Part of recognising and living your life purpose often involves asking yourself the question, “What lights me up?”
I first heard Rebecca Campbell introduce this concept and question in one of her videos, and have heard it from various other individuals in the fields of life purpose, coaching, and personal development.
Rebecca also says, “We don’t discover our soul calling, we uncover it by following the trail of things that light us up and then lose ourselves in the doing” (find the full article here).
In Robert Holden’s book ‘Higher Purpose’ (which I reviewed here), he discusses the concept of paying attention and noticing what makes you feel alive. He encourages us to ask, what are the activities or things that make us feel most alive?
To me, feeling alive and feeling lit up are the same thing.
Feeling alive is a sensation of (metaphorical) expansion in my heart and chest, a lightness and ease in my diaphragm and stomach, and an easing of tension in my shoulders. Feeling lit up also means being excited, enthusiastic, feeling a deep tranquillity and calm in my soul and bones, joy, flow, and like my energy is sparkling with twinkly fairy lights.
How do you know or recognise that you feel alive or lit up?
If you’re not sure, be curious and make it a habit to tune in to your body; see how it feels.
I encourage you to ask yourself this month, where many of us are focused on love with Valentine’s Day around the corner, to spend some time contemplating the question, “What lights me up?”
If you don’t know off the top of your head what lights you up or you can’t think of or identify anything, pay attention during your activities each day for the next however long you want (a week, a month, a year, the rest of your life, whatever) and simply notice how things feel. Pay attention.
Be patient, kind, gentle and curious as you do this. For the busy, hurried or distracted soul, it might take some time for the answers to reveal themselves.
Making a tangible list of things that light you up can be useful. This can be things that you do like activities, daily tasks and actions/behaviours, or it can be tangible things. My list includes a bit of both – your list can be done however works for you and can be however long or short you like.
Here is my list of some of the things that light me up like a Christmas tree adorned in fairy lights:
- Flowers! Smelling them, looking at them, meditating on them, admiring them
- Journaling long-hand (with a really nice smooth pen)
- Cats! Seeing them in windows on walks, patting them, sitting with them, cuddling Sophie especially, feeling their fur or watching them breathe – taking their respiratory rate should be included in all these meditation books I swear
- Writing
- The feeling of the clacking keyboard as I write
- No upcoming social obligations or activities
- A cup of herbal tea outside
- Spider-webs glistening with dew on a crisp misty morning
- Learning something new, delving into one of my sudden special interests, or acquiring a new skill
- Deep one on one conversations (those 3am types but not at 3am – I want to be sleeping at 3am)
- Knitting with a purpose or for a cause (like animals or children)
- Fairy lights! I’ve only mentioned them multiple times in this blog post…
- Sparkly and twinkly anything, like stained glass windows, crystals, sun-catchers etc.
- Dragon fruit
- Log fires in winter
- So Good dairy-free vanilla ice cream in summer
- Beethoven music! And other instrumental pieces of music
- Some of William Wordsworth’s poems (like his poem about daffodils ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’)
- Being in nature – especially bodies of water like waterfalls, flowing creeks, still ponds or looking out at the wavy ocean. Or deep in a pine forest or among the gums.
Final Thoughts
So, what lights you up?
If you feel like it, leave your lights in the comments below for all to see and be inspired by, or reach out to me at [email protected].
I’d love to be inspired by the things that light you up!
Much love from me and keep twinkling,
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