Dialogue on purpose: a workshop

Hi everyone!

“He who has a “why” to live for can bear almost any “how”.” – Nietzsche

What does “purpose” mean to you? Do you have a sense of your purpose? Is it what gets you out of bed in the morning, your paid work, and/or what makes you happy in life? I frequently grapple with this topic! Personal development and popularized self-help movements are in service to questions of purpose. Next Wednesday, I look forward to a workshop with all of you where we discuss purpose, work to clarify what some of our values are, and consider strategies to align our behaviour with our values in our particular contexts.

No preparation is required! If you are interested and have time, however, below is some information to help you make the most out of our time together. The first two references are popular sources that discuss purpose, but each approach the topic with a distinct style. The third is the resource I am using as the basis for our workshop!

1) Victor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, author, and holocaust survivor: The will toward meaning or purpose is the basic drive or motivation of human life.

Logotherapy (meaning-based therapy) is a psychotherapeutic approach claiming that experiences like anxiety, depression, frustration, apathy, and existential crisis have to do with our underlying will toward meaning. This approach suggests that wellbeing can be explored through creativity (work and play), experience (of the world and of others), and attitude (cultivating an attitude toward your situation). Victor Frankl, having lived through the holocaust, reminds us that we each have the very powerful capacity to choose our response to any situation, even when the situation is grave, abusive, and uncontrollable. Our attitude toward our circumstances and our choice about how we respond cannot be taken away from us. These are ours alone to give away or approach with agency.

2) Mark Manson, author of #1 NY Times Best Seller The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*#!: a Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life (2016): With over 10 million copies sold, this book is NOT about positive-thinking but calls readers to be brutally realistic about the difficult aspects of life, and to make choices that help us respond to inevitable challenges. The book makes some good points in an entertaining way. One recommendation has to do with how to pursue a fulfilling career. The suggestion may be counter-intuitive. Rather than romanticizing the best aspects of a job which we think would make us supremely happy, we are instead encouraged to imagine (as realistically as possible) the worst aspects of what a job will demand on its hardest days. It’s suggested that fulfilling work is the work which we have the capacity to respond to at the points in time when others can’t or are unwilling to. Can you think of a task which no one really loves doing but which you are good at? This capacity may be what can set you apart from the crowd as a good candidate for a task or job that you may ultimately find fulfilling.

3) In this interview A Republic, If You Can Keep It w/ Daniel Schmachtenberger @ Zion 2.0 - YouTube, Daniel Schmachtenberger discusses a dharma exercise. See a more extended version here: Dharma Inquiry - Daniel Schmachtenberger (civilizationemerging.com) Dharma is understood here as action that serves your values within the particular context of your life and the current state of the world around you. In other words, dharma is the particular work that is yours to do in your particular life circumstances. If you are interested and have 10 minutes, listen to the audio clip (first link), starting from 53mins 40 seconds. It will introduce you to our workshop material and provide deeper rational for it. This dharma exercise asks what we notice we can’t NOT do? That is, what work we can’t turn away from in our lives without falling out of congruence or alignment with ourselves and our values. This is distinguished from focusing on what we think might make us happy, for example. We are asked to notice where we are holding internal incongruencies, asked to discover why we are holding them (there is always a reason), and to be strategic about what we might do to increase congruence – our actions alignment with our values. This is personal development toward living our dharma or “purpose”.

Workshop activity (we will most likely focus on 2, 3, and 4, this Wednesday):

1) As best as you can, centre yourself and minimize distractions that could pull you away from the activity, including any pressing physiological, interpersonal, or emotional needs. Next are a series of questions to reflect, write on, and discuss:

2) Ask yourself: What is sacred to me? What task is worthy of the devotion of my life, or what is worth more to me than my own life? If it is difficult to name any core values in your response, one strategy is to look for indicators that an unnamed value you hold was violated at a previous time in your life. Remembering a situation that deeply upset you, making you mad or leaving you heart-broken, can help point you in the direction of something that you care about. The pain we experience is a teacher that can help us identify what we hold sacred. Another strategy is to think about work that brings you the most joy and reflect on why it holds such joy for you. What values is it in service to?

3) Ask yourself: What are pressing issues in the world today? Identify 1 or 2 issues or challenges that you have lived experience of that have made an impact on you and what you hold sacred. (Learn as much as you can about the nature of these issues as how accurately you understand them will impact how well you can respond to them.)

4) Acknowledging your answers from 2 and 3, ask yourself: How do I behave so that I am living in the most congruent relationship to the world as it is right now? This is, how do I respond to an issue I have identified while being in service to my values?

5) Ask yourself: How am I living currently? How is my behaviour different from the behaviour I described in my response to 4? With curiosity and self-compassion, ask yourself: What unresolved challenges account for the gap between my answer to 4 and my answer to 5? There are likely many identifiable patterns that commonly steer you off course.

6) This next step will empower you to respond to the challenges in your life that you listed to 5 that are holding you shy of congruence with your own values. Choose one area of incongruence and think of 1 or 2 things you can do to develop greater sovereignty in this area – that is to say, things that will help you tackle that challenge and close the gap between your current behaviour and more congruent behaviour. This might look like research, meditation, therapy, joining others tackling the issue with success, and/or identifying failed attempts to address the issue and brainstorm new solutions. Think “positive deviance”!

All of these steps are complex and can be built upon over a lifetime. This may be especially true of the last step. Additionally, trauma from lived experience undermines our dharma strategies. This is a normal aspect of life and is expressed uniquely for each of us. Consider the importance of step number one, above. Take care to practice a great deal of self-compassion in your endeavor to explore these types of questions as accurately and honestly as possible. Pain is something that can cloud our vision about ourselves and about the world around us, which are already hard to see clearly! It may sound contradictory, but pain is also a brilliant teacher that can point us in the direction of deeper truths, like what we care about and what will help us become healthier versions of ourselves. If you are interested, I would be happy to explore steps 5 and 6 with you all in the New Year!

Happy Friday, everyone! I can’t wait to dialogue with you all on Wednesday!

Zenia