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"REFLECTING ON MY LIFE AND MY LIFE'S PURPOSE" Psychic Advice Column addresses inquiries related to:How to find your life purpose, Essay life with a purpose and goal, Purpose in life to help another, Reflecting on my life and my lifes purpose, Teaching cause effect, What are humans purpose in life, Life purpose + chakra, How do I know god's purpose for my life, Living your Purpose, Finding Your Life's Purpose, Living on Purpose & more...

REFLECTING ON MY LIFE
AND MY LIFE'S PURPOSE

Question: "I am a 45 year old European high school teacher. I am also a Reiki healer. I've lived in the USA for the past 17 years. My entire life long I have been incredibly drawn to the occult, the extrasensory, the psychic world. For the past 20 years or so I have been reading whatever I could get my hands on in this vast field. I feel that I have a calling beyond classroom teaching, but I don't know what it may be and how to find out about it. Dear Grace, can you please help me?"

Psychic Advice:
When it comes to the question of how to find your life purpose, sometimes you need to look right where you are. Your life purpose may be right in front of you, but it may require shifting your viewpoint or outlook in order to see it. You may need to take a step back from your life to look at who you are and what you are doing from a higher perspective.

Sometimes fulfilling your purpose may require you to take a leap of faith, to go out on a limb and try something completely new. However, there are ways that you can fulfill your purpose through what you are already doing, you just may need to shift how you are doing it.

Everything that you have ever done contributes to who you are and what you have to offer. Every job you have ever had, everything you've learned and everything you love to do are all pieces of the puzzle of your life purpose. Every piece is equally important to complete the big picture of your life, but some pieces may be more significant than others.

Life is like a puzzle, but you may not be able to see the whole picture until it is complete. When you work on a puzzle, there are no extra pieces, so every piece must fit in somewhere. Sometimes you may have to try the piece in a number of places to see where it fits, sometimes you may have to wait to find where it fits, and sometimes you may have thought it fit in one place when it wasn't really the perfect fit. Sooner or later, if you persevere and don't give up, you will find the perfect place for every piece of your puzzle, and little by little, the big picture of your life will become clear to you.

As with any puzzle, it is easiest if you begin by defining the edges - these are the parameters of your life, and they consist of what is important to you, including what you will and will not do. You start defining your life's purpose by getting clear about what you love, as well as what you don't like - but you cannot take out the pieces that you don't like because that would just leave an empty space, so you have to replace them with what you do like.

Every experience in your life is a piece of the puzzle, and like attracts like, so you start grouping the pieces of the puzzle by similar colors, shapes and patterns. As you put these pieces together, you get clearer images of what the different areas of the puzzle are about. Some pieces simply fill in the background, while other pieces are significant to the central images of the puzzle. As you place each piece, your life becomes fuller until the puzzle and purpose of your life is fulfilled.

You cannot really start another puzzle until you start another lifetime - even then, you carry pieces of your life's purpose from other lifetimes as part of the puzzle of this lifetime. You cannot just sweep all the pieces off the table and start a new puzzle; even if you change your life completely, the pieces of your life experience up until that moment still remain on the table as part of your puzzle, and you must still work with them and draw from them in some way in order to fulfill the complete picture of this lifetime.

The key to fulfilling your life's purpose is to find the way to put all the pieces of your life together in such a way that it fulfills you. Ideally it must fulfill your heart and soul, but you must put your heart and soul into it in order for them to be fulfilled.

So, you have the pieces of the puzzle that relate to your love and passion for anything metaphysical, and you have the pieces of the puzzle that relate to being a high school teacher. How could these pieces possibly fit together? First, you must recognize that as a teacher in any capacity, you are on the frontlines of being able to affect, influence and potentially alter another human being for the rest of his or her life. If you feel that your purpose in life is to help another, you have tremendous opportunities to do that.

We affect everyone that we come in contact with, whether we realize it or not. No matter where you are, the energy waves created by your thoughts and emotions go out into the world and touch everything around you, including plants, animals, people and places. Your judgments, whether they are positive or negative, affect other people: they can feel the energy of your thoughts, which is why people turn to look at you when you stare at them, even when they're driving.

As a Reiki practitioner, you would understand the power of energy. Energy itself is neutral, like everything else, until it is directed with intention. Even if that intention is unconscious, it still has powerful effects: these effects become more powerful the more the energy is directed consciously and intentionaly. For example, unconscious judgments hurt people whether anyone realizes they are going on or not - they are a form of attack. If that judgment is directed with malicious intention through acts of hatred or bullying or even criticism, it can be devastating. Conversely, the energy of love and admiration feeds the spirit, whether one is aware of it or not, and when that love and admiration are directed with intention through acts of praise or appreciation, it can do a world of good. Duke University has studied the healing power of prayer and how it has positive affects on the recipients of those prayers, even if they were not consciously aware that they were being prayed for. Every thought is a prayer that directs energy with intention.

If part of our purpose in life is to help another, then we can do that with our thoughts, intentions and energies no matter where we are or what we are doing. As a teacher, you have affected every student you have ever come in contact with, which then ripples out to affect everyone that they will ever encounter for the rest of their life. This is true for each of us: we affect those around us, which continues to ripple out to everyone around them, which ripples infinitely throughout time and space.

You can now choose to have a more conscious affect on your students by directing your energy and intention with awareness. As a teacher, you really have the power to help influence, mold and shape people's lives, their sense of themselves and their ideas about the world and about reality itself. This is a position of tremendous power. Our society may not fully recognize or adequately reward teachers for the service they perform, but the Universe certainly does. A teacher can affect and impact a student's entire future, either positively or negatively, which then impacts that student's children, and ripples out into the world for future generations, and even potentially into future lifetimes.

You can bring your love of metaphysics into the classroom in many ways (although I might suggest that you not use the word "occult" as this has certain stigmas associated with it). You don't have to use metaphysical or spiritual language in order to convey spiritual ideas. For instance, you can explain the law of Karma by simply teaching cause and effect. There are many ways to say the same thing. No matter what course you teach, you can incorporate what you have learned on your spiritual quest for knowledge and find a way to share these teachings with your students within your present curriculum.

It is interesting to note that on an episode of the most recent edition of "90210", a television program about teenagers in high school, one of the teachers was teaching about intuition: "Today we're going to talk about perception. How do we perceive? The eyes take in information and then pass that information on to the brain - seems pretty straightforward. But, you can still see without using your eyes - and that's called intuition, using your intuition." You can teach your own students about intuition through multiple-choice tests, by telling them to always trust their first impression.

Teaching is not always about what you say - we all teach and learn by example. Be the living example of all that you have studied spiritually. Give your students encouragement and support, even when you must criticize their work. Help build their self-esteem, and teach them integrity and respect - first and foremost by showing them what it is by exemplifying it. If you show them your frustration, then that is what they will believe work is about. Find a way to instill in them a love of learning and a passion for working by sharing these energies with them. No matter what you do as your profession, the greatest form of service is to profess loving kindness.

How would you feel and act if what you are doing is the most important job in the world? It is - so embody that energy and express your purpose through your passion for your present work. You can bring everything you know, everything you've learned, and everything you love to what you are doing now. You can be of service and find your purpose in the work that you are doing now.

At this particular time, job security is very important, so if you are not feeling satisfied or fulfilled in your present work, ask yourself, how could you do it in a way that is more fulfilling? Ask yourself what you believe your life's purpose is, then find the way to express that through what you are doing. Explore what gives you joy and what you feel passionate about, and incorporate those things into the work that you do. The key to how to find your life purpose is to look within your heart and examine your whole life, because the clues are all around you - you just need to see them.

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