Cassandra Vieten

Offering Mindfulness & Compassion Practice and Support

Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) is a scientific research center and direct-experience lab specializing in the intersection of science and human experience.

"You see this in leaders, in gurus, people who are trying to do really wonderful, creative things. You'll see them get completely off track and kind of possessed by something that is working against the very purpose that they're trying to promote in the world. I've been very lucky to have the opportunity to manifest my purpose in so many ways through work at The Institute of Noetic Sciences and my work at UC San Diego, where I'm now directing the Center for Mindfulness. I work on the science of imagination and the science of psychedelics. If I had told my 19-year-old self that that's where I would end up, she might have been blown away."

"One of the things that the person who led this purpose method said is, if your purpose doesn't scare you a little bit, it's not your purpose. You definitely want to have a little bit of, oh gosh, I don't even know if I could do that, and then you're on the right track. While one person may have a download that their purpose is to start a multinational NGO that feeds and clothes millions of people, or to stop wars from happening, another person's purpose might be to replace the tiles that have worn away from their child's school. The scale is not relevant in purpose territory."

"It can take a few years to set up the conditions under which my purpose could manifest. Especially if your purpose is something that is going against society's conditioning or your conditioning, you've got to have tons of things in your life that give nutrients to the new purpose in order to allow it to grow. In the territory of purpose there are no rules about time, space, or scale. People can live into their purpose when they're 85. People can find their purpose when they're young. You may not have the same purpose at age 30 that you do at 40, 50, 60, or 70. You may have a through line, but allowing it to be flexible and dynamic, and really paying attention to it and cultivating it, rather than thinking it's just going to appear one day."

"Some of the conditions that are really important for most people in terms of growing their purpose: they need a supportive community of like-minded folks, but not too like-minded, so that they're also willing to challenge you and keep you on track. They need time in nature, they need spiritual connection, and often a daily mind-body practice."

"When we are living into our purpose, there are of course times when it's hard work, or it's hard to be out ahead of the pack, and you feel lonely, or it's hard to fail and make mistakes. Those are hard, but when you are allowing it to come through you rather than from you, it's less effort, it in fact becomes a lot of flow and a sort of effortlessness. You can be tired, the same way you're tired after working out in a really healthy way, but you don't have that drained feeling. Allowing your purpose to work through you means that your job is not actually to invent or follow your purpose. Your job is to simply become as transparent as you possibly can, which means stay clear with what you eat, with what you put into your body, with other people in your life, with your values. The clearer I get and the more aligned, it's going to flow. The great inventor Thomas Edison said, I've never invented anything, I'm just a needle on a phonograph."

"I absolutely encountered struggles on my way toward manifesting my purpose. Even in the midst of being at a very high level of feeling like, on the outside anyway, people would have said, wow, she is really living her purpose, I definitely had a period of time where I got lost and felt really out of control, not happy, not useful, and turned to addictions. I had to actually go through treatment during that time and come back on track. I say it out loud because so many people who are really pursuing their purpose have a secret life where they're really not pursuing it, and it just means that some of the conditions that one must have in place to stay balanced and flexible while living a purpose were lacking. They were missing, or they wore away over time. Sometimes we can work so hard that we just forget about taking care of ourselves, or we have so many plates spinning that it kind of has to come out sideways somewhere. It reminded me, even in the midst of this beautiful career moment, that number one, anyone can get lost, and number two, you've got to spend extra energy to keep all of your support structures in place, or you can very easily get lost."

"Your job then is not to directly pursue the purpose right away. It's to ask yourself, what conditions do I need to cultivate in my life to make that purpose really blossom, really flourish. We can get kind of mad at ourselves because we're not doing our purpose when we didn't take the time to set the conditions, and it can take a few years to set up. It's sort of like a garden. You get a seed planted either by yourself, by your family, by the universe, and then your job is to provide the soil and the nutrients and the sunshine and water and stakes in the ground to allow this seed to grow. Same thing in your own life. What they need is a supportive community of like-minded folks, time in nature, spiritual connection, and often a daily mind-body practice that helps them stay at a certain level of spiritual fitness and resilience. If your purpose is big enough, it's going to be scary, and it's going to cause trouble, so you've got to have a certain level of agility, flexibility, and nimbleness to get through all of the obstacles that might be put in your path."