Living “On Purpose” – Rev. Aimee Daniels
This video features the Sunday “talk” only. Watch the full service on our Facebook page.
DESCRIPTION
Each of us has a unique purpose, a personal dharma, that is central to living a fulfilled and meaningful life. Join us as we explore how to intentionally align with your inherent gifts and the things that energize and inspire you to serve the world.
SUMMARY
Rev. Aimee Daniels discusses the importance of finding and living one’s purpose in life. She shares her own experience of feeling disconnected from her true purpose, and describes how she eventually found her calling by taking a “leap of faith” and listening to her inner spirit. The key points are:
- Everyone has a unique purpose and gifts to offer the world, which is their “dharma” or spiritual calling. This is not necessarily about having a specific job or legacy, but about expressing oneself in a creative and loving way.
- Obstacles to finding one’s purpose include fear, limiting beliefs, and the influence of others’ voices and expectations. Rev. Aimee encourages the audience to be curious, try new things, and ask for feedback to discover their strengths and “red threads” – the themes and activities that bring them joy.
- Spiritual practices like meditation, journaling, and visualization can help connect one to their purpose. Sher also emphasizes the importance of service and contributing one’s gifts to others.
- Ultimately, Rev. Aimee affirms that each person’s purpose is divinely guided, and encourages the audience to trust the process of discovering and expressing their unique gifts.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Aimee Daniels (00:01):
Hello. Good morning everyone. Well, they’re getting my screen taken care of here. I like to run my own slides. Little clue about me. Oh, okay. Thank you. Did you know your future is unwritten? Yeah, your future is unwritten. That’s why I requested that song because we can think that we’re stuck by our past. We can think that what’s happened before determines what happens in the future. And we know that’s not true in this teaching. And today we’re going to talk about living on purpose and a little play on words there too, the on purpose. Because I want you to live your purpose on purpose, and it’s easy not to do that in our lives. So let’s dive in here. Who has a sense of their purpose in life already? Look at that. That’s a lot of hands. That’s exciting. Years ago when I was still in my corporate life, I used to think I had two lives.
(01:06):
I used to think I had my work life and I had my spiritual life and they weren’t the same life. Even though I was in this teaching by the way, and already studying it, it felt like two lives to me. And if I were to use a word to say what I really wanted, I wanted my life to be integrated. I didn’t want to feel like I was living two lives anymore. And there was this sense within me that I was off track. There was just like something was disconnected. And if you looked at my outer life, you would’ve been like, what are you talking about? I had a great job. I had a nice house. I lived in Washington DC at that time and I called it my glamorous life. I got to do a lot of cool stuff, kind of a cool place, but I kind of felt sad in the middle of it.
(01:56):
I just didn’t feel like I had a real life. And this question, what should I be doing with my life? It really loomed large for me. And the truth is I had been in that question for quite a while. For a long time it probably followed an outside path thinking that that fulfillment was on the outside, getting a certain job, getting recognition, whatever. But as Rob read to us from Wayne Dyer, our inner self is calling us. And that sense of discontent or that lack of integration that I felt was actually my spirit trying to get my attention. And it was also trying to get my attention through my physical body. I was having some health stuff going on. And so finally there was a day I had to make a choice. And my choice was really this. Do I stay on the path I’m on? It was comfortable for some people I would’ve been having a good life. Or do I take leap of faith where I have no idea where it’s going to lead me? And I took the leap of faith. I can’t explain it. I had some sort of a sense of deep inner knowing that I was supposed to take a different path. My spirit was saying, look here. And I listened.
(03:17):
So today we’re talking about the law of dharma, which is purpose. And we’ve been talking about all of these laws, pure potentiality, giving and receiving karma least effort, intention and desire, detachment and dharma, which is purpose. Dharma means purpose. And you might say, Hey, some of these seem kind of the same. It’s we’re talking about doing the same thing to access them. And what I want to say to you is it’s all energy. These laws are to help us work with the energy. That’s what spirit is. It’s energy. And that energy expresses through you. It expresses through every one of us. And Deepak says, everyone has a purpose in life, a unique gift or talent to offer to others.
(04:07):
And he says there’s something each of us can do better than anyone else in the world. I don’t know if I personally relate to it exactly that way. I think we all have gifts, but I think if we’re like, I can do this better than everyone else, that kind of feels like ego to me. It feels like ego to me. So I don’t relate to that. I also don’t relate to the word legacy. One of my friends a while ago said, well, what’s your legacy? And I’m like, I don’t know. I’m just trying to show up every day and help who I can help. And do I need to worry about my legacy or do I get to be in today? Do I get to enjoy today? I don’t really know what tomorrow’s going to bring. So this question of what are our gifts? What are we offering is what we’re going to take a look at today.
(04:55):
And we’re also going to look at how to live on purpose. So to purposefully live in a place where you are offering your gifts. And I think to me, the key to offering your gifts is really one word and it’s joy. When you are offering your gifts, you’re in joy. You might even feel like you enter a timeless state, like you could do something for hours and it doesn’t even feel like you’re working. That’s what happens when you’re offering your gifts. That’s what happens when you’re on purpose. So just to illustrate how we’re all different, this is from an ugly sweater party. I went to Saturday night and I just want to illustrate how we all have different ideas about how to express ourselves. So this is Rich and I over there on the left, you can see I went all Grinch all the time.
(05:45):
I love the Grinch. The Grinch isn’t aspirational character. He developed a heart. I even had my little Grinch slippers on there. I had a hat too, but Rich Kosh the hat. He didn’t like my hat. But here’s my friends. Now I want to point out this friend. This is my friend Mary Lee. You can see she became a tree and it’s kind of hard to see, but she even has ornaments on her head. So we got the same assignment, and clearly she took a different creative approach. And so the reason I want to illustrate this is we all show up to life with a different approach. My mom used to say, if we all like the same things, it would be a boring world. Thank God we approach things differently. I thought that was very clever. She’s a very clever person. She is totally into her art at this point in her life making things.
(06:32):
She has a pot sculpture in her yard called Patty Pothead. I mean, she’s really clever. But her corporate life for years was, she was a recruiter and she recruited people to work in not-for-profits. And what she does now, her way that she gives back is that she helps people when they’re interviewing for jobs. And so I like her story because she’s also helping people. So sometimes the expression of our gifts might be something that we’re doing for her, it’s her art. She loves it, but she’s also helping. And when we help, we are connecting to our spirit. When we help others, we’re connecting to that energy of love that exists between us. So Rob read to us from Wayne Dyer and he explained to us that thoughts about our purpose are our spirit trying to get our attention. So are we listening? I remember when I was in college, I sold Amway with one of my friends, and you get to see a lot of motivational speakers. I didn’t even know what a motivational speaker was before that. But one of ’em said, if God gave you a dream, he gave you everything you need to make it come through. Now, we’d change that He to it, we’d make say, God was it. But if God gave you a dream, it gave you everything you need to make it come true. And I think that that’s what your purpose is. It’s something that’s planted within you that wants to express in the world.
(08:03):
And Joseph Campbell says, if the path before you is clear, it’s not your path. You love that quote. Because why don’t we start? Why don’t we really give ourself the freedom to explore and express our purpose? What gets in our way? Fear of change, fear of failure, wanting certainty. Other people’s voices in our head, the shoulds. I know for me sometimes it’s lack of confidence. The committee in your head that has an opinion. It happened this week. I was talking to a guy about joining one of my Vistage groups, and I got off the phone, I go, well, I really blew that one. Oh my God. And then Friday night, he texted me and said, okay, I’m joining your group. And I’m just like, why do you do this to yourself? I’m like, I don’t know. I know better. Why do I do that to myself?
(08:56):
And we can all do that. Sometimes we can hold ourselves to a standard that gets in our way of doing what we want to do, doing what we want to express in the world. So Parker Palmer tells us that we want to listen to what our life is telling us and that notice the doors that are opening. Notice the doors that are closing and just notice where things are flowing. And when I quit my corporate job, one of my close friends actually said to me, I’ve shared this before, you’re going to ruin your career. And I’m like, thanks. And this is what I feel like I, I feel like I need to do it. I can’t explain it. But if I defined myself as my career as a limited thing, it has to look like a certain job or whatever. That would have been true because I ceased to do what I had been doing.
(09:56):
But I always say spirit is smarter than I am. And I just started accepting invitations. I hadn’t taken another job. I looked at some jobs. I wasn’t really excited about any of ’em of them at all. It was more of what I’d been doing for 25 years. And I’m like, I think I’m done. I don’t think I want to do that. That doesn’t feel good. And so I just started accepting invitations. Some of ’em, I felt completely unqualified for him. I’d be honest about that. One guy was a psychologist and he asked me to help him. He was doing evaluations of executive teams and companies. Most of them were owned by investors, but he wanted a business person. I felt completely unqualified and he wanted me to be his business partner. I’m like, I don’t get that. Why would you want that? But I ended up deciding that wasn’t right for me, but I had to try things on.
(10:48):
I was just trying things on. And that led me to where I am, the work that I’m doing now. But we can confuse our path with the outcome. We can be so focused on what we think the outcome should be. And our culture is always counting. Let’s face it, social media. What is it like? Hey, look at me. Here I am. I’m popular. I won this award, whatever. But we’re always counting. And that’s not really good for our spirit because we all have different gifts to offer. And my gifts are not the same as the gifts of everyone in this room. Thank God we wouldn’t have cityside if we didn’t all have different gifts, because that’s how the community gets created through the different gifts of people who are here.
(11:36):
And Wayne Dyer teaches us that your purpose is not about having a certain job and occupation living in a certain place. It’s about sharing yourself in a creative loving way. And I like that because sharing yourself in a creative loving way is really letting spirit flow through you. We talk about the qualities of spirit all the time when we pray, what is the quality of spirit you want to call in? That’s creativity, love, joy. Any word we might throw out there that’s spirit working through you. Spirit’s always working through you, whether you know it or not. Do you realize that even just the fact that you’re breathing, that is spirit working through you. And so look at the intelligence of nature. Nature knows how to run itself. Everything just works together. And our life is actually like that too. But sometimes we can’t see it right because too close to it.
(12:39):
And I also want to say it’s also important to acknowledge the season of our life that we’re in when we think about our purpose. Because how our purpose expresses at different parts of our life is different, and we need to honor that. If you think about Oprah, I was thinking about Oprah. Her story is an interesting one. She always wanted to be famous from the time she was a teenager, she wanted to be famous. She was working for a network, I think in Baltimore or someplace like that. And they said to her, your hair is not okay. You have to go get your hair straightened. And her hair fell out and they said, well, you can’t be a network broadcaster anymore because your hair fell out. And so they put her on a talk show. And what she said about her life was, I sat down on that talk show and I knew I was in the right place.
(13:40):
And that’s how you’re in spirit when you have that sense of knowing that’s your spirit when, and so at first, she was kind of like a Phil Donahue, if anyone remembers him, just like a really high quality talk show host person. And then she had an experience one day where she had a white supremacist on her show, and he was using the N word. He was calling her the N word. And she decided that day that she was never going to put anybody else’s voice in the room, help bring it into the room, into the world if they did not align with her values and what she wanted to bring into the world. And it changed her. And so she decided then to do a lot of the things that we know her for. She had spiritual teachers like Don Miguel Ruiz and Michael Beckwith and people like that on her show.
(14:34):
She started O Magazine. Now she does Super Soul Sunday. She has her book club. I couldn’t even tell you how many people she’s impacted multi hundreds of millions, I’m sure I couldn’t even tell you, but it’s because she kept to where her spirit was calling her. And maybe our lives are not as glamorous as that. You can look at her and go, okay, yeah, she got a clear sign. But I think we’re getting clear signs too. Maybe aren’t always listening to ’em. And your purpose doesn’t have to be glamorous. One of my clients this week, he was hosting our meeting and he was talking about, he said, guys, you’re probably going to think I’m like a jerk. He goes, but we’re doing well. I’m making money. He’s 39 years old. He said, I just keep asking myself, look, why? If this is all we’re here for is to make money, why am I doing this?
(15:35):
And the people in the room asked him a bunch of questions and it helped him reconnect to how his business was helping people, which is what his spirit was wanting. He needed to do a reframe. I think we can all go to sleep on whether we’re serving in our purpose. I think a lot of times we take for granted even the gifts that we’re offering. We don’t see ourselves. We don’t see ourselves because the committee in our head has a strong opinion about how we should be better or whatever, but we might not see how other people see us. Or even a small thing like a person you impact, you don’t know impacting one person could impact thousands of people. You really don’t know. And so what I want to say is it’s really about keeping your purpose fresh and front of mind and being in the question asking yourself, am I on purpose?
(16:37):
Is my life expressing my purpose? Adam Grant, and this is probably kind of hard to read, so I say take a picture of it and look at this at home. But Adam Grant talks about finding the red threads in your life and your red threads are the things that flow throughout your life. So these are the things that you keep seeing. So how do you know what your red threads are? You think about the peak moments in your life, those times when you felt super energized and you just felt like so aligned. And you think about where were you? What were you doing? Who were you with? I think timelessness is a great way to measure kind of like what wants to flow through you? What do you do in your life that you could just do it for hours and hours and it just makes you so happy.
(17:36):
You don’t even notice you’re doing it. It doesn’t land as work for me, that’s anything that has to do with something spiritual. It’s planning like an event or planning an experience or something like that. I love that stuff. That makes me happy. Those are peak things for me. And you want to look at what your strengths are too. And I think this is a hard one. I think a lot of us don’t know what our strengths are. You could give some sort of rote answer like, oh, hey, I’m good at organizing, or something like that. But if you don’t know how other people experience you, I really encourage you to ask ’em. I had someone say something to me once that I worked with that changed my life. I had no idea. She said to me, do you know what your gift is? And I’m like, no, I have no idea.
(18:30):
Please tell me. I mean, right. And she said, you bring people together. That’s what you do. And I was like, oh, okay. Well, when she told me that, I was like, I do that in every part of my life. I do that with my family. I do that with my friends now I do that here, but I didn’t know that. I know that sounds so dumb, but so often we don’t see our gifts. And so I really also encourage you, please tell the people in your life what you think their gifts are, because we don’t hear that enough. We do not hear that enough. So please tell the people in your life, and I think you got to clarify your values too.
(19:14):
This was a key for me when I decided to leave my corporate work, because I had a come to, I was going to say, come to Jesus. I had a come to Amy experience and I went home on a Friday night. They had asked me to move, and I just sat there and I thought, if I keep doing this, I’m not reflecting my values. What am I doing? Right? Because I worked for a company that after I was in financial services, after the downturn, the heart went away and it was because it was challenging and stuff like that. And I just had to say, you know what? I’m someone who cares about people. It’s hard for me to work for a company where the top people make so much money and I can’t give a teller or raise that. It hurt my heart. So you got to know what you value and you want to look for patterns in your life.
(20:05):
What are the themes, the activities, the things that just keep coming up or the things you get super excited about, the things you get excited about? And please just give yourself permission to try things on. Just try stuff. This is, I think the beauty of the Artist’s Way book. If you’ve ever read it or done it, you go on your artist date with yourself. You just take yourself out. You walk around, you end up wherever you end up, but you’re really exploring what speaks to you. And that’s what we want to do. We want to be curious about what’s trying to speak to us.
(20:43):
So Patanjali says, when we’re inspired by a great purpose, a project, all our thoughts break their bonds. And so our thoughts of limitation, which we all have. Does anyone have ’em besides me? Our thoughts of limitation? Who am I to do this? Right? We break through those. And sometimes even having those thoughts is part of the purpose, part of what is expressing as our purpose, moving through that thought like, oh, that’s not possible for me. Maybe that’s part of expressing our purpose too. Because if you think about it, the expression of spirit through you is your purpose. It’s just showing up in different ways. Sometimes it might show up as love. We all have loved ones, especially those of us who have parents who are getting older. My in-laws are getting up there. That’s part of our purpose now Rich and mine, is to spend as much time and give as much love to his parents as possible. We’re so grateful that we still have them at 86 and 87. So our purpose can look a lot of ways. But when we think about other expressions, if you have a dream, who has a dream?
(22:03):
Let’s get a couple of shout outs on dreams. Anyone brave enough to shout out? Who’s got a dream? Oh, you’re going to Italy. I love that. Anybody else willing to do a shout out? Okay. Oh my gosh, I love that big event. Bringing creative communities together. That’s awesome. So Abraham, Esther Hicks would say, we want to become a cooperative component to that, right? So we want to really get in the energy of who do I need to become to be the person who’s fulfilling this purpose? What do I need to embody within myself to fulfill this purpose? Because when we’re focused on that and not on our limiting beliefs, we’re able to move forward into it and we’re able to move ourselves out of our doubts. Sometimes the divine does not manifest things in our timing. Have you ever noticed that? Sometimes we have to wait.
(23:06):
So we really want to align with service. This is a great quote by Tony Robbins here. But aligning with service can come a lot of different ways. It can come from acts of kindness. It can come from sharing our expertise. It can be volunteering, it can be mentoring. It can be lots of different ways in the world. So we want to ask the question, how can I serve today? And what happens when we serve? We feel connected to others, right? We are connected. It’s easy to forget that we’re all connected. We’re all part of this energy that is all connected. But when we are serving others, we feel connected. When we’re in experience with others, we’re feeling connected and we’re connected to our spirit. So Deepak says, there’s three steps to discover and practice the law of karma. One is discover your true self. Guess what?
(24:00):
That one starts with, spiritual practice. Number two, identify your unique talents, which we just talked about. And number three, serve others with your talents. So I just want to talk about spiritual practices just for a second before we’re going to go into a practice. But this idea of purpose really begins and ends with spiritual practice. If I want to be connected to my spirit, I need to do my spiritual practice. I need to take time every day to practice meditation, mindfulness, quiet the mind, whatever. We can also practice mantra, which is like mantra is really an affirmation. It’s really a form of prayer. We could say a mantra about our purpose. I’m aligned with my purpose. Say that after me, I am aligned with my purpose. Let’s do it one more time with some enthusiasm. I am aligned with my purpose. The next practice is journaling and self-reflection.
(25:02):
This is a great time of year to do this as we finish the year just to really sit with what do you want more of in your life? What do you want to express more of? What do you want to experience more of? Maybe you want to journal about a question about your purpose. What is spirit’s idea of my purpose? How can I express my purpose? Today? We also want to visualize vision and vision board visualizing. We’re actually going to do a little visualization in our closing practice, but begin to see the way that you want your purpose to express. See it in your mind’s eye. Hold it in your mind’s eye. Neville Goddard would’ve called that awakened imagination. We create from that place because you’re building the energy of that. You can also do the visioning practice from Michael Beckwith. The five Questions, or you can do make a vision board.
(25:59):
Something as simple as picking some pictures from a magazine that can start to show you what your spirit is seeking to express through you. I gotten a little tangled on that one. And Connie’s doing a vision board workshop the first Sunday of the new year. So that’s an opportunity for you to come together and do that with other people. We can also practice gratitude if we notice what’s present, not what’s absent. We’re building the energy. We’re building some momentum by practicing our gratitude, what went well today. Oh, great, that was awesome. And we also want to do prayer and intention setting. Whether you’re praying for yourself, sometimes we forget to pray for, make sure you’re praying for yourself, but you can also get prayer. But prayer is intention. You’re setting an intention. And if I were to pick two things for you to do every day, it would be meditation and prayer. And then give yourself some space. Go spend some time in nature. Go on a retreat, go for a walk. Just do something because so often our clarity comes to us when we’re out moving around and get some support. If you need it right, go to a practitioner, go to a coach, go to a therapist, get a mentor. But find someone to help you keep that vision alive, because I think this is the greatest gift we can actually give to each other, is to encourage each other. It’s the greatest gift we can offer another human.
(27:33):
So Pablo Picasso said, the meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away. So it’s about expressing your life force on purpose aligned with your purpose. So we’re going to move into a little process now. And I know I’m over on time, if anyone’s looking at the time, could talk about this for four days. And there’s so much to say. So I want to invite you to just close your eyes and take a breath with me. Let’s take a couple breaths together, just breathing in and breathing out, just breathing in and breathing out. And just put your attention in the area of your third eye, in the middle of your forehead, and ask your spirit what it wants to say to you about your purpose. What is your purpose right now? And if you’re getting a few words, I just want you to begin to visualize those. What does it look like for you to live on purpose? What does it feel like? What’s happening around you? And what are you expressing in the world? How are you serving others? And just breathe into this and just ask your spirit to show you your next steps. What are your next steps? Your next step to express the spirit. This purpose. It could be something small, it could be something big. Just ask Spirit, what’s your next step?
(30:53):
And I just invite you to know that spirit will make the way forward for you. There’s nothing to figure out. And I know I affirm. I claim for all of us that we’re listening. I know that spirit is seeking to express itself through each of the beautiful people, hearing my words, absolutely expressing their joy, their gifts, their purpose, their goodness. And I know that the energy of love is magnified as this happens. That the energy of light is coming through each person as they allow their purpose to express through them in love, that there is grace, there is ease, there is perfect flow. There is perfect divine alignment that is happening in each one of us. And I know that spirit. It’s just spirit’s pleasure to make this happen. So I say yes to this for all of us, and I invite everyone along with me to repeat these words after me.
(32:03):
I am here to discover my gift and share it with the world. Please say it with me. I am here to discover my gift and share it with the world. Let’s do it one more time with a little more enthusiasm, a little louder. I’m here to discover my gift and share it with the world. I say yes to this for all of us. I know that God’s got this. I’m grateful for this. I’m grateful for all the good, all the light, all the love that is coming from this divine intention, these divine intentions. I’m so grateful for this, and with so much gratitude, I simply say, and so it is. Amen.
Paige Kizer (32:55):
Thank you, Reverend.