Energy comes from purpose. If the left side of your brain tells the right side of your brain that there is enough of a crisis, the right side sends out energy, sometimes superhuman energy. That’s why there’s a difference between people who set and achieve goals all day long, and people who just do whatever comes up, or whatever they feel like doing. For one person, there’s always an additional purpose. For the other, there’s boredom and confusion, two of the biggest energy robbers.
Knowing what you are doing, and why you are doing it, gives you the energy to motivate yourself. Not knowing your purpose drains all of your motivation. We have all heard the story of the little mother who, seeing her young child trapped, lifts an extremely heavy object, such as a car, to free her child. When asked to repeat the superhuman feat later, of course the woman cannot do it.
Being a single dad has connected me to the dramatic relationship between purpose and energy. If I’m cooking something, for example, and out of the corner of my eye I can see flames coming from the kitchen, it’s amazing how quickly I can move from the living room to the kitchen. Crisis creates instant purpose, which creates instant energy.
The idea of “He’s not heavy, he’s my brother” is based on purpose. When our purpose is big, so is our strength and energy. “But, I don’t know what my purpose is,” many people tell me, as if someone forgot to tell them what it is. Those people may have been waiting forever to be told how to live and what to live for.
There are only two reasons why you don’t know your purpose: 1) You don’t talk to yourself; and 2) You don’t know where it comes from. (You think it comes from outside of you, not from within.) People with purpose know how to go deep inside their own souls and talk to themselves about why they exist, and what they want to do with the gift of life.
“Only humans have reached the point where they no longer know why they exist,” says the shaman Lame Deer. “They do not use their brains and they have forgotten the secret knowledge of their bodies, their senses, or their dreams.” Lame Deer is not optimistic about the future for people who live without purpose.
“They are not using the knowledge that the spirits have put into each of them,” he said. “They are not even aware of it, so they are stumbling blindly along a road to nowhere—a paved highway that they themselves have bulldozed and smoothed so that they can get faster toward the great hollow hole that they will find at the end of it, waiting to swallow them up. It is a fast and comfortable superhighway, but I know where it leads. I have seen it. I have been there in my visions and it makes me shudder to think about it.”
Goals can be built, strengthened, and made more inspiring every day. We are completely responsible for our own goals. We can go into our own spirit and create them, or we can not. Our life energy is completely dependent on how much purpose we are willing to create.