Do you own a copy of Sera Beak’s The Red Book: A Deliciously Unorthodox Approach to Igniting Your Divine Spark yet? If not, how come?! I’m re-reading it right now & this segment jumped out at me. I hope you enjoy it!

Role Playing

As you’ve probably gathered by now, you have a special purpose. You’ve got certain things to do & people to see & flowers to smell & experiences to have that your intuition is constantly guiding you toward. You have a role that needs to be played, & chances are, it’s the role of a lifetime. When lived truthfully, this role will consist of doing & being what you love & making a decent living from it. Whoa. Imagine that.

Now before you start dreaming of exotic travels & radical business plans & living in Turkey, please realize that most people’s roles while here on this earthly plane for such a quick blink of time aren’t nearly so dramatic or far-reaching; one person’s role might be as seemingly simple as becoming, say, a conductor of high-frequency love while living on a particularly bleak city block, while another’s is to be an amazing mother, while another’s is to grow organic food, or save lemurs, or work at that magazine.

Although your intuition might lead you (or might have already led you) toward a role that might not seem all that glamorous, it doesn’t make it any less important or meaningful or soul-rocking. There might be thousands of first-grade teachers, but only you can give hope to those specific children in that specific children at that specific time. Let’s face it, not everyone can be a Nelson Mandela, because as amazing as that man is, the universe doesn’t need millions of him. The universe needs, well, you. & only you can do what it is you do, in your unique way. So please don’t shut down your unique abilities with doubt or comparisons or critiques (“Working at this cafe or teaching music to the elderly or writing poetry on my lunch break can’t be all that cosmically significant; just look at that guy I saw on 20/20 who’s setting up HIV clinics in Africa”). Gandhi said, “Whatever you do may seem insignificant to you, but it is most important that you do it.” Trust me, when you believe in yourself & fulfil your role to the best of your ability, you are a spiritual superstar, as powerful & as needed as any soul on the planet. As modern dance genius Martha Graham so beautifully put it, “There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action. & because there is only one of you in time, this expression is unique. & if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium & be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is: nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly & directly. To keep the channel open” (quoted in Rob Brezsny’s Pronoia, p. 76).

This is a mysteriously connected universe. We don’t always consciously know how far our energy might reach & how intense its effect might be, but by doig what you intuitively feel you should be doing in this world (be it a career, a project, an art piece, a relationship), you are actually, believe it or not, helping to infuse this planet & even the entire cosmos with deep soulful purpose as well as encouraging other beings to seek out & bravely live their own role. (There is more about this phenomenon in the next chapter.)

Of course, when we start becoming more connected to & more expressive of who we really are, the seemingly random roles we play become just natural extensions of ourselves. Intuitive hits about what your role is (for right now) may not always suggest a huge change from what you are already doing, but they should help you do what you do more consciously. Richard Bach wrote, “Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: if you’re alive, it isn’t” (Illusions, p. 159). So what’s your part to play now? How can you be it even better? Don’t know if you’ve found what you’re meant to do or be quite yet? Don’t fret; when it’s time, the universe will give you plenty of external & internal hints, but here’s mine: You’ll know when you find it because it will make you feel very alive, happy, aligned, content — even if it challenges you & pushes your limits & freaks you out a bit. You will know, on a cell-tingling level, that you are doing what you are meant to do, no matter how mundane it might appear to others, or even to your ego. You will know by how intensely you’re existing.

P.S. Buy the book!