Necessary Labor: Finding purpose through process

The journey to discover our purpose, our “why?” is often cited as an essential component for success or fulfillment. Many utilize higher education, travel, specialized programs, meditation, or mentorship to find the answer. Some start from a place of spiritual inspiration or curiosity or possibly an awakening from a challenging or traumatic experience. Others seem to be driven from within to acquire this understanding from childhood. I am indeed the latter — a seeker who has aligned myself with alternative paths from a very young age. However, in the last two years, I have considered a different question, one I have come to feel is a more practical starting point. This question highlights the “process” of life, itʻs workflow if you will, and helps me remain present and embodied; qualities that are essential to developing the strength and resilience required to live one's “why?,” or one's purpose authentically.

A New Inquiry
I began to rethink my driving question after I experienced my father’s death. My brother was his primary caretaker, but our entire family orbited closely in his final weeks. The key experiences to my mindshift center around what I observed as my father struggled to let go of his physical form. My father’s body was literally laboring out of this world. Everything about his being, and in the broader household, was moving and vibrating in a repeating pattern of constriction and release: intensity and calm. Labor.

I came to see the managing of immediate tasks, the delegation of ongoing responsibilities, and the relationship between conversation and silence to be a dance between people and emotion, with space and time. My father’s passing was intimate, but it was also vast in its implications and left me feeling as if I had witnessed an ancient bio-spiritual process that connected me to all humans throughout time.

Regardless of race, creed, color, socio-economic status, education, politics, or cultural background, death is an experience that binds us whether or not we discretely acknowledge this fact. But this shared experience is only possible because of birth; our other shared knowing. From that point on, I went deeper into an idea I had always held as true––that life and death are not the bookends of a single life cycle but rather punctuations in a symphony of interconnected processes that are the scaffolding of our lived experience as a collective human species. 

From these realizations, a new motivator emerged — process.

Click here to listen to the podcast episode about this experience from Salted Logic

Death and Rebirth
A month after my dad died, a series of events began to unfold that would change the foundation of my life permanently. And although the entire backstory is worth sharing, I will fast forward to the point that I began describing his final weeks, especially his last days, as labored. The same kind of labor that is required to give birth — to anything significant. I remembered stroking my father’s hair and telling him to relax as his chest heaved. His muscles would contract and release in repeating and quickening patterns, similar to my labor of his grandchildren. We now shared the experience of hours of intentional push and pull that moves life through its various stages. The more detail I recalled about my childbirth experiences, the more deeply I committed to the idea that our entire lived experience is by design, a process of laboring.

In addition to physical birth, which produces humans, butterflies, and incredible works of art (to name but a few), other labored processes include going from static to dynamic states, lower to higher consciousness, student to teacher, and child to adult. In all, these transformations require being present and accepting complete reorganization and discomfort, very often over extended periods. Even when these processes are perceived as positive or celebrated, like the birth of a child or graduation, the cumulative investment of time, energy, and emotion (possibly money) is significant. My point, however, is not the outcome but rather the process that moves us closer to our highest potential regardless of the events we experience. We all share this process, but so often, we focus on achievement and miss opportunity after opportunity to grow our consciousness.

Let's ImagineIf you picture a beaded bracelet stretched out between your hands, the micro perspective is that the bracelet represents a singular, memorable experience. Each bead is a contraction or period of intensity. Each space, a time for recovery, where we often (and would be advised to) adapt, course correct, and recharge. It is also a time where we can most effectively integrate newly learned lessons into our next decision. Ultimately, the pattern of beads and spaces, of contractions and recovery periods, creates labor, and the tension required to birth our desired result. In some cases, the outcome is far different than we had hoped, but in any all cases, we have changed.

In the macro, assuming we go left to right, the left hand’s fingers are pinching the bracelet at our entry point — birth. The same location on the right side is the exit — our death. Each bead now represents a single event that we know from the micro is a collection of contractions that produce a unique experience. The spaces between beads are the pauses we take after completing a significant challenge — be it perceived as positive or negative. Together, the entire bracelet, from left to right, is our lived experience on this Earth.

Practical Application
If we begin our inner work looking at how we labor, and for what, we can start to learn about how we learn. The timing between intensity and rest gives us boundaries, guideposts. Patterns begin to appear from seeming chaos when we commit to building the most supportive learning environment for our unique form of progress, versus running in circles and looking outside ourselves for answers (which at times can be necessary or serve a purpose). Recognizing our patterns, and the cycles they create can allow us to more effectively use our recovery periods to adapt, restock, recenter, reenergize. With practice, not only can we track our progress, over time, we can come to accept that growth (that of self or a project) is not linear, nor does it mean that our laboring will necessarily decrease in intensity or frequency in the future. In terms of defining our “why,” laboring is a useful tool for discovering the answer. By becoming a master process manager, our why very often arises, without much effort, through a mix of lived experience, repetition, and emotion.

If you have to choose a starting point to develop a relationship with your life’s process, I encourage consideration of your entry and exit points — birth and death. Developing a complete understanding of our most significant labors may take a lifetime, but having engaged in a basic exploration of them will provide a sound foundation for the rest of your journey. Birth and death are also the areas that can produce deep underlying anxiety and fear and are the least integrated into people’s lives. Our delivery is a process most of us have no conscious memory of, but it is the foundation of our genealogy and all the familial patterns that can so often stunt our growth. Beginning with other life labors is fine, but those paths often lead you right back to your beginning or your anxiety about the end.

With a new awareness of my labor process across many sectors of my life and relationships, I now move through the world, building my strategy based on how I best manage my labor tendencies. It took me a while to understand just how nuanced one’s understanding must be (and there is much more studying to do). As an example, just because I have a specific reaction to authority in the workplace doesnʻt mean that my response in intimate relationships or with my kids is the same. As well, the learning must be ongoing because we continue to change, be it from acquiring maturity from practice or possibly age or from having multiple challenges back to back in the same sector of life.

By tracking the time between contractions, adaptations can be made as frequency and duration increases or decreases. Each recovery or reset period can be used efficiently to prepare for the next wave of intensity well before it hits (of course, this is not an exact science). By monitoring progress, proactive measures can be taken to ensure our external actions are fulfilled in parallel with our spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical needs. The trick is to find the balance between intentionally manifesting one’s dreams, while also allowing the quantum mechanics of life to course-correct based on elements of the situation we are not able to see, know or comprehend. A strategy that can support greater accuracy is to evaluate the congruence between what we hope will happen with what is happening. This step is vital because there are times when our drivers are overly weighted by what we want versus what is needed, or we have not honestly accounted for the underlying agendas of others who may be involved in the situation.

Personally Speaking
I have built a substantive catalog of mental notes (which often end up in my journal entries) on how I labor, and how the patterns of constriction and release change under different circumstances. When external forces are the dominant factor, my tendencies change once again. Ultimately, learning about my internal process has required an array of strategies, as does managing them.

I have also unraveled substantial portions of my family-of-origin patterns by learning about my laboring tendencies. I have become better at embracing joy and setting aside the myth that “things are too good to be true.” When that feeling arises, it is very often due to unmet expectations, which developed from my lack of understanding of the inner workings of my process in the first place.

There is a deep well of resilience that I have built over time from a committed practice. This reservoir helps me face adversity over extended periods, and dance with multiple unknowns at once. I still feel anxiety and doubt when things donʻt work in my favor, and in some cases, fear arises when I realize I have turned a blind eye to a situation that needed careful management. However, I find myself far less disappointed because I work to ensure my process is rooted in my needs; I prioritize emotional stability over finishing with time to spare. I have come to learn that life may be a classroom, but it is not a test.

The contraction patterns that still trip me up are intimate relationships, be they with a partner or my family members, specifically my children. The labors and patterns of my ʻdearest lovesʻ contrast and mirror my own in such a perfectly attuned manner that I have to address my process. When I turn from best-practice, I can become consumed by fear and judgment. The only mechanism I have found to create peace and understanding within these relationships is to reassess the inner workings of my process. Most often, I regain a balanced perspective by assessing my birth/life and future death. I guess you could call it a memento mori moment. This realization affirms, for me, the importance of every labor of my lived experience, big or small. Our labors allow for self-mastery and collectively, provide a mechanism to further human consciousness.