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Posted by Michael Finkelstein | August 30th, 2019

Getting On With Your Life

This is not going to be an easy message to get across without risking upsetting you; but I feel
compelled to challenge the status quo a bit. It’s on the theme of not sweating the small stuff, which though I have written before, seems ever more critical in this time when we are driven to distraction by public figures who disseminate messages of fear. Not only are we being sold things we really don’t need, but we are led to believe that if we don’t follow the advice of those who lead us, we will be doomed. And to be clear, in the category of “those who lead us” we must include our doctors and teachers as well as our pundits and politicians.

Who do we trust? And what is the dominant message of those who speak the loudest? Seems to me that we are being misdirected. Though I’m not going to go so far as to get into the dialogue of whether misdirection is intentional or not, self-serving those in power or who profit in some other way, but when it comes to your health especially, I would like to direct your attention to a very fundamental question. What are you doing here? Why are you alive and what is the purpose of your life? If you answer is that this is all random, I invite you to stop reading. On the other hand, if you sense, as I do, that this question is more relevant than ever, please continue. For how else can you sort through all the advice, to chose how to live to your greatest potential? To me, as one of those advisers, it’s not enough to help people merely survive.

So, what if there is a very specific reason you were born. What is that reason, what role do you play in the global society? And, when you consider that, consider this: what do your life’s experiences have to do with that role? In other words, is it possible that what challenges you, what you suffer from, indeed, what might kill you, is purposeful? Can you take it one step further…..your physical survival, beyond the period necessary for your to claim your true identity, has nothing to do with it. In other words, death, while a big deal, is not going to interfere with your progress, unless you let it.

In my estimation, identifying our life’s purpose is essential to the mission we were born to serve. Should we fall prey to the messages of the dominant voices, we might mistake our role to be limited, i.e. to merely survive or to support someone else’s agenda. In so doing we give up on some of the unique potential we possess. Indeed, we might get so attached to the label of our “cause” that it becomes our identity, without which we lose ourselves, and the special reason for our presence in this world.

This is not to say that our causes don’t have merit. Some of these things are noble in fact, i.e. I enjoyed thinking of myself as a fixer for instance. But, when I delve into that, if my identity is too closely caught up in an ego pursuit, I wind up finding myself absorbed in the problems all around me that need fixing. Similarly, if your identity is that of a survivor, while it certainly might be true that you survived one type of threat or another and for a period of time it might need to be your primary focus, it could also catch you up in a vicious cycle of challenges that test your ability to survive. There’s a point of time in which we want to get off that carousel and leap beyond the mundane into something far more exciting. There’s more to life than the immediate needs of our physical body.

In this regard, even something like cancer, by this accounting, is the small stuff. Sure, it seems huge, monumental. The fact is it is truly life-threatening and it needs to be taken seriously. Still, at the level of the soul, since it is not “soul-threatening,” it is quite possibly the opposite…an incredible opportunity for the soul. Indeed, it might be the reason you were born, to learn to rise above the fray. In this regard, cancer is one of the more useful conditions for our life to achieve its purpose, beyond merely surviving — it forces us to face our mortality in order to get on with it.

So, what calls you? If I were a magician and could wave my wand and get rid of your disease (or dis-ease), now, what would you do with your life? Your soul was incarnated with this incredible potential. My point here is to remind you to get back in touch with that. Now’s the time to embrace that identity. Serving your life’s purpose is not only the best thing you can do for your health, but it is the best thing you can do for the world, and that’s a worthy mission.

Mitakuye Oyasin,

Michael

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