Please Note: Winter Blooms is an educational website only and is in no way meant to replace experience with a trained EFT practitioner, counselor, or therapist. To find an EFT Practitioner, visit the AAMET website, the EFT Universe website, the Tapping Solution website, or contact Jane at 802-533-9277 or jane@winterblooms.net for EFT coaching support.
Purpose. We all long for one, admiring people who find theirs early and spend their lives doing the thing they love to do in an environment that makes them glad to be alive. As I write this sentence I can’t help but think of Jane Goodall, primatologist, anthropologist, writer, and activist who has brought so much information about our primate cousins, the Chimpanzees, to our general store of knowledge, who began her work as a girl in her teens and now, at eighty, continues to deepen our understanding of the consequences of environmental degradation through works such as Reason for Hope. People who find their niche early in life appear to live charmed lives, because no matter the challenges they face, their purpose fuels their desire to get up each morning and embrace what is with courage, wisdom, and enthusiasm. We all want such lives. Privately and publicly, we want our lives to matter, to have purpose, in spite of whatever cynicism we express when we feel defeated. Tapping, if applied with gentle persistence, can help us to understand our purpose in the broadest sense, and in doing so, increase our zest for life.
Purpose does not mean a grand calling although some of us may find our purpose while answering a grand or public call. Purpose, in its most comprehensive and useful sense, is learning how to do our best, live from our hearts, open our minds, honour our bodies, develop our creative resources, connect with others, care for our Earth home, and maintain our optimism, regardless of the chaos at home and everywhere in the world. When we hold this understanding of purpose, we discover we all share the same one: to evolve, to become kinder, wiser, more understanding, more compassionate, more peaceful, and more present to life, not as we want it to be or as we think it should be, but as it is.
I’ll illustrate this with an example from my own life. Recently I discovered my eye-glasses prescription needed significant tweaking. In just a few months, my eyes underwent a notable change. This fact initially kindled fear because my mother was declared legally blind when she turned eighty. She was a visual artist and she experienced this significant change in life as a heavy blow. I hadn’t yet learned of tapping when she received her diagnosis, and it took her years to recover from her macular degeneration reality, but she did recover, finding at the end of her life a way to live fully by being present to the world as she could experience it. She continued to laugh, to express her sense of beauty, to learn to ask for and accept help, to relate to her loved ones and friends, to give to those whose lives enriched her and to those whose lives did not. She hated not seeing, but she worked through her hatred to live life on its own terms, and I am grateful for her choice to embrace her blindness and each new day’s challenges and gifts. Happily, with our tapping skills, we can learn to embrace life’s realities very quickly and move through them with optimism.
While we may discover what we consider unique and individualized callings over the course of our lives, we also share a common purpose, regardless of our differences. Our common purpose is to be open and present to life’s pleasures, sorrows, and even its horrors. Tuning into our hearts, asking how we might contribute to making a bad situation better and a good situation better still relieves us from looking for the perfect job, calling, or relationship. Our common purpose, whatever individual and unique purpose we may be fulfilling, is to consciously evolve into more loving, wise, kind, insightful beings.
Tapping, to open our hearts and minds, to resolve annoying and even dangerous habits or situations, is our version of saving the world as much as Jane Goodall’s work with Chimpanzees is her version. Making the very best of our lives in each moment is an ever-present purpose, no matter our personal and professional uniqueness, gifts, talents, and responsibilities. It is gratifying to know that tapping to be our best as we do our best in every moment helps us to make significant contributions to the peace and healing of the world. It is hard to imagine a higher purpose than this.
Until next week
Jane
Jane Buchan, MA, AAMET Advanced Practitioner, jane@winterblooms.net, 802-533-9277