Find Your Calling

Your calling is what you are called to do, not just in life but in any given moment—and that is what life is, isn't it? A given moment.

Finding your calling is the reception of the moment that is given, yet it is often so hard for us to receive. It is hard to receive because we are resistant to yielding to the moment. We are resistant to yield to the moment because we are always chasing a future or reliving a past. In doing so, we become distracted from the present. We lose our way. We forget there is a way. We are lost in the wilderness of mental imaginings. When we lack the awareness to meet this moment, we do not have the ears to hear, we do not have the eyes to see, or the heart to open.

The moment is the mystical sound that, like celestial music, is singing a song that we are all strangely familiar with. But who is listening? To hear the call is to have the ears to hear. How do we find those ears? By listening. Listening opens one to the present moment, because the now is the only place where the act of listening is opened. 

When you think it is you, you will only go so far; when you perceive the source, you go to the source. To find your calling is not to see into the future. It is to listen to the present and to hear what is calling you.

You're not only the identity construct, the idea, the name, or even the form. We must, therefore, pay attention to the vices, addictions, and cravings in our life, for they are places for the personality to cling and root a sense of self. In these places, different entities can attach to the individual and feed off those energies. However, it is a two-way street; there is no victim being drained by the vampire. One must choose to engage in those mindless vices to open those doors. The way out is through awareness.

Awareness is behind the identity. It is infinite. If we do not establish ourselves and understand that we are more than identity, name, and form, then when it is our turn to die, we may continue to cling, and the idea of the personal can thus survive and cling to new hosts. If you want to walk in the light of the spirit, you must pay keen attention to all the places you enter willingly or mindlessly into the darkness.

If we zoom out, we see things are so close together, all standing in one space, all colliding into itself. There is not much room there for separation even though you and I seem so far apart from each other. There is an invisible web that unites and connects all life to itself. There is nothing that you do that does not touch this web of existence; therefore, everything you do quivers other areas of your life and is feeding different parts of the web. It is the story of the two wolves. It is the story of spiritual warfare. The battle of light versus dark. You simply feed and empower one, and this gives you the strength not to defeat the other but rather to embrace it wholly and completely as it is. In doing so, you shine a light into the darkness. A light in the darkness is a revelation; it reveals what was hidden. And when a light shines, the shadows disappear.

Can you conceive of a radiance that shines in all beings?

Can you imagine a Great Spirit that loves you unconditionally?  

Do you believe in eternity?

Your mission is not in your thoughts or dreams. It is embodied, it is felt, it is transmitted. Stop looking for your mission or the goal on the horizon. Instead, ask what is your transmission? Moment by moment, what are you emitting? What wants to come through you? This is the lived experience that goes beyond the mission. It is your authentic transmission. 

It does not necessarily come from what you offer, rather from all that you have received. It is in discovering what you are underneath the clothing, the labels, the masks. In this sense your “divine calling” is the Divine Calling you.

First, you must listen. First, you must pick up the phone and hear what the hotline of life has to say. Until you do that, you live in your own hyper-individual universe and miss this big beautiful mystery that we all share.

So what is it that you share? 

What is it that you receive?

What is it that you are?

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Vocation, as I see it, springs forth from inner stillness. It is an act of deep listening, not necessarily a choice of what one is to do, but rather a calling forth of what lies at the heart of the individual. This “calling forth” relates to the root of the word vocation—vocato—to summon, to call. It is the call to bring out what is latent and dormant within. In this way, vocation becomes a kind of awakening that emerges from the silent spaces behind the noise of the world, growing so loud that one must answer that call and follow that summoning.

Vocation is both the passive receiving of the call and the active response to it. If we focus solely on the external aspect of what to do in the world, we miss the subtle texture of who we are despite the world. It is this “who we are” before the world of things that carries the call to be architected, erected, and discovered in the world. When one has heard the call of their deepest vocation, it acts as a bridge across a mighty river—a bridge that carries one to the other shore, connecting and uniting the inner and the outer. Through this bridge, one may be better able to translate these two worlds and share the unseen wisdom that supports others in becoming quiet enough to hear their own innermost calling.