The yogic teaching of dharma
The road to finding your life purpose
I never set out to become a psychologist. Or a yoga teacher. Or a writer. In fact, when I was a teen I had an elaborate fantasy world, and my career plans ranged from actress to air stewardess to news journalist to TV presenter.
I left school without a plan. I left Uni without a plan. And 3 decades later, I still don’t have a plan. But I followed the threads of where my curiosity led me, and it hasn’t led me astray. It led me to psychology, yoga, trauma therapy, embodiment work, and, more recently, to writing. It led me to the things that have supported my own growth and healing, and to the things I can offer to the world. I can hand-on-heart say that I love what I do. It’s an immense privilege to sit alongside people in their darkest times and help them navigate the way forwards. It continues to teach me so much about myself and about life. My path is continually re-shaping and evolving and I have no idea where it’s leading next, but I can’t wait to find out what the chapters ahead have in store.
I have come to believe we each are here on this earth with something to contribute. I like to think of life as a giant tapestry, to which we each contribute a single stitch, but which collectively creates the mesmerizingly complex work of art that is humanity. Your task in this life is to figure out what your stitch looks like, what vital piece of the cosmic puzzle you came here to offer. The gift that is uniquely yours, that no one else can replicate.
In yoga philosophy, this is known as our dharma or life purpose.
How do you go about finding your dharma?
Some people just seem to know what their passion and purpose is, as if it’s signposted in neon from the moment they arrive on the planet and they follow that direction. For most of us, it’s much more subtle and elusive. We need to look for clues and follow different threads, take some wrong turns, meet some dead ends, and wonder why they’re not working out. Many times, when it doesn’t work out, it’s being guided by our head, by a list of shoulds or sensible rational decisions rather than by our deeper intuitive knowing, our heart and soul.
In his book, The Great Work of Your Life, seasoned yogi and psychotherapist Stephen Cope describes the journey of dharma as having multiple steps.
The first step is finding what you love and what you’re good at. The clues are in the things that light you up, give you energy, bring you joy and capture your imagination.
If you don’t know what it is you love – try asking yourself what you loved to do when you were 5 years old or 12 years old. Before the world got its hands on you, with its long list of prescriptions and shoulds and told you what was and wasn’t possible. You may find some clues there. You can also look for those moments where you’re fully absorbed in activity and time passes without you noticing – moments that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi labelled ‘flow state’.
In her book Big Magic,
suggests that finding your passion in life can be a burdensome quest, but that if we simply start by following small glimmers of curiosity, these clues will eventually lead us towards our path. Any tiny urge or spark of interest can be a clue, a signpost, nudging us along the way.Often the challenges in our life contain within them the seeds of our dharma. Our gifts and strengths sometimes blossom from the compost of our struggles, as we learn and grow through them. They are all part of our dharmic path.
When you’ve found something that feels like your offering, the second step is to let that become your compass, go all out and put your heart and soul into doing that thing. To make it a centrepiece of your life. The focus of your life’s work.
Then comes the part that is perhaps the most challenging for our anxious, controlling human minds to grasp. Stephen Cope writes that we must let go of judging our dharma based on our narrow definitions of success – like how much income or attention it is generating, sales figures or numbers of followers. We need to focus our energy on the process rather than fixating on the outcome.
Vincent Van Gogh only sold one painting during his lifetime, the rest of the 900+ collection of his artworks only sold after his death. If he’d judged his life purpose by external definitions of success, he probably would have given up early in the journey and the world would be a poorer place without his incredible contributions. I don’t think that anyone would argue that painting wasn’t his dharma, even though it didn’t bring fame and wealth within his lifetime. It’s a useful reminder that we don’t always get to see the effect of our contribution on the world.
Perhaps once we find something that feels in alignment with who we are, we just have to send it out into the world and trust that it’s adding something to the tapestry. One stitch can feel highly insignificant, but as we zoom out, a bigger picture emerges where our stitches becomes part of something rich and potent.
The final step, according to yogic wisdom, is to hand over our gifts to the mysteries of the universe, or God, or divinity, or however you conceptualise the forces that guide us. What happens to it next is none of our business.
Our life purpose can be continually evolving and changing, it can be different at 50 than it was at 25 and may have evolved again by 75. But what I notice is that, when you’re living in alignment with your life purpose, doing the thing that you do best, then work-life balance feels less of a concern. Work and life start to merge seamlessly into each other and what you do can increase energy and vitality instead of depleting it. If you’re finding yourself in a job that saps your life-force energy, I encourage you to question whether you’re in the right place, whether you’re maximising your gifts. Your dharma need not be big or glamorous. There’s a beautiful Australian movie, Kenny, about a guy who cleans toilets and puts his entire heart and soul into his work. It’s fictional, but I think it illustrates a great point - anything can be our dharma, it’s the attitude, the fit and the intentionality that makes it so.
Finding your dharma may sound like a big responsibility, but the good news is you have full permission to be uniquely you. And you only have to do your little bit. There can be relief in that. You do not have to do all the other pieces that you see all the other people around you doing. That is their dharma, not yours.
As Stephen Cope writes
We cannot be anyone we want to be. We can only authentically be who we are.
Stay in your lane and find what is authentically yours. That is all that the world requires of you. There is a spark of consciousness that wants to express itself through you. Find your gift and give yourself wholeheartedly to that. Life is too short for anything else.
How does this idea sit with you? And do you have a sense of what your dharma is? Join me in the comments below to share your thoughts. (If you’re reading this in an email, click through to the website to join the conversation).
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Beautiful, Vicki, and so relevant, as ever. I loved the part about remembering what interested you as a child. My major interests were fully formed by the time I was 13, I just didn't have names for them and no one else noticed. But they've all borne fruit, incidentally, along the way.
Absolutely love this... I use the idea of threads with my coaching clients... it’s amazing to see what weaves together through our lives...