How do we find our purpose?

[Diana]

I am trying to do just this. It gets hard often. And the loneliness makes it like a hundred times worse. I dunno how to deal with the resulting emotions when I try to show myself unconditional forgiveness and compassion or how to describe them. The feelings are very mixed. I want to break down and cry. I try meditation walks and traditional meditation to help. And healing codes. Hopefully they'll prove helpful, as I'm in a lot of pain lately.

I think pain is part of the deal. It's like grief: you have to feel it or it's repressed and becomes toxic. We have to feel pain and in my estimation that never stops—it's just part of the whole. By that I mean accepting the pain as part of being here (or even anywhere—I don't know). Speaking personally, my pain derives from the suffering here of all living things. Nothing I will ever do will eliminate that suffering because it is something larger than me and my actions. I can help beings I come across and maybe mitigate some of the suffering, but that won't miraculously transform the entire system whether the system is random, planned, or dynamic. I have an effect, but I don't think that's the point. The point, to me, is evolution of self as part of a whole; so changing self can affect the whole but changing the whole is not the responsibility of self.

This is a partial explanation of why I seek detachment. I don't seek to put "joy" icing over a cake of "pain." I think we have to be able to feel joy while also accepting the pain—not covering the pain up with joy. "Happiness" can be anesthetizing, making us temporarily blind to pain—but the pain is still there. So to that end, we have to accept ourselves. If we are empathetic, sensitive types, then that's what we are and people who can skate through life with "positive" attitudes and smile all the time are not better, or have less karma, or more evolved than sensitive types who find it difficult to navigate 3D.

(The following is totally paraphrased and it's been a long time since I read this so I may be off about the details.) Ram Dass talked about meditating in his backyard (or somewhere outside). His (or someone's) cat brought a dying mouse to him and was torturing it as domesticated cats will sometimes do before they eat prey. RD was in a quandary over it. He felt pain/sorrow watching the cat and the poor mouse and came to a realization that maybe that was the point—that he accept and feel his pain. That the point was not to try and take his own pain away by intervening, as the natural animal world is predicated upon predator/prey, but rather to observe self and self's pain, and feel it, accept it and not try to eliminate it or cover it up.

On the other hand, it is possible to mitigate the sorrow of this existence by taking action of some kind. Volunteering, creating beautiful things (paintings, stories, music, painting a room, making an altar, knitting, and so on), walking in nature and interacting with the flora and fauna, the sun, rain, snow, and breathing outdoor air. It's also really important to get physical exercise.