Purpose Lab Resources

I was working in eating disorders when I realized that I had kind of hit my limit in terms of what I could contribute. I had already published a manual teaching clinicians how to treat eating disorders. I made 400 pages of resources freely available. I taught many recorded lectures on how to do eating disorder treatment. I opened up a program that still exists at a hospital, but it felt like there was maybe more for me. So I had contributed and fulfilled my purpose, and that felt really complete. I was searching for what the next move was, and I really wanted to go into the consciousness space headlong, but it felt to me that there was a step I could not skip, which was to codify all of the twenty year experience that I have had as a psychologist, not just in eating disorders, but in suicide research, treating OCD, anxiety, depression, mood disorders, basically anything that exists. If it is a psychological disorder, I have treated it. So to put all of that somewhere for posterity, in a way that would be helpful for people, felt like a really important move.

Once you clear all the cobwebs, once you take away all of those structures that keep you off your purpose, once you are there, there is no stopping you. There is no stopping you. And so that freedom to just go, go, go. But once you are able to sit and listen to what is inside, and that hair on fire feeling comes of I have got to do this or I am going to explode, that is it. You go, and you tune out all of those distractions. It involves all of the things I have described, but ultimately there is a free will choice made to do what feels inevitable. When I think about living my purpose, it feels like there is not even a choice anymore. It feels like it is given to me. The purpose to help as a psychologist, by studying suicide, developing eating disorder interventions, or using AI to close the treatment gap in the mental health landscape, is born out of a hair on fire desire to do it.

If you do not know what your purpose is, the first step is surrender, acceptance, quieting the mind, and starting to test. Test what feels right. Maybe volunteer somewhere. Maybe help someone out, help a friend in need, see how it feels to be of service, and then see if you can match your talents with that. If you do not have any particular talents, you can develop them. We all have skills. We all can develop skill. It is that marriage between skill, the willingness to develop it, and feeling what ignites you. That is it. It is trial and error sometimes, and that is okay. Trust in the process and trust that you will get there. The advice that I have for someone, perhaps like yourself, who has not found your purpose is that it is okay. It is totally okay. Everyone who now knows their purpose once did not know their purpose. And part of your purpose is to find your purpose. That is part of the process. How do you do that? You do that first by letting go of the expectation of what it is or what it should be.

When people are faced with that choice between doing what is easy, sticking to the script, sticking to the programming of people telling them what they should do, and following those orders, versus taking a critical look at that psychological setup and going inward to see what calls to them, that decision is a multi step process. To me, alignment means operating from a place that is devoid of fear. Maybe the fear is there, but you are not giving into it. You are operating from a centeredness and from your heart, rather than giving into the ego, giving into what scares you, giving into what other people think you should do, and really sitting and listening to what is calling to you, what is true, and having the courage to step out regardless of the naysayers, potential rejection, or failure, and doing what it is that calls to you from within.

Once you strip away the programming and the fears, you are left with something undeniable. And what is undeniable, that is your purpose. The purpose to help as a psychologist, by studying suicide, developing eating disorder interventions, or using AI to close the treatment gap in the mental health landscape, is born out of a hair on fire desire to do it. That hair on fire desire comes from being unencumbered by fear. But once you are able to sit and listen to what is inside, and that hair on fire feeling comes of I have got to do this or I am going to explode, that is it. You go, and you tune out all of those distractions. When I think about living my purpose, it feels like there is not even a choice anymore. It feels like it is given to me.

I did not know what to do, and I was invited to something called the Bhutan Innovation Forum in the country of Bhutan, where I met investors in a company called Yuna. All I heard the entire time I was in Bhutan was Yuna, Yuna, Yuna. And I thought, what is this Yuna thing that everybody is talking about? I came to find out that Yuna is an AI powered mental health coaching app that is very low cost and very scalable, and that they needed someone who fit my description, a treatment innovator, not just an academic scientist, psychologist, or therapist, but someone who has innovated in the treatment space. And I thought, I am perfect for this. It felt like fate, but it was really scary because this is uncharted territory.

In the eating disorder treatment that I created, at the foundation is full acceptance of the body and an understanding that the body is not the self. We have been taught, especially women, that we are equal to our bodies. We are how we look. We are how much we weigh. We are how old we are. All of these numbers. We are reduced to objectively measurable things. But we are not a thing. We are a being. And when we think of ourselves as how old we are, what our dress size is, etc., we are denying our true divine conscious beingness. And so, to recognize through the recovery of an eating disorder that we are not our bodies, that we are so much more, that really is the goal. And that is borne out in so many different ways. There are so many different techniques, but all of them are really in service of understanding that we are so much more than the sum of our parts.

Once you clear all the cobwebs, once you take away all of those structures that keep you off your purpose, once you are there, there is no stopping you. There is no stopping you. And so that freedom to just go, go, go. That is what is in it. That is what is in it for you. And there is a spiritual freedom in that too. There is. Because when you are living your purpose, you are in touch with the nature of your consciousness and what you are here to do, and what you are here to do is bigger than any one person. That is big. It is as high as it gets. So you are actually living in what we will call divine alignment. The reason I am so thrilled to be helping co create Yuna is because I needed these tools when I was sixteen. When I was struggling, I walked myself to the public library and read self help books to try to figure it out. There were no resources. Many people still do not have access to resources, and that disparity absolutely needs to be addressed.

What happens when you find your purpose is that you are free. You are free. That is it. That is what is in it for you. You are free from your own fears. Because when you are living your purpose, you are in touch with the nature of your consciousness and what you are here to do, and what you are here to do is bigger than any one person. That is big. It is as high as it gets. So you are actually living in what we will call divine alignment. And that feeling that you get, it is not necessarily easy. It is not necessarily restful, but it is pure. It is pure and it is free. And there is nothing, nothing, nothing better than unchaining yourself from the servitude of your own fears. We would come as a species into coherence. We would start resonating with one another at the same level. Once that happens, it feels like the next evolutionary step for our species.

It has been scary every day since joining the co founder team. There have been so many things that have come up that scared me. Ignoring praise, criticism, and distraction to stay on purpose. There are the naysayers, the people who idolize a person in this role, and all of it has to be ignored because all of it, the praise, the rejection, all of it, is a distraction from the purpose. The biggest struggle for me in living my purpose is to tune out all of that noise. We need to evolve past the point where we need external validation or external warning. We need to pay attention to our intuition that tells us, no, this thing is going to work. And it is going to work because I am going to help make it work. We need to trust our own fortitude and also trust that if you fail, it is okay and you will learn from it. That is the key. And it is hard. It is hard to stay on purpose. There are a million temptations. There are a million distractions.

Rejecting comments from my colleagues who are therapists who think that this is an awful thing and it cannot replace therapy, which it is not intended to, or whatever. There is so much noise. There is so much noise. There are the naysayers, the people who idolize a person in this role, and all of it has to be ignored because all of it, the praise, the rejection, all of it, is a distraction from the purpose. And the purpose is to be loving, truthful, and to serve. The biggest struggle for me in living my purpose is to tune out all of that noise, all of the people saying that I should not do it, or that it is too risky, or that I should totally do it because I am going to be rich, or whatever. All of the opinion, all of that external opinion, that is not what guides the way. Be the youest you. That is what I would say to the world. Be the youest you.

When I was deciding whether or not to become a psychologist, I was offered a semester long internship at Sydney Children's Hospital in Australia, working with kids with cancer. The hospital was located right on Bondi Beach, which is one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. I did not know if I was cut out for the role of helping kids with cancer. I had never met a child with cancer. It felt really overwhelming. It felt really scary. When I got to my internship and I was looking down the road at the beach, I thought to myself, I can either go to the most beautiful beach in the world or confront all of the horrors that come with working in a hospital. That was a decision point for me. I could have made the decision to skip out, not face my fears, not be of service, and not be honest by not honoring my commitment, and just skip out. That was a pivotal moment for me, where I made the choice to walk into that hospital and see what was in store. I thought to myself, whether or not I personally face this, these kids are going to be in this hospital, and they are either going to have someone there to help them through it or not. That was a very sobering moment for me. I think that it essentially changed my life, because that was the first really hard decision I made up until that point that felt cogent and aligned. It felt loving. It felt truthful. It felt like it was being of service. AI is the wild west. There are currently no consistent regulations about what we can do with AI. A million things could go wrong. But I got quiet and listened to what was coming to me intuitively, which was that this is going to work.