Purpose Lab

It took me losing everything that I had created, that I thought represented who I am and what I am supposed to bring to the world, to finally step into what I am now building and creating for the world. But I had so many fears, apprehensions, so much resistance to it, that it took one hard knock after another for that to come through. So as soon as I said yes, when the universe was like, how long are you going to keep ignoring this SoulSearch, then I realized, okay, this is what I am truly supposed to be doing. As soon as I started doing that, different sources of income, business revenue all started flowing in. A new legal team, everything started shifting. So that is when I started realizing, wow, I was blocking myself because I was so blinded by who I thought I was supposed to be. I was not opening myself up to who I truly was. We have so much fear of the unknown. But the unknown is the realm of infinite possibilities. Our human mind cannot even begin to comprehend what we can do. And so when we open ourselves up to what is possible, we can then jump into the unknown. But that can be a really scary jump to make. And I was not willing to make it until I was forced to. But as soon as I did, that is when everything started shifting.

The first thing, and I hope you don't mind me saying this, purpose can become a prison and people need to be careful. Purpose is there to be all of you in creation. It's creation flowing through you. Our filter goes from, this is my purpose and creation's kind of coming through here, to this is my purpose and we've got this whole barrier in front of purpose being expressed. But if we let go of control and allow the purpose of your divine blueprint, which everybody has, to come through, then life gets easier. There is less discombobulation of the flow of creation. As we do that, ego dissipates, control dissipates, and we come into the flow of creation in service. For all those who think they can control consciousness, stop it. For all those who want to save the world, stop it. Let us listen to what the divine gives us, because the divine has a plan. The source is the master chess player. Listen to the instruction that comes in line with your blueprint and take the next step in courage and confidence. Just be in the power of the present moment and let information come, and what the next step is. It might be making a cup of tea. It might be going to buy a Lamborghini. Whatever it may be, or calling a friend. It doesn't really matter. The point is this, you're loved.

But then there came a day when I accepted that I'm not okay. And I accepted that I don't need to be strong anymore. I feel like when you're going against your path, it's so difficult. And when you're going and serving your true mission, everything just unfolds. And sometimes it's so easy that you can't even believe how easy it is. But that's how it's supposed to be. And in a strange way, it's like a play. But we are always told not to play. We're told to be serious about it. I think when everything flows together, that's when magic happens. And things can only flow together if you're truly on your path. That's the secret.

It doesn't take me off track, but I have to find ways of taking smaller steps than I might wish to take. I have learned through that practice to be in the not knowing, and I can hold that for quite a long time because I know if I take a step too quick, it will stop me. If I stay on track, connected to my purpose, and truly appreciating the now, it doesn't mean I don't think forward. I am really a strategic connector, always looking far ahead as well, but from here, and as soon as I let that go, the next step reveals itself. Step by step, I learned that it was about being in the now, accepting what it is, how I'm doing. If I could be with that, there would be enough energy from my heart. If I started to go into the mind or wish for something that was not there, it would drop away.

Trust that each step of your journey will unfold in front of you. Trust that the help you need will always arrive. You will always meet the right people, the right circumstances, and the right situations to make sure your gifts are shared with the world. Everything that you need is always going to be provided for you. That's why I'm in so much trust, surrender, and gratitude every single day. I know that everything I need is already here, and if it's not, it's going to show up. The universe has a great sense of humor. I decided in early 2020 to retire from my graphic design profession and devote myself entirely to painting and to being out in the world with people. Two weeks after I sold my online business, I said, 'Okay, I'm finally ready to get away from the computer.' Then the pandemic happened, and we had to shut down for two months. I laughed because the universe is so funny in the timing that I finally took this leap of faith. The timing was not up to me. I had to go home for two months and be alone in my house. It gave me time to rest. It gave me time to paint my spirit animals.

That system crash occurred for me in alcoholism. And so my fourth time in treatment, I finally surrendered. That was January 31st, 2022. I turned my will over to God. Since then, magnificent things have happened. It is so much more beautiful than anything I could have ever in my wildest dreams imagined. I am sitting here with you in Sedona, Arizona. Four years ago, if you said, 'What is the most amazing and impactful thing you can do with your life?' it would have been something about money. And that would have left me very empty. Page 552 of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous says acceptance is the answer to all my problems today, because if you accept the things you cannot change, everything gets better, and then you play with the things you can. That is playing in the stream of reality. That is a truth. What I have learned is just sit back, stay in alignment, and what unfolds is so much better than what you would have ever thought. I am here with you today, and what we are able to do now is so much greater than what I would have ever picked my best life to be four years ago with my will. What God has shown me I am capable of in this world is far beyond what any man has ever told me I am capable of.

The trust frequency is not having a one-year plan or two-year plan. This is my vision. This is where we need to go, to just follow that heart and go, okay, this is going to help me grow. This is going to help me grow. What we grow into, sometimes we leave that up to divinity and we move along as long as we have discernment and dissuade some of the attachments we have so that we can more quickly move up to this higher potential and purposes. If we start to look through the lens that the quantum field, the universe, is here for us, not to us, then circumstances are happening for our benefit, not against us. This is a trust in the quantum field and in higher energies. This is a planet, a place where we come to learn and grow. If we can move into this space and understand it a little better, and move into a higher emotional intelligence around it, we can deal with things that happen in life with less drama, with a cleaner lens, maybe with more amusement.

I did not really come to a solid answer. It kind of felt like I fell through a black hole, in a way of both nothingness and everythingness at the same time. And I guess that is how I came to just, well, I do not know anything except that everything just is, and whatever I am, just am. And so, yeah, I am just. I am here to be. I do not think it is necessarily my purpose to enjoy being, but I do enjoy when I am in the kind of energy state where I am just enjoying being. It is beautiful. It can be ugly. It can be pleasurable and painful. It all just is. You can manifest anything you want. On a logical, philosophical level, I knew that was possible, because everything and anything is possible at the same time. But on an emotional level, it had not resonated with me until recently. It is an exciting place to be.

This approach resulted in me getting my first tattoo, which says surrender in Bengali, to your truth and intuition. That became the philosophy I would move through. What unfolded was finding community, connecting with people, and a lot of deep listening. Looking back now over the last 18 months, it has been a hibernation of my inner world. It was about listening, attuning, sensing subtleties, noticing what lit me up and what did not. The biggest struggle I have had in living my purpose is the moments when I feel completely lost, when it is still unfolding. You do not have a clear line of what you are doing or what you are about, and you are just watching everything unfold. Listening and creating that space also meant letting go of many things, which was uncomfortable and painful. It is during this transition, when things are falling away but nothing has come in yet, that you are in a vast space of not knowing. I read a quote a long time ago that says, when everything is unknown, everything is possible. Sometimes you need to clear the garden for a new crop to grow and just trust the process. There are really big blocks where it feels like pushing water uphill, like why is this so hard? Maybe it's hard because it's not in flow, and it's okay to let go, release control, and try to surrender into it as hard as it can be.

Okay. So, if you're looking for a purpose, the thing is it's about patience. And me being the most impatient, irrational human being on the planet, that's been tricky. But I guess when things go wrong now, I kind of vibe with it. I'm like, okay, I'm going to learn from this. So, no matter what you're in right now, it's a learning curve and you learn in pain. You adapt in pain. If you're getting to a certain age, you can teach the next generation how to navigate it and how to just trust the process. Trust the resilience. That's what it is. Trust the process. Life is painful, but that is the gift. Weirdly.

This approach resulted in me getting my first tattoo, which says surrender in Bengali, to your truth and intuition. That became the philosophy I would move through. What unfolded was finding community, connecting with people, and a lot of deep listening. Looking back now over the last 18 months, it has been a hibernation of my inner world. It was about listening, attuning, sensing subtleties, noticing what lit me up and what did not. The biggest struggle I have had in living my purpose is the moments when I feel completely lost, when it is still unfolding. You do not have a clear line of what you are doing or what you are about, and you are just watching everything unfold. Listening and creating that space also meant letting go of many things, which was uncomfortable and painful. It is during this transition, when things are falling away but nothing has come in yet, that you are in a vast space of not knowing. I read a quote a long time ago that says, when everything is unknown, everything is possible. Sometimes you need to clear the garden for a new crop to grow and just trust the process. There are really big blocks where it feels like pushing water uphill, like why is this so hard? Maybe it's hard because it's not in flow, and it's okay to let go, release control, and try to surrender into it as hard as it can be.

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.

Sometimes I have mental songs playing. If I start to take action and want to achieve something, I simply limit it because I'm doing it with my thoughts, and our thinking has a limit. If I say, well, I'm going to take this out here, I'm going to operate here, I'm going to do, do, do, that doesn't exist. That is not real. That's ego fantasy to feel important. There was no moment when I said, this is what I will do, this is what I came to do. I did not go to it. It came to me. I studied, did my own thing, opened my beauty salons, and so on. This was simply happening. It was not something I was trying to force. It was something my soul was meant to do. I did not have a choice. It just happened. The mission of life is simply to live in the present, to nourish your spirit and just let it transform if it needs to.

I used to think about what my destiny was going to be because I always felt like maybe I was not living my destiny. Now I do not think like that at all because I feel like I am living my purpose and I am living my destiny. I know that everything has already been done, and it feels as if we are living in a movie that is playing backwards, that is fully completed, and we think it is playing forwards. I believe that what we consider to be destiny is just the free will of the higher self, and that is you also. When I say destiny is the free will of the higher self, it means that everything is already set. There is a version of you, your higher self, that already exists. You are not going to fail to get there because it is already there, and we are just living. Therefore, everything that we think we could make a mistake on, that the world is going to end and everything, if the world is going to end, it is just going to end. I am not going to worry about it anymore because I know if that is the timeline I am in, that is the timeline I am in. I cannot jump the timeline. I am not going to change it. There is no changing it. Therefore, there is no stress about it. There is also no stress for me wondering if I am going to be able to live out my purpose. I will live out my purpose. It is part of the architecture.

But it was hard in the beginning. I really have to admit that. I so desperately thought that I wanted it, and that's how you know you're grasping onto the wrong passion and purpose when you so desperately don't want to let it go. Desperation has nothing to do with ease and flow. It has nothing to do with the God source. It has nothing to do with our energy. All energy flows. Hey, you know, when you have a short circuit, that's when the energy doesn't flow anymore. Something is cutting it off, and it's going to go in different directions haphazardly. But when you release, and that, to me, is what surrendering really means, is surrendering your desperation and the need to, and always go for the want to and the whatever I am meant to have to. But when you are desperate and you want, that lets me know something is displaced there. Desperation is a negative word. It has a negative connotation. It has a negative energy. And when you let go of it, that is when you have a chance to be shown, this is what you are meant to be. And I promise you this, it is so much greater than what you thought it was meant to be.

That system crash occurred for me in alcoholism. And so my fourth time in treatment, I finally surrendered. That was January 31st, 2022. I turned my will over to God. Since then, magnificent things have happened. It is so much more beautiful than anything I could have ever in my wildest dreams imagined. I am sitting here with you in Sedona, Arizona. Four years ago, if you said, 'What is the most amazing and impactful thing you can do with your life?' it would have been something about money. And that would have left me very empty. Page 552 of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous says acceptance is the answer to all my problems today, because if you accept the things you cannot change, everything gets better, and then you play with the things you can. That is playing in the stream of reality. That is a truth. What I have learned is just sit back, stay in alignment, and what unfolds is so much better than what you would have ever thought. I am here with you today, and what we are able to do now is so much greater than what I would have ever picked my best life to be four years ago with my will. What God has shown me I am capable of in this world is far beyond what any man has ever told me I am capable of.

When I sit still and I am not in the busyness of life, the doings and the tasks of every day, it is very clear when you have to take action. I feel like this whole voyage, mission, and dream is not something I am working on alone. There is something beyond that is urging me to move in different directions at different times, and I feel that very strongly. There is a movement, a feeling in my heart, but also energetically, where I suddenly book a flight to go somewhere and it is happening. I think, wait, I wanted to stay home, and now I am moving all year. Literally, we are going to Brazil, Switzerland, Morocco, all over the world in the next 12 months. It is surreal. It is not what I expected. I thought I was going to be home, grounded, building a nest, and it is the absolute opposite. This is what life wants of me, to be out there with the people, with the communities. When the world calls, I will listen. I will show up always.

And so I'm kind of going in and out of surrender. So then I come in and I'm like, 'Uh oh, now what?' And then God says to me, I can hardly say this. God said, 'Put your hands over her and love her. She's your daughter. She's your child. Love her as much as you love your children. And your love is going to save her life. That's all you have to do. That's what heals.' And so I just did that. I put my hands over her, and then I just went into an altered. The knock on the door. Karen's like, I'm here. And then all of a sudden, panic, sheer panic came in. Anxiety. I'm doubled over. I'm sweating. And I say, God, God, this is it. This is the moment. I don't know what to do. I was crying. I was like, I'll be right there, Karen, just a minute. And God says, don't do anything. Get out of the way. Just get out of the way. I'm doing this. Say, I am going to surrender what I think I know of what is reality. I am just going to surrender it for a moment as an experiment. Just do that and see what happens. See what happens, because something miraculous will happen.

I had a vision. I saw a spiritual center, Agape. I was walking down the street. I was really small in the dream, and the building had people coming out, all the demographics, everybody was in there. They were singing and praying, and a voice said, this is what we want you to do. I said, but in the dream, I'm really small. How am I going to do that? They said, you say yes and we'll do the rest. So I began a vision group in my living room. We met every Thursday night to become the vibration of a community that we wanted to build. We didn't start linearly with business plans or any of that. We wanted to be internally the frequency of unconditional love and peace, and then let the rest happen rather than, you know, let's go do a business plan. Let's do all that nonsense first. It's like, no, that's second. You have to be the person first. So I led this vision group, and on November 30, 1986, I had my first public service, and it's been going on ever since. Now, 189 countries tune in, and I travel around the world and go where I'm called to do what I'm called to do.

"Many times, you have to trust yourself, take a step into the void, and trust that a magical step will appear so you can keep walking through the becoming. I think that's something that I've been doing over and over."

"I just lived life mindfully and I flowed. I never knew, I absolutely never had a plan to do what I'm doing today. I studied, but I moved into the corporate world, but I lived life. I remember my dad always saying, flow with life but be mindful, flow. Our purposes can keep changing. Right now, if I'm going to swim, it's to have a great swim, enjoy myself. So I believe purpose is kind of blown out of proportion today. That one purpose, purpose, no, it can be different for all of us. Today, the purpose of a child is to play and have a good time. That purpose is going to change as the child grows. So I think we need to expand our thinking about a purpose but be more mindful about intention."

"The question I always ask is, what's trying to happen. Peter and I run a creativity lab called Source to Screen, and the whole purpose of it is to help bring people into that alignment. The idea is that great ideas are trying to find us. It's not us finding great ideas. Carl Jung said great ideas come and they find you, and that is actually so true. They find us when we are actually living in alignment with ourselves, when we are loving ourselves, when we are accepting ourselves fully. The more we are accepting who we are, the uniqueness of who we are, when we are in that place, ideas come and find us because then we are a perfect vessel for that to execute. All the spiritual lessons were there to learn, for our own spiritual growth, and also because something else, and this is the big lesson always, I think, is the question I always ask: what's trying to happen? Flow comes in the most bizarre ways, so if we can just get out of our heads and not second guess it and just trust, that is ultimately what it comes down to."

"When you're doing what you feel is your purpose, what you feel like you were kept here to do, it becomes effortless. The questions start being removed from the whole thing, and you're just floating along, following the tendrils of the way that you're being brought through it. It really becomes easier when the doubt starts to be removed. You could just sit back and say, isn't this nice?"

Finding your purpose is deeply subjective. There's no formula. It's about surrendering, opening yourself up, and letting go. If you're striving too hard, it's not there. The magic starts when you surrender and trust the process. We're scared of letting go because society teaches control and certainty, but the magic lies in staying open, seeing who you meet, and what comes in. Extraordinary moments happen when you trust the process. It's different for everyone, but it's about letting go.

"Embodying and living into that eternal yes has been the key to unlocking all of these adventures, all of these stories, all of these communities, all of these friendships, and partnerships. It all comes down to a single willingness to say yes. It's not easy being human. There are a lot of challenges, a lot of needs, material, financial, societal. There are many reasons to block the call, and we want to empathize, and yet at the same time, we're called to be courageous. I'm here, use me. I don't know how it's going to work out, I can't see all of the solutions, but you can. So I'm here, and I say yes, and in that moment, the universe changes. Everything changes, everything shifts when somebody steps on that threshold and stands there under the cosmos on the earth and says yes, I am here, use me. If we were to wait for all the traffic lights to go green before we left the house, we'd never leave. Jump in the river of life. Jump in the river of life and have faith that it will carry you, because it will."

June 15–19, 2026 Paola di Florio and Peter Rader

In the creativity workshop that Paola and I co-facilitate, Source to Screen, one of the quotes that we use is Carl Jung, people don't have ideas, ideas have people, they find us. And it's kind of this weird, mystical, sacred thing where, like, get out of the way and drop in, drop in, and attune, and find your center, and then stuff comes up, you know, inward, outward, from beyond, it floats in. It's not even a chasing of flow. It's an allowing. It's an allowing of the sequence to play out the way it's supposed to.

"If you're attached to needing to find it, there's no space to even be in the light that is you. I like to tell people, release the attachment to whatever you think you should be doing right now and figure out how to create joy in the now. The journey towards happiness or towards purpose may bring uncomfortable questions. Lean into those questions and be gentle with yourself. In that discovery process, because at the end of the day, it's all good. It's all good. You are safe, you've done nothing wrong, you are loved. You're actually on your way, and you're further along than you think you are, I promise."

"There were 18 months between the time I closed everything in the technology world and the launch of Humanity's Team with Neale Donald Walsch. During those 18 months, I stayed true to the calling. There was uncertainty. I did not even know we were going to launch Humanity's Team for a year and a half. I only knew there was a spiritual calling I was meant to serve. That time allowed me to relax, find balance, and become completely empty so I could fill up with what I would need to do when we launched Humanity's Team."