To bring anything into the world of form, to bring a creation down to earth from the realm of possibility and potential, requires a number of elements to come into harmony and resonance with each other.
Three elements that are essential to all manifestation are: alignment of purpose; power; and participation in the activity of wholeness.
Today, let’s talk about alignment of purpose, in relation to something you want to create in your business.
Become aware of your whole being: your body, your emotions, your thoughts, your past, your future, your present reality.
Gather all of these aspects of yourself together — bring them into the wholeness that is your Self right now.
Together, these constitute what I call your incarnational system.
This is your personhood, that which makes you uniquely yourself. This is what you’ve chosen as the raw material of your life this time around.
Your soul is the aspect of you that over-arches all of these different aspects of yourself.
Your soul chooses the circumstances and the variables that make up your incarnational system. It chose the family you were born into, the culture, the religious tradition, the genetic heritage, and the physical structure of your body.
It chose these as the best possible combination of resources with which to grow you and to incarnate the potentials you came here to bring into the world.
But your soul’s purpose is not necessarily the same as your incarnational purpose.
Your incarnational purpose — the purpose that emerges from your personhood — is very specific. It is intimately involved with your in-born talents, your gifts, the things you love, and your life’s direction.
Your incarnational purpose is to express your genius and gifts, to be all of who you are, as fully as possible.
If you look at what you love to do — what you loved, especially when you were very young — you’ll probably get a clear picture of your incarnational purpose.
Most of us knew in our early years what we were here to do but we didn’t have the physical resources to do it then. So we let our deep desires sink into unconsciousness.
To access your incarnational purpose now, you may have to excavate through layers of beliefs, pictures, programming or agreements under which your purpose is buried.
Often, what it gets covered up with are thought-forms, beliefs, stories or patterns: beliefs about perfection, shoulds, family or cultural beliefs and programming.
Your purpose can get buried under beliefs about who you are and what you are capable of: I can’t do this because I’m not good enough; I’m not smart enough or wealthy enough or powerful enough.
It can disappear under the weight of gender programming that you may intellectually have rejected, but that shows up as resistance or fear: Women do this and men do that and that’s the way it rolls.
Your stories and beliefs are not you. They are forms of energy, and they can be transformed.
As you dissolve and transform your stories, you will get much clearer about what your incarnational purpose is.
The more closely you align yourself with your incarnational purpose, the more easily you can access your personal power. That, in turn, will make it much easier to manifest what you want in your life.
If there isn’t a clear alignment between what you want to create and your incarnational purpose, you will struggle to make your creative project happen.
If, for instance, you love the outdoors — you love being outdoors, it’s part of your incarnational purpose to serve nature, and to give voice to the natural world — yet you choose a creative project that will lock you up in a basement for six months in front of a computer screen, you’ll have much more difficulty making that project happen.
Because you’re going against the grain of your nature and the grain of your incarnational purpose.
Your soul has its own purpose, separate from your incarnation, even though it participates in your incarnational purpose with you.
Because your soul exists along a continuum between unity at one end and your specificity, your personhood, your incarnation at the other end.
Part of your soul participates in the purposes of your incarnation, but your soul also operates simultaneously in the realm of wholeness.
Your soul doesn’t just ask: What do I want to create for myself, how can I fully be myself?
It also asks: What fits into the context of my life most fully? What is the next step that is going to emerge out of wholeness, out of my place in wholeness, to serve wholeness?
Your soul’s purpose is to participate in wholeness; to express love, delight, joy, creativity and all of those qualities that emerge from Source, from wholeness.
When you can align your creative project with both your soul’s purpose and your incarnational purpose, you will greatly increase your power to create and manifest it.
This post is an excerpt from Become Your Own Business Adviser.