And so when we're doing things that light us up, we're being purposeful...Dr. Jordan Grumet
On Sundays, I take six or so kids, including three of our gkids, out to do something. A movie, ice skating, a hike or walk. Yesterday, for the first time, we bowled. I wasn’t looking forward to it. Bowling. Not my idea of fun. And yet it was fun. I didn’t fully get it until I reflected on my day later.
The fun was sharing the joy when the kids knocked over a few pins. The collective cheers and high fives. Even a sad sort of bonding “bummer” over gutter balls felt good.
The process of reflection was key to building my self-awareness of what gives me joy. Knowing what gives us joy as well as what bums us out is key to living a meaningful, joyful, healthy, purposeful life. You would think we could just spout off whatever it is that jolts us with joy or kills us with cringe, but it isn’t true for many of us. And that’s a problem we can solve with a simple, very old process called the Examen.
The process which I am talking about has even become a spiritual practice for many. It was devised in the 1500’s by Ignatius of Loyola (later St. Ignatius).
In his early years Ignatius took up dancing, dueling, fencing, gambling, pursuing young ladies. He joined the army at seventeen, and according to one biographer, he strutted about "with his cape flying open to reveal his tight-fitting hose and boots; a sword and dagger at his waist". Evidently, he was a rough punkish swordsman (Wikipedia's words) who used his privileged status to escape prosecution for violent crimes he committed. But after an accident, convalescence, and using this simple process, he turned his life around to his own and the world’s benefit (for one thing, he helped establish the Jesuit order).
The Examen has several variations, but the primary process is building the capacity to discern the difference between what lights you up – gives you vitality (contentment, meaning, and joy), and what snuffs you out – saps your energy (takes away your contentment, meaning, and joy).
A lovely little book was written about it about thirty years ago, Sleeping With Bread: Holding What Gives You Life by Dennis Linn, Sheila Fabricant Linn, and Matthew Linn. It looks like a children’s book. It most certainly is not; I can’t recommend it enough.
The title of the book comes from comes from a World War II story when thousands of children were orphaned and left to starve. According to the authors, some of the children were rescued and put into orphanages where they received good care and food, but many could not sleep at night.
The problem? They feared waking up to the worst – being homeless and without food again. No matter how much they were reassured nothing worked until someone gave a child a loaf of bread to hold at night. Eventually all the kids were given a piece of bread. Holding their bread allowed them to sleep.
Where is this bread talk going? The idea of “holding our bread” is a metaphor for holding on to – remembering and maintaining that which gives us joy – what lights us up, feeds us, sustains us.
The Examen process helps us figure out what our "bread is" - it involves asking ourselves two questions (in various forms): For what am I most grateful? For what am I least grateful. That's it.
The first part then is identifying our “consolation”. The second part involves deciphering our “desolation”. Both of these questions help us identify our values and direction in life. Our purpose. What gives us life.
At this point nearly everyone knows the benefits of having a purpose – it’s impact on longevity, happiness, physical and psychological health, and good relationships. However, we’ve been around the block, many of us pulling out our hair, trying to “find” our purpose. That’s part of the problem according to the Linns AND to a purpose researcher and hospice doctor, Jordon Grumet (author of The Purpose Code).
We have thought of purpose with a capitol “P”. The big "P" Purpose being our why, our audacious vision, outrageous goal in life...thinking of it that way can bog us down. It's especially unhelpful if our Purpose is about the fame, money, power that we see others pointing us toward. We may go nuts never finding our big "P" Purpose or when we do find it, we may realize it doesn't offer us much of a bang, at least not for long.
Ignatius, the Linns, and Grumet tell us to go a different way with purpose. Think of it differently. Discern it from the inside out. Right now. All the time.
How? Very simply notice what gives you and me joy, energizes us, gives us meaning... and what does not (both questions are useful). We can use the gratitude questions and variations like:
When did I feel most alive today? When did I most feel like life draining out of me?
When did I give and receive the most love today? When did I give and receive the least love today?
When today did I have the greatest sense of belonging? When today did I have the least sense of belonging?
When was I the happiest today? When was I the saddest?
What was today’s high point? What was today’s low point?
What did I most fear today? When was I most courageous today?
As we reflect and discern, we gain an understanding of who we are – our purpose not with the aim of achieving a special goal, but through the process of living with ourselves.
And, we can use those same sorts of questions after an event, after reading a book, after a week, even when we see our lives coming to an end. We may even find purpose in the very last breaths we take as we ask and answer those questions… and can have what some call a “good death”.
Let me expand a bit and offer a few more tips from Grumet on discerning your purpose:
As is clear from using the Examen, the idea is to look inward, not outward. When we look outward we get distracted by society, marketers, even our loved ones. We need instead, to look inward.
Second, as you have already read, focus on the process, not goals. This idea is new for most of us. But the idea is to stop fixating on becoming a big wig in the distant future and pay attention to... right here, right now... to what puts us into a flow state where we lose track of time for example.
Grumet’s story is not only of learning from his experience as a hospice doctor, but also from his own life where he felt he had to live life like his father. He was living his father’s purpose instead of his own. While he was doing that, he hated getting up on Monday mornings and starting a new week of suffering.
Grumet has another tip for discerning your purpose; he calls it using the “spaghetti method”. Just do some new things, step out of your comfort zone, notice how you respond.
Take me with the bowling. It wasn’t about the actual bowling for me, but had I never gone along with the kids’ idea to try it, I might never have realized how much I love cheering for others. I might never have heard from one of the older kids, “Uh, you might need to be a little quieter, maybe not quite SO enthusiastic… people are looking at us.”
Now I know that one of my purpose “anchors”, as Grumet calls these little inklings and flashes of insight, is about the joy of celebrating and commiserating with others as we proceed on our journeys.
And, as I reflect back, it’s one behavior I have put to good use and could do even more skillfully as a life coach, teacher, friend, and mother. I also notice that when I must tell people what they are doing wrong, all day long, it drains me. My blood pressure goes up. Cortisol floods my body.
If I had a position where that’s what I had to do all day – point out deficiencies (I’ve had to do some of that when I was in the Army), I’d go to another method that Grumet recommends. I would try to find a way to incorporate celebration and commiserating into my “off hours” and find ways to subtract telling people where they are failing as much I as could from my regular hours.
This is a big shift in how we think about purpose with a big “P” - that huge, audacious mind-blowing goal which beautifully melds our big “why” in life together. I'm reluctant to totally dismiss it. For some it may work out just fine.
For others switching to purpose with a little “p” may be much more valuable. For a life of little "p" purpose we are going to need to use reflection and discernment and self-awareness. We must be better at noticing what give us joy versus what drains us right now. Then do more of that (what gives us joy) and less of this other (what drains us) - at least finding a good balance, as we proceed on the journey.
I'm going to be reading more of Grumet and re-reading Sleeping With Bread: Holding What Gives You Life. For me, it won't be a practice just for myself, but to assist me as I walk alongside others - noticing their consolations and desolations. Cheering and commiserating.
How might we journey together to the Good Life by practicing the Examen? Allowing ourselves to notice and discern what lights us up and what snuffs us out. And how might we create lives that honor how our “insides” respond to different situations, activities, and various people, and points us toward our purpose?
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