 We all want to know why we are here. What is our mission in life? Those people who know it are easy to spot: their lives shine with meaning. Their perception of their life's purpose gives them the strength to live through the rough times as well as to enjoy the good.
Many people, however, are confused – or completely in the dark – about their reason for living. This lack of self-understanding and direction is a health problem itself, in a sense, for it can lead to all sorts of emotional stress, including depression, anxiety, and fatigue. And when these stresses or negative emotions become entrenched, they can contribute to the development of an illness. It's not only your mind that wants to know your mission - this knowledge is vitally important to your body and spirit as well. The further we stray from our true mission in life, the more frustrated we will become, and the more out of sync our energy will be.
By coming to know your mission, you can live your life in a way that makes best use of your energy. When you are working well with your energy, you are also making the best expression of your personal power. I call this living in accord with your Sacred Contract.
Seeing the larger picture
Our life's mission, or Contract, cannot be defined or measured simply by our external life, however. Your purpose is not only your career or hobby or romantic relationship. A Contract is your overall relationship to your personal power and your spiritual power. It is how you work with your energy and whom you give it to. It is also how much you are willing to surrender to divine guidance. Although a Contract is not the physical details of your life, you can use those details to figure out what your Contract is. Your life is composed of many facets that shimmer and reflect both your physical and your internal energy. In attempting to grasp the whole of this reflection, you can discern and define your mission. Just as each fragment of a hologram contains the entire image, your mission is reflected, although maybe from a slightly different angle, within each of these many individual energy rays.
Still, it takes practice to learn to see the larger picture in these fragments, to learn to add them together to get the sum of your mission. Discovering your Contract is bound to give you surprises. You're going to have rugs pulled out from under you and realizations that rock you. But in the process you will learn how to see symbolically, how to manage your personal power, and how to fulfil your Sacred Contract.
In my previous books Anatomy of the Spirit and Why People Don't Heal and How They Can, I explained some of the ways that energy works, how it organizes itself around our seven emotional centres, or chakras, and how you can learn to read your energy and hone your intuition to see where your spiritual and physical disruptions or diseases originate. I taught how and why energy could become blocked or distorted and how this blockage – which is often connected to unfinished business in the past – could be cleared so that you could heal. Usually the emotional or spiritual healing was tied to learning the lesson of the emotional centre or centres involved in the illness. Sometimes the lesson was the illness itself, and learning to work with that form of energy brought insight into the mental and emotional changes that needed to be made.
Archetypal patterns
After many thousands of intuitive readings, I came to the conclusion that an organizing principle even greater than the interplay of the chakras is shaping the energy within each of us – and shaping our lives as it does so. I began to identify universal forms of cosmic intelligence that are directly involved in the day-to-day organizing of our lives. In fact, with every reading that I did after 1989, what I could only call an archetypal pattern stepped forward out of the details and fragments of each life and assumed a definite shape, offering clear insight into that person's psyche and why her life was as it was. These patterns, often ancient in origin, populate our minds and lives in ways that affect us deeply. Yet we are generally unaware of them. These patterns of intelligence are archetypes, dynamic living forms of energy that are shared in many people's thoughts and emotions, across cultures and countries.
Learning to read the archetypal patterns that influence your energy is the natural complement to working with the energy of the chakras. Just as the energies of your chakras work together to provide a map of physical and energy information, the collective body of your archetypes produces a view of the governing forces of your psyche and soul. This interrelationship of forces explains why I was able to move so naturally from reading the energy of chakras to reading the energy of archetypes. The energy body that surrounds you, which is created by the chakras, contains all the data of your biology and your biography, so it makes sense that this energy would manifest in patterns of archetypes that affect your life.
So to work with these big energies, these archetypal patterns, you have to step away from your life, step up and back from the detailed brush-strokes that make up your energy self-portrait, to see the whole picture. Working with your archetypes involves seeing your life in symbols at the centre of a panoramic vista. From this vantage point you are able to take into account all parts of your life. You don't just focus on the major events or significant wounds.
Our twelve companions
In the 1990s I began teaching seminars on these archetypal energies. As my students learned to identify their archetypal patterns, then link the characteristics of each archetype to crucial behaviours and relationships, they often got instant clues to their life's mission. The energy of the archetype and its manifestation in our psyches and lives is so pervasive and intimate that no part of our lives exists separately from at least one archetypal pattern. Usually no fewer than twelve are our constant companions. Each has a story to tell you; each brings with it the power of the world myths and legends in which it has figured over time, and the energy of the patterns of belief and behaviour out of which it was created.
Archetypes are the architects of our lives. They are the energy companions through whom we can learn to understand ourselves. These psychological, emotional patterns – how we live and whom we love – can lead us to a profound understanding of our purpose. Their energy can connect us to our higher Sacred Contract – to our greater mission on the planet. When we understand how they work, we realise that there are no insignificant relationships. Every experience that we have contains purpose and meaning. Each event, each person in our lives embodies an energetic fragment of our own psyche and soul. Our individual spiritual task is to recognize and integrate all of them into our awareness so that the greater pattern of our mission can shine forth in its full dimensions.
In Sacred Contracts lies a process that helps you to discover and integrate the fragments of your psyche. It is a guide to intense self-examination for the purpose of finding your individual archetypal companions, and working with them to realize your life's mission and Sacred Contract.
By developing symbolic sight and archetypal language, you will grasp the whole of your life with a level of spiritual clarity that can heal the emotional and spiritual wounds you have accumulated and fill you with awe that your life is also of great importance to everyone you encounter. It becomes possible for you to trust that everything that is meant to come your way will arrive in due time, that you will be with the right people at the right moment, and that divine guidance endlessly flows into your soul. It can't be otherwise: we manage our Contracts, but the Divine takes care of the Sacred.
From Sacred Contracts, copyright 2001 by Caroline Myss, published in the UK in 2002 by Transworld.
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