Category: Life Mission Inquiry

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Parenting as Stewardship: Nurturing the Unseen Within Our Children

As a parent, there’s a dance between feeling I understand my child wholly and completely, or wanting to, and being present that there is a mystery in my child that I don’t yet fully grasp, and may never. From a life mission perspective, if I move from the place of being present to their wholeness as if I understand it fully, I start to make assumptions about where to encourage them in their interests and begin to subtly shape the corridor down which they begin to walk into their adolescence. If I haven’t made space for what I can not fully see in them, those voices may become whispers and eventually fade into the shadows, perhaps only to return with hues of resentment and anger, or grief later. So how do I as a parent come to grips with how to support my child in their path, whether or not I fully grok it, and also, personally resonate with it?

My sense is it comes back to the conditions of the ‘garden’ so to speak, again and again. What conditions will support their soul, heart, body, mind, in growing into who they are here to become? Perhaps that is where my own looking at the qualities that are important to me, as a parent, come into play – maybe it’s openness, understanding, patience…or fiery enthusiasm that gives them space to express…or steady on determination to support them in their path…how I show up as a parent to them, will have a lot to do with how I show up to my own self. Can I be with the mystery of who I am, with a quality of care? This also helps.

It’s a humbling thing, to gently push aside the places where I want my child to perform so I feel more whole and complete in myself, and make space for the mystery that is in them, waiting to bloom. From this place, I’ve noticed that the connection I wanted all along surfaces through a mutual gratitude. A rightness in the parent-child connection. What if we aren’t here to direct our children on the path they should go; instead we are here tend the garden and make space for their buds to grow, lest it get overrun by all the other things in the garden wanting to take root, the “noise” of the world.

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Remembering Life Mission: An Artful Practice

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

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Who owns these things and why?

by Carissa Kazyss

Have you ever felt stuck doing something you didn’t want to do, yet weren’t sure what it was you did want to do? Sometimes it’s easier to articulate to ourselves and others what we are moving away from, yet to get ultra specific and clear about what we are moving towards can feel murkier. What we really want is sometimes encased in a myriad of feelings, thoughts, memories and aspirations. And we may have never even really articulated what we truly want fully.

General qualities like happiness, joy, peace, play, ease might come to move …we might even envision a life of these things, yet how do we make it real when it comes to action? It can feel like there is a huge gap between how we want to feel in our lives and imagining ourselves doing the things that would give us those qualities. Especially if it’s challenging to imagine a reality outside of the reality we are currently in.

In The Caravan of Remembering, we find a response to this tension, as David is asked to step into the unknown of the Caravan and begin to explore life mission by asking questions like ‘why are you in the horizontal world?’ and ‘survey your house as if it belonged to a stranger…ask yourself who this person is who owns these things and why…what is his or her life about?’ The latter question seems to intrigue people, and I find there’s a lot to unpack in the simplicity of it.

The act of seeing ourselves through our space, as a stranger invites as kind of objective, detached looking with the question of “why would this person have these things, what are they about?.” It can be invigorating to look around one’s house in this way. Looking, free of opinion as much as we can, free of subjective attachment, holding a question of what the things in the space might say about me.

When I ask this question, clues begin to build, almost poetically, in a space inside my mind that seems to be reserved for this kind of inquiry. It takes me out of the usual tallying of how my housecleaning is doing, and also out of the chatter about this and that. Somehow, in asking this question, and the other life mission scales or Caravan scales offered, a moment of stillness happens. Wheels are turning in some part of my mind. A spotlight is shining in a new way on my space, and in the process I’m feeling seen in a new way.

Being seen by our ‘selves’ – an interesting concept, isn’t it? How often do we take time to see ourselves in a way that’s safe, free of judgement, simply as is. There is a key here for identifying the “towards” – the more we see ourselves and are known to ourselves, the more the next step, the towards movement becomes accessible from within. And the more we learn to recognize it on the outside.

As if by magic (but not really), we’ve started to search for meaning in our lives. And in this search for meaning, we begin to find what gives us most meaning, and what specifically that looks like to our unique as a snowflake selves. There is no longer a question of whether we are doing our life purpose, there’s a surrendering to the process and the inquiry, a giving way to the process of it, versus attachment to an outcome. And then outcomes begin to happen. Because we are all lit up, alive, engaged in life, moment by moment presence.

So the next time you have a moment, take a look around your house or office or car or any place you inhabit and ask, “who would have these things and why? what is this person about?” If you stay with the question, it will continue to percolate and build in you, until you one day your knowing self speaks louder than the chatter, louder than the doubts, louder than things that don’t give you life. And you notice yourself reaching for the things that give you meaning, feed your heart and soul, and your articulation of why you are here has begun.