I remember the first time I learned how to draw a star without lifting my pen off the page. I was so excited that I started re-tracing that line over and over. Stars bloomed in notebooks and without much will at all, I practiced until I could draw my stars quickly and accurately and effortlessly. This one tiny practice that somehow still takes up residence in my childhood memories, likely because it was meaningful.
We remember what has meaning.
I also remember the first time, not long ago, when I felt the culmination of my practice of asking questions about my life mission seemed to condense into something like poetry. Thick layers of answers over many sessions lead to something that anchored in my heart. Fully anchored, in the kind of way that was equally impactful as it was effortless to recall.
Deep meaning has a compound effect.
Staying true to a practice, and the repetition required in a practice can feel like pulling teeth. The Talent Code is a great resource about how to go about practicing. Regular practice is also how you know when you are ‘on’ and when you are ‘off.’ If we don’t have a regular practice for something, how can we expect ourselves to claim the result?
Remembering life mission takes practice.
It’s not that sexy. We want standout epiphanies. Single revelations that catapult us for decades. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that the very thing needed for the sprout to appear was regular tending to the soil: aka practice. We create new pathways in our brains each time we repeat, with intention and meaning, like me drawing stars over and over again as a child.
The work of Caravan of Remembering offers a way to be in a practice about remembering one’s life mission, so that it can reveal to you in moments of great duress, questioning, and change, why you are here, what you are here to do and who you are here to become: the questions of life mission.
“You can use the questions and exercises as a musician does, daily doing scales to increase the skill with their instrument. In this case, one’s own life is the instrument.”
– The Caravan of Remembering