Sunday, August 26, 2012

When Career and Life Mission Don't Match

Our chosen career is what we do for a living – in other words the kind of work that we do in order to get money.

Our life mission is that which we are meant to do – the task or tasks that we came to accomplish in this life time.

As I have written before, when I first started my Feng Shui career I used to believe that the two needed to go together in order for a person to be truly fulfilled. After the financial collapse at the end of 2008, though, I saw that my clients who had more than one skill to "fall back on" where the ones that adapted better to the rapid economic changes. I saw then that there is an inherent value in having a job or a career that allows us to contribute to our society and in exchange get enough income to live in a way that all our needs and at least some of our desires are met.

During the financial collapse I also saw people who were very skilled, and had more than one skill, but who had been "ruined" by their belief in New Age teachings and books that claimed that any person should be able to manifest their ideal job at any time, if they desired it strongly enough and raised their vibration high enough. These people rejected job offers that would have allowed them to make a good living because they were not for work that was aligned with their dream career and/or sense of life mission.  A couple of these people I know ended up being evicted from their homes and having to file for bankruptcy.

I now believe that for most people life mission and career don't come together. Sometimes, they aren't even in the same field of work, and most of the time this is not a problem. However, when a person's career is in opposition to their life mission, I have seen people express deep dissatisfaction and engage in self-sabotaging behavior.

To illustrate this point let me give you two examples:

Client A is a woman who is a healer and a Reiki master and believes in the healing power of the human body and soul. She herself avoids taking medication, and she uses herbal remedies as the first recourse when she or a family member are feeling ill. Client A works for a pharmaceutical company.

Client B is also a woman who is a healer and a Reiki master, and just like Client A, she uses herbs and other natural therapies to tend to her healing needs and those of her loved ones. Client B is a nurse.

Both women would describe their life missions as "Increasing awareness in the larger community about alternative and complementary therapies." Client A is very unhappy. She has a positive attitude and uses a very disciplined spiritual regime to keep from plunging into depression. She manages most of the time, but at a great energetic cost. Hard as she might try, her alternative healing ventures do not succeed. From time to time, her health suffers.

Client B, on the other hand, is very happy and healthy.  Notice that both women work for institutions that promote conventional medical care as their main job, and have healing practices on the side. Moreover, both women feel that conventional medicine is something that is contrary to their life mission. So why is one of the women very unhappy, while the other one is very happy?

Client B noticed a long time ago that what is usually called "health care" is really only "sick care," in the sense that all their treatments are based on drugs, surgery and radiation, to control illnesses that have already manifested in a person's system, while very little effort is made to foster health so that most people would not need "health care." When she was confronted with this realization, she quite her job at a hospital and took some time to try and do healing full time. She did well for a while until – you guessed it – the financial crisis of 2008. Client B took some time off to search her soul and find where she could fit in the apparatus of conventional medical care where she would feel that she was not betraying herself and her life mission. She finally went to work doing hospice care, where she could offer compassionate care to people at the end of their lives, as well as to their loved ones. Thus, she is able to provide for the needs of her family, while staying true to her life mission. Client A, on the other hand, works directly helping people get medication which she believes may be doing more harm than good. (Please notice that I am not making any judgement regarding the effectiveness of conventional medicine or alternative therapies, I am simply presenting the views of the two women in the example.)

So what can Client A do?

1. She can recognize the value of having a job that pays her bills, even if it is not her dream job, and if it is in opposition to her life mission. She can also start actively looking for another job, while continuing to work at her present job. The new job doesn't have to be in alignment with her life mission, but it ought not to be in opposition to it.

2. Client A can also change her Life Mission, or the part of her Life Mission which she describes as promoting alternative and complementary healing techniques. It can be done. Some spiritual healers would make you belief that Life Missions cannot be changed or moved, but that is not true. You can truly let go of a Life Mission – other times people realize that what they thought was their Life Mission was actually a simple belief that something needed to be done and that they should be the ones to do it.

There is no greater value in choosing either option, but she needs to make a choice. A person's soul cannot be divided for a long time without seeing some negative effect. Most people who have actually connected with their true Life Mission or Missions, however, tend to decide to pursue them, because of their own strong desire to go in that direction, more than from a sense of obligation. A sense of obligation, on the other hand, can often be a sign that the perceived "Life Mission" is actually an idea that was picked up from sources other than the person's soul.

Dr. Susana Kronfeld, practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine and a good friend of mine has designed a healing poem to help people re-align with their life mission. You do not have to purchase the poster, just work with the thumbnail below or simply memorize the words. If you feel you benefit from the poem after a few days, consider purchasing the poster, which contains healing frequencies by healer and artist Bill Austin. When we "put our money where our beliefs are" we give more power to our creative powers. :) Click on the Sky Blue for more info on purchasing the poster:


It is likely that the words in this poster don't make a lot of sense to you, but they are very powerful. This poem was designed from a deep knowledge of how the five elements (water, wood, fire, earth and metal) work and how they interact with the three levels of existence: Heaven (thoughts), Earth (physical action), and Humankind (emotions). Art, like poetry, can sometimes achieve amazing transformations in the human soul.