Look To Your Dharma – Discovering Your Calling – Rev. Aimee Daniels
This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
DESCRIPTION
What if your life has a unique calling? This Sunday we will explore how to listen to the whispers of your soul and uncover your dharma – your sacred purpose. Learn to trust your curiosity, tune into your inner knowing and take the next step towards the life you were born to live.
SUMMARY
• Your dharma or calling is a whisper inside you, not a booming voice from the sky. It’s what you feel most passionate and curious about.
• Follow your curiosity, listen to your body’s wisdom, and have the courage to pursue your dharma, even if it’s uncomfortable or unconventional.
• Trust that your dharma will unfold and evolve over time. Surrender to the flow of life and know that everything happens for a reason.
• Your life and your unique gifts are your offering to the world. Set aside time to reflect on what you’re being called to express, and then take a step to bring it into the world.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Aimee Daniels:
Grow as we go. What a beautiful sentiment, isn’t it? And we’re really all doing that all the time. And it’s also, we’re going to be talking about your dharma, which is your calling today, but we’re really growing with our dharma as we go. It’s going to have different expressions. Oops. Okay. That would be the reason it wasn’t working. Maybe you want to check the back. Here we go. Maybe we’ll see. Anyway. Yay. Okay. See, it takes a village to get my laptop working, so I want to invite you to take a breath with me just to really center our energy together. So let’s just breathe in and breathe out.
Just settle into your body and let yourself arrive here. Doesn’t it feel good right now with everything going on in the world? Yeah. So the Bhagavan Gita is an ancient Hindu scripture and it begins on a battlefield, but it’s not an actual battlefield. It’s an inner battlefield. This is a story of an inner war or conflict, and it’s the story of Arjuna who’s a ed warrior, and he has a charioteer named Krishna who’s actually the divine in disguise. So he doesn’t know that the charioteer is the divine, and their conversation has been called one of the greatest spiritual dialogues of all times. So on the morning of this decisive battle, Arjuna rides his chariot to the front lines. And as he looks across the battlefield to one side, he sees his family and he sees his friends and he sees his teachers. And on the other side, he sees his kin and his comrade and his allies, and he’s beside himself because to take any action in this situation would be killing a part of himself. It would be like harming his own heart. And so he’s overcome with grief and confusion, and he drops his bow and he turns to Krishna and he says, I can’t do this. My mind is so confused right now. My heart is breaking. Tell me what I should do. Show me the way. And Krishna’s reply is profound and simple. He says, look to your dharma. And in Sanskrit, dharma means sacred duty. It’s what we might call your soul’s calling. And it’s the thing that only you can do as Jason read to us.
And that’s an interesting thought for Westerners, isn’t it? Because we think that we have to do things a certain way, for lack of a better way to say that, to thrive in life. But there’s something that only you can do it. And I would call it, it’s almost like your beingness because it doesn’t even really matter what you’re doing. It’s really about your beingness. And so Krishna reminds Arjuna that fulfillment comes not from doing everything, but from doing that thing that is yours to do. That’s where our fulfillment comes. And he also tells Arjuna to act without attachment to the outcome. That’s also very hard thing for us, isn’t it? We’re like, I do this, I get this result, right? But the battlefield is really a metaphor for our own lives because we’re always faced with choices in our lives, whether it’s am I going to go on a new path in my life or how am I going to handle what’s coming up?
So it’s a metaphor for that. And we do wrestle with questions like, what am I here for? Anyone ever wrestle with that one besides me incessantly, we might ask ourselves, what’s mine to do? Or we might have fear, we might have doubt, we might even have resistance to what our inner self is telling us that we are called to do. And so we’re going to look at our dharma today. Ernest Holmes, who was deeply influenced by the Bhagavan Gita said, there’s a place which you are to fill and which no one else can fill, something that you are to do, which no one else can do. And so let’s pause just for a second. I’m going to ask you to close your eyes again for a minute. And I want you to take a deep breath, and I want you to imagine yourself as a child, and I want you to see yourself playful, unburdened, you’re full of curiosity. And when you picture yourself like this, where are you? What are you doing and what brings you alive? Perhaps there was a time that you liked to paint or to build or to sing or like me, you like to climb trees or explore or dance or ask questions or dream. Just notice your younger self and notice what it feels like.
And when you’re ready, just bring your attention back into the world, into the room, into the world too. But somewhere along the way, many of us set aside those things that we loved, didn’t we? Or those things that were just felt like the most natural expression of us. We set them aside. Maybe it was because someone told us we should be practical or they told us that it wasn’t safe or it didn’t meet the expectations that people had for our lives. But dharma is patient. Dharma keeps whispering to us, it keeps calling to us, and it’s waiting for us to remember that essence of ourselves. So what did you once know about yourself that you’re being called to remember right now? Is there anything? I know for me, it’s like there’s sort of like a freedom when I think about my little self, right? There was just a freedom running around, making up dance routines, just sort of being untethered. So what are you being called to remember?
As Judy mentioned, your dharma begins as a whisper. We think that there’s a big megaphone in the sky that’s going to say to us, this is what you’re supposed to do. But that’s not how it works. It’s a whisper. It might be a nudge. It might be something you’re longing for, it might be something you’re curious about. And one of the things about this beautiful book by Steven Cope, which is probably one of the things I like about it the most besides his little wisdoms that I’m sharing with you, is he tells a lot of stories. And so I’m going to tell a lot of stories to you today about people that he talked about in the book. And the reason I’m doing that is I think when we hear stories, we see ourselves in the stories. So one of the first stories that he tells is about Henry David Thoreau.
We all know him. Walden Pond, right? Transcendentalists studied under Emerson, and after he finished Harvard, he decided that he was going to walk away from what everyone thought he should do, all their expectations. And they thought he was kind of a flake. I mean, people thought he was lazy. And so he goes to this experiment in the woods, you might know about this and he’s going to spend a couple years in nature and he’s going to see what comes up. Well, that couple years in nature, this is the funny little extra part of the story, is he was a mile and a half from where his parents lived and they brought him food. I think that’s kind of funny. But he had his experiment with nature, and what he did is he spent a lot of time observing nature, observing the birds, the trees, the different things that were there.
He also spent a lot of time listening to the stillness. And out of that came the book Walden. And at the time that it was written, it really wasn’t popular. In fact, his book did not really become popular until after he passed. But it went on to influence some very important people who have lived in the world since then. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. And he said to in the book, he says, go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life that you have been imagining. Remember that? So your dharma is whispering to you, but are you listening? We would call that the still small voice, right? It’s not this voice up here that is telling you what the agenda for your life should be or what you should be doing. It’s that quiet part of yourself that is always speaking to you, but you have to make room for it.
So we want to listen for the whispers. Rick Rubin says, the universe is constantly whispering. There are signals being broadcast everywhere. The question is, are you tuned in to listen? So your life is, I think of our lives are like a radio station and we decide what we’re tuned into. And I know that this is very hard right now because we’re barrage by negativity and what’s wrong and all of that. We are, I think this is just the age, but you want to be mindful about what are you tuned into. You can know that all of that is going on, but you don’t have to keep the dial on that channel all the time. So my encouragement to you is are you listening to yourself? Are you tuning to the channel of yourself? And when I say yourself, I don’t mean your human self, I mean your higher self, what we might say capital S self, I in the divine are one.
Because anytime you notice your brain is yapping, which we all have moments like that. Let’s be truthful, I was driving up Lake Shore Drive coming here today, and I saw all the salt trucks parked along. Do you know about this? Because ice is coming. The mayor decided we were going to park salt trucks to just send a message that they’re not welcome. And it got my mind going down a tangent, right? Because I started to think about how I don’t agree with what’s happening right now. And I’m like, okay, come back to your center as a spiritual person. My center needs to be in seeing what’s possible for us, not in seeing what’s wrong. And that is hard, that’s hard. That’s a lot of practice. But that’s the same thing we want to do in our own lives. We want to tune into what is possible for us.
We want to do our practice. We want to be in nature. We want to meditate. We want to get prayer. We want to do whatever it is, even if it’s just sitting quietly, it’s going to bring us back to ourselves. I do really believe actually, if more people just came back to ourselves, the world would start to straighten itself out. I really believe that. So spirit is always present, but we need to slow down. Another way that spirit whispers is synchronicities or signs, what you might call signs. I was on this trip with my friend who sadly lost her husband a couple of years ago. She asked me to go with her. And so three times on the trip, the Alchemist comes up, the book, the Alchemist. It came up in conversation with the ladies who were going to do it for the book club.
One of my friends told Rich, he ought to be reading the book. And then I’m watching a movie on the way home, and I see they’re in the book, in the movie, they’re talking about the book The Alchemist. I’m like, well, I guess I’m supposed to go look at The Alchemist. But it’s a different angle. But it’s very similar to the story of Krisna and Arjuna because Santiago de Santiago decides he’s going to go out in the world to get his fortune. And he goes on this long journey and he has many diversions, and he ends up back at home. If you know the story, he ends up back at home and he realized that what he was looking for was always there. And I think that that is the same thing with us. What we’re looking for is already in us. It is literally your dharma is implanted in you.
And how do you know it’s implanted in you? It’s obvious in what you love. It’s obvious in what you love. It whispers. It doesn’t lecture, and it lets you know. And when you listen, you’ll know what the next step is. I think that’s the place that’s a stretch for a lot of us. I want to share a couple things in the room. Sorry, online people, you’re not going to be able to see this, but see this beautiful artwork on the wall here. This was done by Colette Wright, who many of you know, she’s been part of this community over time, and I think her art is an example of a whisper for her. She started painting. She writes poetry, she teaches about it now, but she just continued to follow it. She continued to follow the whisper. Another good example, some of you were here when Daniel Epstein presented his book.
This has been a couple years ago now, on Portraits and Faith. Anybody remember that? And like his story, I like his story too, because he was in a time in his life where he didn’t know if he believed in God. And so he traveled for work a lot at that time, and he just made a decision that every place he went, he was going to go and he was going to visit and meet someone of whatever. The faith was there. He was going to take their picture, and then he was going to write about what they believed and about their life. And he created this beautiful book, which Gina El turned into a beautiful, what’s the right word for it? Like a display. This has been at the Muhammad Ali Center in Tennessee or Kentucky, wherever it is, all over the place. But to bring forth this message, and it’s really a message of oneness. But I love his story because it came out of his feeling a little bit unhappy his life, but he followed it and he just did it, and then it turned into something. And that’s really what we’re all called to as well.
So follow your curiosity is the next pointer from Steven Cope. And you might not get that lightning bolt from the sky, as I said, but you want to follow what’s showing up. You want to follow the breadcrumbs that are showing up. Elizabeth Gilbert in her book, big Magic said, passion is rare and intimidating. Curiosity is gentle. It whispers. Hey, look over here. One of the other stories Stephen Cope tells us about Jane Goodall. She’s a great example of curiosity. When she was a little girl, she was fascinated by animals. And when she was a young adult with no scientific training on her own, she decided she was going to go to Africa and live with the primates. And it took her about a year to get them to trust her, to let her come close to them. Think about the amount of patients that took, and eventually they started interacting with her.
But that’s the other thing that really strikes me about his book is that everyone he talks about, they just allowed it to unfold. They didn’t rush it. They weren’t working some five-year plan of what’s supposed to happen. They were simply doing what comes next. So you might have something that you notice as a curiosity that you’re having in your life. I know for me right now, one of my curiosities with some of the other people in our community is just to go a little bit deeper into the healing that our teaching is actually based on. And we’re doing that together. So that’s one of my curiosity. What are yours? What are the things that you’re curious about right now?
The next thing you want to think about is how is your body talking to you? So your body is actually a compass. So when we’re living in alignment with our truth, our body feels good, and purpose is actually more felt than figured out. Have you ever noticed that in your life? If you’re trying really hard to figure something out, I’ll just say you’re probably not tapped into your spirit. And the reason I know that is when I start speaking, I’m trying to figure something out. That’s what I’ve learned over time. If I’m saying I need to figure this out, I need to figure it out. I’m not tapped in. I’m not doing my work. I have to pull myself out of it and say, I got to stop trying to figure this out. Just need to see what’s trying to happen. So Martha Beck tells us when we’re aligned with our dharma, we feel light, expansive, and aligned.
When we’re out of alignment, we feel heavy, tight, and resistant. Does anyone relate to that? I know I’ve had times in my life of great stress where my body was clearly speaking to me, and I’m not sure how well I was listening until I had a little health episode, but it’s like it was just, and I got, it happened more than once. I’m just going to be honest with you. I’m just kind of like, oh, it’s still trying to tell me. But I hadn’t caught up with what it was trying to tell me. And Stephen Cope tells the story in the book about a friend he grew up with who was a poet. And this guy was like a genius poet. He was one of these people who naturally understood philosophy and things like that. But because his parents were struggling financially, he made the decision that he wasn’t going to pursue his poetry and philosophy and the things he loved.
He was going to become a doctor. And I’ll let you read the book to find out that it didn’t have a happy ending for him, right? It’s because he was separated from what really mattered to him. And we can all probably relate to that. We’ve probably all made choices like that in our life where we made a decision because we were trying to solve for X, y, or Z, usually money. And then we ended up feeling unhappy. So how do you know when something’s for you versus not for you, right? How do you sense into that? How do you know something’s really aligned with your dharma? And I’m going to invite you to close your eyes again for a minute. I want you to bring to mind a time when you felt really alive. You might even want to imagine yourself in whatever room you were in, what was going on around you, who was there, what was happening?
And as you get the image in your mind, just begin to sense in to your body. What do you notice is going on in your body? What are you feeling in your body? For me, I would call it a sense of wellbeing or a sense of peace or satisfaction. And it often happens for me when I’m with a group of people and I see some sort of magic happening between people or just people having breakthroughs together. But what is it for you? Where do you see in your own life where your energy comes up when you’re present there?
And if you can name a quality in your head, just so you remember it later, just name that quality in your head. I think my quality is connection. And when you’re ready, just bring your energy into the room. Because when you feel that energy, that spirit saying yes to you, we say spirit always says yes to what we put out there, right? Whatever we put out, spirit says yes. So we want to put out our joy. We want to put out what is calling to us. We want to put out what is speaking to us.
Our dharma also takes courage. Sometimes we got to step outside of our comfort zone to follow our dharma because it’s going to stretch us. It might put us in situations we’ve never been in before. There might be some people who misunderstand you or say, Hey, what are you doing? This doesn’t make sense. What’s this path you’re on here? Or whatever. I know that happened to me when I quit my job. One of my friends is like, what are you doing? I’m like, I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m just supposed to be doing this. It’s a knowing, right? It’s a knowing. So Glennon Doyle says, in Untamed, the truest most beautiful life never promises to be easy. It asks us to be brave to inhabit it fully. So that’s what we’re called to be, is to be brave. Walt Whitman, my last story for the day, maybe there’s one more, is another person he talks about.
And if you’re familiar with Walt Whitman famous poet wrote before the Civil War. And during the Civil War, his first thing that he wrote was considered to be a very, I guess the best word would be risque poem called Leaves of Grass. He happened to be gay, and he lived an open life, which at that time people were not doing. And he really got ridiculed. He got rejected, but he followed his calling anyway. And later, as in some of these other stories, now his poetry is celebrated worldwide. The world just wasn’t quite ready for what he was doing. And the other thing I love about his story, because I think it shows the evolution of dharma. So he publishes this thing, and then he’s kind of in a slump because of the judgment of others. And it’s during the Civil War. And his brother, they think his brother might have died.
So he’s going from hospital to hospital, and he is madly searching for his brother, and he finds him very much alive. But what happens in the process is that he starts connecting with these men who are in the hospital who are injured, and he simply starts spending time with them. And then it starts to really open his heart in a different way. And one of them said to him, you sitting here with me when I’m very alone, I’m away from my family. It saved me. And Walt Whitman looked at him and said, no, you saved me. And I think it shows the importance of our connection with others and how really what is around us influences our dharma. I think someone’s going to talk about this in a future week, but our dharma also changes based on the time in which we live. So your dharma can also evolve, right?
Like what it was when you were young might not be what it is now, where it might have a different incarnation in this chapter, but your dharma’s not about playing small. Your dharma is inviting you to risk being seen. That’s what this is about. So the last point, key point is surrendering to the flow. To me, one of the best teachers that we have alive on the planet right now about this is Michael Singer. If you have read any of his books, his whole life was a surrender. He fell in love with meditating when he was young. And his whole goal was to fund himself so he could meditate and he could start a retreat center. That was his goal. And then life kept bringing him opportunities that he was making money. He got a part-time job at a university, and then he was early in the computers, and then he started a company, and then the company got quite large.
And then there were some problems there that he was accused of some wrongdoing, but it taught him how to surrender. That is what it taught him, how to surrender and let the flow of life show you where it’s going. So Michael Singer would say, show, say yes to what shows up. Trust life’s unfolding. Let your dharma find you. And I think this is one of all of our big lessons to just trust that what’s happening is for us, right? And even if we can’t see why it’s happening, there is something in everything that happens. That’s for us. I told you I lost my laptop, so I’m on this trip. You might ask, why did you even have it with you? It’s an excellent question. I was sitting at the airport on my late night flight trying to get a last couple things done for work, otherwise I would’ve left at home.
And so then I learned a lot from that. First of all, I didn’t have to have the darn thing with me to begin with, but it made me realize how I plan in my mind, and this is an embarrassing admission for a spiritual person, but I plan in my mind for everything that could go wrong. I want to have everything I could have in case something goes wrong or whatever. I’m like, wow, that’s a lot of stuff to carry through life. And I am like, what if I just simplified right? And what if I just didn’t anymore? And it was weird. The other thing that was weird too is I really did believe my laptop was coming back to me, but I was okay if it didn’t.
And it’s a silly example, but it just got me to think about what would my life look like if it were different, if I inhabited it differently? And so we want to keep the channel of spirit open. We want to make room for that channel because that will show us and lead us to where we’re supposed to go. It’s not about figuring it out. If we’re trying to figure it out, we’re striving. And if we’re striving, we’re off track. So I’m just going to recap what we’ve talked about, and then we’re going to take this into prayer. But I want to leave you with a call to action, which is this. Your life is your unique offering to the world.
That’s what your life is. And there’s not a right or wrong in what that looks like. It’s what do you want to express through you? It doesn’t have to be some big elaborate thing. It might be like, wow, I just really want to deeply love the people that God puts in front of me. So I want to invite you this week. This is just on the screen as just a recap of what we talked about. Your dharma begins as a whisper. Follow your curiosity, listen to your body’s wisdom. Be courageous and trust that your life is going to meet you surrender. But I want to invite you also this week to set aside time to see what wants to come up for you. You could do that by saying, I’m going to spend 10 minutes every day. I’m going to add it on to my meditation.
I’m just going to sit down. Maybe I’ll ask myself some visioning questions. Maybe I’ll take out a piece of paper and I’ll just write down what wants to be expressed through me right now. My second assignment is take a step. I don’t know about you, but how often do you have a really good idea or something and you don’t take action? Esther Hicks would slap us on the wrist if she were here, and she would say, if you have an idea or an inspiration, it means everything is lined up in that moment for you. So that’s my invitation to you. We’re going to take this into prayer now. So I just want to invite you to close your eyes, and I’m going to actually ask you to repeat after me.
I am a unique and unrepeatable expression of spirit. Say it with me. I am a unique and unrepeatable expression of spirit. Let’s say it one more time. I am a unique and unrepeatable expression of spirit. I listen, I trust and I follow the whispers of my soul. Say it with me. I listen. I trust and I follow the whispers of my soul. Let’s say it one more time. I listen, I trust and I follow the whispers of the earth soul. And so I just invite all of us just to breathe in this moment, in the awareness of God, spirit, the divine source, whatever your word is, I just call forth and magnified that presence in this very moment, just knowing that this is the presence of love and goodness and possibility. This is the presence of life itself. And I know that I am one with this love, with this perfect expression, with this life that is expressing in as in through me.
And as I know this for myself. I know this for each person hearing my words. And I’m actually going to say this prayer for the whole world because I know that we are all one with this love, this grace, this goodness, this divine wellbeing, this divine possibility that is the truth of our beingness. And so from this place of oneness, I just speak a word for each one of us just knowing that we are open to expressing our dharma in the world, our calling, knowing that spirit is letting us know what it is calling us to do, and that we are acting on it now. We are listening to the whispers. We are embracing curiosity. We’re taking a chance, we’re going for it. We’re taking risks, and we’re just allowing spirit to show us where it is taking us. And I just know that as each of us is tapped into the love at the center of our being, this truth of spirit at the center of our being, that the world is shifting, that more love is coming into the world, more connection, more care, more divine wellbeing.
And I just know and declare that anything unlike that is leaving our experience individually and collectively. And I know that the truth of spirit, the truth of this love that we are is making itself known in the world even now. So I say to this for all of us, and I just know that God’s got this prayer is already fulfilled. I just know the energy has shifted. And knowing that God’s got this, I’m grateful. I’m grateful for each person’s awareness of the special gifts that they have, gifts to offer that only they can offer. I’m grateful to know that each and every person is led, and I’m grateful to know that the vibration and energy of this planet and our country are moving into a place of greater love, greater care, greater wellbeing. I’m grateful to know this prayer is fulfilled now, and with so much gratitude, I simply say, and so it is. Amen.