Become a Catalyst for your Personal Purpose

Laura Basha

One thing I have learned is that any enlightenment I have attained is not so much the result of noble pursuit as it is waking up to the fact that my face has been in the dirt for a long time and maybe I don’t really know what I’m doing and it’s time to get up, brush myself off and have the wherewithal to listen for what I don’t know.

This was certainly part of the process of creating a personal purpose, which finally resonated into words from the essence of what I am committed to. The purpose is in fact now the articulation of who I say I am as a possibility. It took some courage to keep creating just the right combination of phrasing in the face of wanting to “do it right” or “look good” or “look intelligent”, yet now I have a verbalization that I can truly say is the default against which I can measure what I commit to: “I am committed that people are free from the limitations of the past, profoundly present, generating lives of authentic self-expression and joy”.

This process by the way is not dissimilar to the process of creating a painting. In the words of my dear painting mentor, Larry Robinson: “If you don’t hate this painting at some point in the process, it’s not going to be a good painting!”

In the realm of creative self-expression there is an angst with which we must engage, working with it, tolerating its discomfort, until harmony unfolds. In the painter’s case, we engage through the brush; in the case of a remarkable human being, through a purpose, a commitment to something bigger than one’s self.

If we allow it, transformation has its way with us.

“Look at any inspired painting. It’s like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation.”

– ARTIST PHILIP GUSTON

Become a catalyst for your personal purpose, a catalyst for yourself as well as for others in your world. Becoming a catalyst for your personal purpose is like a gong sounding; it puts you and your world in a state of reverberation, transmuting old worn-out discourses into new realms of possibility.

This article is an excerpt of a larger body of work, The Creative Process: A Portal to ‘Not-Knowing,’ which you can read HERE.