A seeker goes to Nepal and climbs the Himalayas to find a teacher, a guru he has heard of. After months of searching and fighting, he finds the famous man and asks him his burning question: “What is the meaning of life?”

“The meaning of life is a bridge,” answers the sage.

The seeker is outraged. “Wait a minute, what kind of silly answer is that? I struggled and struggled to get here, and that’s all you have to say? A bridge? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!”

The guru blinked, looked at him and said, “You mean … it’s not a bridge?”

Most of my clients come to me, not looking for the meaning of life, but focused on some crisis in their lives: a relationship disaster, marital or family problems, lack of direction and motivation, a great loss for which they are grief, an emotional problem such as anxiety or depression, or perhaps even to help you recover from an addiction. The first thing we do is resolve the crisis, handle the immediate problems and fix everything, then we embark on an extensive process to find out how the problem happened and what needs to change to prevent it from happening again. Once those things are handled, there is a period of happiness or euphoria, when life first works out, they feel successful, calm, more in charge. Most of the clients are leaving at this time.

Then they often come back asking, “Now that I’m in charge of myself and I have a lot of extra energy, because life is so much easier and my relationships are working, I feel like I’m missing something, what am I doing?” What am I doing here? “

This begins a spiritual search for meaning, which I have written about in a couple of books.The true thirteenth step, Y The Ten Smartest Decisions A Woman Can Make After Forty.

People for whom the foundations of life are already laid need more: they need a sense of meaning and a higher purpose than mere survival. Once self-confidence and self-esteem have been established, you will need a challenge to feel satisfied, a way to express your uniqueness and individuality to yourself, your friends, and the world.

But if your life purpose is not yet apparent to you, how can you find out what it is? Where does the sense of purpose come from? It comes from within you and is not imposed or chosen from the outside. Your purpose may be your livelihood or it may have nothing to do with how you earn a living. Your purpose may be simple, such as having a good, healthy life for yourself and your children, or it may be more dramatic and based on what you learned from healing your own childhood experience. Many people know that inner purpose has the power to transform anxiety, anger, fear, and rage into powerful, life-affirming actions:

Dr. Bernie Siegel, a cancer specialist, was discouraged and frustrated by the lack of success of cancer medicine. He challenged the approach of the medical establishment by looking at patients who had experienced “miracle cures” and “spontaneous remissions.” Although he was ridiculed by his peers, he persevered and, from there, developed a new way of recruiting the patient’s own healing capacity, described in his book, Love, Medicine and Miracles.

Cleve Jones turned her anger, bitterness and pain over AIDS into the Memorial Quilt for Project Names, which has helped people around the world express, heal and understand the pain resulting from this tragic epidemic.

After her thirteen-year-old daughter was killed by a drunk driver, Candy Lightner used the power of her grief and anger to found Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), to combat the problem and prevent the senseless deaths of other children.

Sojourner Truth, an African American and former slave, was instrumental in the development of the Underground Railroad to guide slaves to freedom before and during the American Civil War.

Ron Kovic, paralyzed from the waist down as a soldier in Vietnam, first turned to alcoholism, but then recovered and channeled his resentment and anger into anti-war protests, and later wrote the best-selling book and screenplay for a winning film. from the Oscar, Born on The Fourth of July.

A life purpose provides you with the means to control your destiny, regardless of the strength of the difficulties you have incurred. Most of the world’s spiritual thinkers have said that the wisdom that guides each of us is available if we only listen and trust what we hear. You may already have a lot of ideas, but don’t trust or take them seriously. Perhaps when you have an idea of ​​what your “work on earth” is, or your life purpose, you distrust yourself too much (I can’t do that) or are too desperate and helpless to believe it or act on it. Your purpose can become clear to you in an instant, or gradually, as if you were following clues, one at a time. Whether you get it all at once or one piece at a time, it will still require work and experience to achieve it. Inner wisdom is not rational or practical in nature, but more intuitive and spiritual. It can provide a way of looking at the big picture, or a more distant and objective point of view of life’s problems and problems. Each new idea must be tested through practical use, to see how it works. Step by step, using both intuitive wisdom and clear thinking, you can surface your inner motivation and use it to create what you want. Your combination of inspiration expressed through action becomes the bridge to the meaning of your own life. – From Finish with you