment, it can spur the necessary action. The essential argument: Creation and meaning arise from tension; discomfort reignites our engagement and creativity, demanding we actively shape our path even when security is lost.

What if my world explodes even though I’m doing what I agreed to do by following my soul’s intentions?

Now and then, life throws us serious curve balls—unexpected shifts that derail our plans. The 2000 film Cast Away, starring Tom Hanks, exemplifies this: Chuck Noland faces total upheaval after an airplane crash leaves him stranded. With his established life destroyed overnight, he is forced to confront whether and how he can rebuild his sense of meaning and agency. This story illustrates the fundamental question: how do we respond when our lives change in ways we did not choose?

A hypothetical exploration of Chuck’s soul choices.
Holding up a lens that looks at the events in a life as the direct result of soul choice, some questions (far from exhaustive) come to mind about Chuck’s life-transforming event:

1. Was he following his original soul’s agenda before he crashed into the ocean, and was the course of his life untimely ripped by an unforeseeable accident?
2. Was he forcefully reminded to return to his original intentions, and if so, what might those have been?
3. Or, was his ordeal on the island always meant to be the next phase in his unfolding life plan?

Before I proceed, I would like to clarify that I do not offer definitive answers, but rather ask these questions to illuminate how we can find meaning and agency in the aftermath of life-altering, unexpected events. The process of grappling with these questions may offer insight into how trauma helps us regain purpose and direction.

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Question 1: Was Chuck following his original soul’s agenda before he crashed into the ocean, and was the course of his life untimely ripped by an unforeseeable accident?

Scenario 1: As an employee of an international company, Chuck was doing what he came here to do. He was developing leadership skills, including those in managing others, time management, and relationship-building with coworkers, supervisees, friends, and intimates. He was successful at his job – he accomplished his goals, and he was competent, trustworthy, and reliable.

He planned to get married, have children, and support his family both emotionally and financially. He handled stress and responsibilities maturely. Conscious of time as a resource, he lived a deliberate life with clear plans.

Then his tightly crafted, intentionally designed life was completely derailed by a horrific accident.

The accident destroyed his old agreements. He had to reinvent his life, creating it one moment at a time. What did he bring to this sudden shift? Everything he knew and was capable of.

Chuck could have died in the ocean, but instead, his life raft drifted to an uninhabited island. Perhaps he was guided there, or maybe it was just luck.

If he were guided, there was a higher intention for his life to continue despite it being thrown so completely off course. If it was an accident that he landed on a shore, he was still faced with the choice to give up on his life or to do whatever he could to survive and find a way to return to the life that had been ripped from him.

Do we choose to give up or persevere?

Whether or not there was a higher force that guided Chuck to the island shore, he still had a choice to make. He could continue living or find a way to exit.

When stranded and isolated, we can either give up or surrender, or we can engage fully with the unknown. Isolation and scarce resources can break the faint-hearted or push you to find courage and embrace life, even with no idea what it may look like.

Although Chuck’s ordeal was unplanned, he had to decide what to do with it. Creating his life alone, he faced the challenge of building from scratch—drawing on his inner resources without support from others. He had to become the creator of his own survival.

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Question 2: Was Chuck reminded, by harsh intervention, to route back to the original intentions for his life? In which case, what might they have been?

Scenario II: Chuck wasn’t living his true purpose, just relying on existing skills. He was competent but not working on what he was meant to do. He had already mastered these skills and was avoiding the effort needed to grow in new ways.

Sometimes we ask for wake-up calls.

The truth was that Chuck had resisted taking on new skills and relationships in his previous incarnations, and now his resistance had come back to haunt him. In fact, he had asked that this time around, if he failed to track his original purpose, that he be reminded in no uncertain terms that a change of course was required. Enter a horrific accident. Now his tightly crafted life was completely and intentionally derailed – by his own design.

The accident ended his stale patterns. Forced to improvise and adapt, Chuck was pushed to develop new skills and a fresh mindset. Only by losing old comforts did he find the drive to evolve into who he needed to become.

Ultimately, the soul seeks not only survival but growth, meaning, and transformation. No matter how disruptive or unplanned the detours may be, it is through these challenges that we find both our resilience and our purpose. Our task is to keep moving forward, to reinvent ourselves if necessary, and to trust that even in times of upheaval, our lives can evolve into something meaningful. By embracing each twist in the journey, we discover new dimensions of ourselves and our path.

Who was this person that Chuck needed to become? It was the person his soul required him to become. The soul wants to be fully present and engaged. The soul needs to have experiences that challenge it to expand and develop new aspects of itself. It is inherent to the soul to be creative and to be dynamic. As sparks of God, we are each a god in our own right. God is the mastermind par excellence of Exploration and Creation. When his/her incarnational expression spends too much time going over the same lesson plan, the soul will endure boredom only so long.

What was included in Chuck’s new lesson plan?

Self-reliance.
The courage to persevere in the face of an unknown future
The courage to persevere without external aid from tools or others.
The courage to tend his own wounds.
Profound creativity in designing new applications for otherwise mundane objects.
Learning to deal with and accept severe restrictions and limitations.
Learning new skills.

What else did he learn? He came to know his heart’s desires. He understood what was truly meaningful to him now that he was removed from the din of his former noisy and hurried life. He came to be in far greater alignment with his soul.

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Question 3: Was the life-changing event of living on the island simply the next phase in the story of his unfolding life plan?

Scenario III: As an employee of an international company, Chuck was doing what he came here to do, but there was more he had agreed to. He was developing leadership skills, including those in managing others, time management, and relationship-building with coworkers, supervisees, friends, and intimates. He was successful at his job – he accomplished his goals, and he was competent, trustworthy, and reliable.

The truth was that Chuck had resisted taking on new skills and relationships in his previous incarnations, and he had asked for an intervention that would require him to make a radical departure from life circumstances that no longer offered his soul either challenge or excitement. However, he still wanted to polish his abilities to handle the challenges of high-level leadership demands, and so included those in the first part of his life. When the time came for him to achieve sufficient mastery, he wanted to be allowed to step up to new life skills. And so it came to pass.

When Chuck was finally returned to his former life, he had a medicine bag bursting with new skills and self-knowledge. With these hard-won and intrepid tools under his belt, his capacity to handle whatever life brought him had increased by magnitudes. Whether or not he had asked for training in new levels of mastery, he was nonetheless given a stark and unprecedented opportunity to do so.

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Additional Reflections
Sometimes life takes unexpected twists and turns, getting out of hand. Sometimes we don’t have much in the way of resources or know-how to deal with unknown territory. What can we do? We can find help where help is available – usually in unexpected places. We now have a genuine opportunity to reach deep within ourselves and beyond to seek solutions that will give us the momentum to move forward and escape from dark places. Not only do we seek solutions, but we also strive to find the courage to face our fears. We find hope in each breath, and we receive messages and guidance from sources that were previously hidden from us. In extremity, our senses intensify, giving us the ability to understand the language of signs and symbols that were previously invisible and incomprehensible.

Aligning with our Souls
There are some exquisite gifts to be attained in the process of standing for our lives. The more difficult the challenge, the more ferocious we must be in our resolve because that is what is required if we are going to live. The more difficult the challenge, the more determined we must be in our intentions to live the lives we have agreed to live. The more difficult the challenge, the greater the demand to find creative solutions that will get us clear of the breakers. And why should we live? We must live so that our souls can continue to experience more love, more beauty, more joy, more knowledge, more connection, more excitement, and more anticipation of what is yet to come and what we can yet become. There are some exquisite gifts to be attained in the process of standing for our lives. The biggest one is that we become more aligned with our own soul. And when we are aligned with our souls, we know intuitively what our right lives should look and feel like.

We often forget or fail to truly grasp the reasons behind life’s reversals. While we may have asked for intervention on behalf of our souls, it is also possible to be thrust helplessly into irrevocable life shifts that were not part of the original plan for our lives. Despite being cast away – whether or not of our own choice and design – we can still forge our way forward in reliance on the most powerful intrinsic attribute each one of us possesses. And that is our legacy, as chips off the old block that is God, to be the Creators of a new life.

When you express your unique piece of the Tao, your life will be a beautiful reflection of who you are, because you will be being who you came here to be and doing what you came here to do.

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