For years, I’ve stood on stages and shared the same truth: you don’t have to find your purpose; your purpose finds you. So if you’ve been lying awake at night, obsessing over how to find your life purpose, comparing your timeline to everyone else’s or waiting for some big sign to tell you what you’re supposed to be doing, I want you to exhale right now. The search doesn’t have to be so hard. Your spirit guides already know the way, and they’ve been trying to show you.
In this episode of Dear Guides, psychic medium Sean Collyns joined me to share the spiritual secret to uncovering your true calling without the overthinking! Learning how to find your life purpose isn’t about more searching. It’s about less resistance. The moment you stop fighting your own life and start letting your guides in, the picture gets clearer.
Your Purpose Isn’t Something You Have to Figure Out
Here’s what I’ve noticed after decades of doing this work. People treat purpose like a puzzle to solve. They journal about it, they take quizzes, they compare their lives to a friend’s and think, that will never be me. And in that comparison, they disconnect from the very thing that was trying to reach them.
“Your purpose isn’t something you have to figure out. It’s something your spirit guides can reveal.”
Sean put it so simply. Our purpose finds us when we’re loving life, when we’re doing what lights us up. Our guides work through that joy. They evoke what we dream of, what we long for, what we secretly wish we could do and that longing isn’t random; it’s guidance.
What Is My Life Purpose? Start Here
If you’re asking, “what is my life purpose,” start with this definition, because it takes the pressure off.
Your life purpose is the function you’re here to serve. On the highest level, that function is the same for everyone: to be an extension of love. From there, the expression is different for each of us. For some, it shows up through creative work. For others, it’s through parenting, teaching, healing, or simply how they treat a stranger.
A few markers that you’re getting close to your purpose:
- You feel more joy and less overthinking when you’re doing it.
- You lose track of time.
- It doesn’t require you to abandon who you are to do it.
- It often involves some form of healing, either yours or someone else’s.
I get asked often how to know if you’re on the right spiritual path at all, especially when life feels uncertain. My answer is always the same: notice where your energy naturally goes when no one is watching and the pressure is off. That’s usually where your soul purpose is quietly pointing.
None of this requires a five-year plan, but it does require your attention. Your guides are constantly nudging you toward the version of your life that fits, and those nudges show up in ordinary moments long before they show up as a clear career path.
Purpose vs. Career — They’re Not the Same Thing
This is where so many people get stuck. They think their career is their purpose, and if the career isn’t lining up, they assume they’ve failed at their purpose too.
Your career can be one of the ways you fulfill your purpose, but it isn’t the purpose itself. A stay-at-home mom raising her children with love is living an extraordinarily high purpose. So is the person on the street who smiles at everyone and makes a stranger’s day better. Purpose is bigger than a job title; it’s the energy you bring to whatever you’re doing.
How I Found My Own Purpose (And How My Guides Led the Way)
I didn’t find my purpose by planning it out. I found it in a studio apartment in my 20s, stacks of self-help books next to my bed, still drinking and using drugs most nights. I knew, even then, that I had a calling to teach. I just couldn’t see how I’d ever get there from where I was.
On October 2nd, 2005, I heard my guide say, clearly and audibly: get clean and you will live a life beyond your wildest dreams. Within a year, spirit intervened in my life again and again, each time nudging me one step closer to my purpose.
The Book That Pulled Me to the Register
One of those moments happened about a year into my sobriety. I walked into a little metaphysical bookstore on 13th Street in NYC and saw a display of A Course in Miracles. When I picked up the book, I felt this hot, electric energy move through my hands, and the book practically dragged me to the register. I paid, walked outside, opened it, and read one of the first lines: this is a required course.
That was the beginning of my path as a student of that teaching, and later, as a teacher of it myself. There were other moments too. A dinner party I almost skipped that led me to the exact yoga practice that became part of my life’s work. None of it was a coincidence. My guides had a hand in every bit of it.
Looking back, I can see how each of those moments built on the last one. None of them felt like “the purpose” while they were happening. They just felt like small, strange pulls I couldn’t explain. That’s usually how it goes. You rarely recognize the full shape of your purpose while you’re inside a single moment of it. You only see the pattern once you look back.
Can Your Purpose Change? Is It Fixed, or Does It Evolve?
Short answer: it evolves. Your purpose isn’t a single fixed destination you arrive at once and never revisit. The way you express it at 25 will likely look different at 45. What stays constant is the underlying function, being a messenger of love, and the form that takes will keep shifting as you heal and grow.
This is also why learning how to find your life purpose isn’t a one-time project. It’s more like a relationship you keep returning to, especially through big transitions like a career change, a breakup, becoming a parent, or a health scare. Each season can reveal a new layer of the same underlying purpose.
How Spirit Guides Communicate With You
Sean shared that people often assume connecting with a guide means hearing a voice or seeing a vision. For most people, it starts somewhere much quieter: with a feeling.
Your guides tend to communicate through:
- A sense of loving presence, rather than a literal voice.
- Repeated signs, songs, numbers, or symbols that keep showing up.
- Dreams.
- Nudges you can’t quite explain, but also can’t ignore.
- A sudden clarity that feels like it came from outside your own thinking.
Trying to identify a guide the way you’d identify a person, by name, gender, or appearance, actually creates distance. The connection deepens when you stop trying to profile them and start simply feeling them.
Get me free guided meditation to connect with your spirit guides
What It Feels Like When Your Guide Is Communicating
For me, it’s different depending on which guide is coming through. When I’m channeling higher guides, the energy feels high up, buzzy, and quick. When I connect with Wayne Dyer (my spiritual mentor, who is now one of my guides in spirit), it’s calm and grounded, with a strong, steady presence I can feel just to my right.
You might feel warmth. You might feel energy in your hands. You might just feel accompanied, like you’re not walking through something alone. Trust whatever that feeling is for you. It doesn’t need to look like anyone else’s experience.
The Simple Practice That Opens the Door: “I Am Willing to Heal”
The doorway to your guides, and to your purpose, opens with four words: I am willing to heal.
Say it silently. Say it in a journal. Say it as many times as you need to. That willingness is the invitation and it tells your guides, show me where to go, I can’t figure this out alone, and I’m ready to receive your help.
“I am willing to heal — that’s enough to open the door.”
You don’t need to already know what you’re healing from. You just need the willingness to begin.
The Dear Guides Journaling Practice
Here’s a practice I use often, and one Sean and I talked through on the show. At the top of a page, write: Dear guides at the highest truth and compassion, what would you have me know? Then let the pen move without stopping to edit yourself.
Don’t worry if it feels like rambling at first. Keep going. At some point, the handwriting or the rhythm of your thoughts often shifts, and what comes through starts to feel less like your usual inner chatter and more like something arriving from somewhere else. That’s the message.
Self-Love Is the Highest Frequency
Something came through during our conversation that I haven’t stopped thinking about.
“Self-love is the highest possible frequency.”
When you genuinely love and honor yourself, everything else starts to reorganize around that. Your nervous system settles. Your purpose becomes easier to see because you’re finally calm enough to notice it. Healing your relationship with yourself is the most direct root to finding your purpose.
A Guided Meditation to Connect With Your Guides and Your Purpose
Sean and I closed the episode with a short meditation, and I want to walk you through a version of it here.
Close your eyes. Take a breath and let your attention settle into your chest. Imagine your guides stepping forward, each one placing a hand on your shoulder or your arm. Feel that warmth, even if you can’t picture a face.
Now say silently: I am willing to heal. I am willing to heal whatever is blocking me from living in my purpose. Feel the door open.
Then add: I am willing to let you help me. I am willing to let you show me where to go. Sit with whatever rises up. It might be a word, a feeling, an image. Don’t judge it or dismiss it. Just let it land in your body.
Before you come back, ask your guides for a sign, a confirmation you’ll recognize later today. It might be a number, a song, a symbol. Trust that you already sense what it will be. Take a breath, feel your feet on the ground, and come back whenever you’re ready.
Resources
Books
The Universe Has Your Back by Gabrielle Bernstein
Self Help by Gabrielle Bernstein
Your Soul Is the Source of Your Power by Sean Collyns
Free Meditation to Connect with Your Spirit Guides
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know what my life purpose is? You usually don’t find your purpose by analyzing it. You feel it. It tends to reveal itself when you’re doing what brings you joy and fulfillment, rather than when you’re comparing yourself to someone else’s path.
Is my career the same thing as my purpose? No. Your career can be one way you fulfill your purpose, but it isn’t the purpose itself. Purpose is the function you’re here to serve, and that can show up through parenting, friendship, community, or work.
Can your life purpose change over time? Yes, purpose evolves. The underlying function stays the same, but how you express it shifts as you grow and heal.
How do spirit guides communicate with you? Mostly through feeling, not through a literal voice. Signs, dreams, songs, and repeated symbols are common ways guides get your attention.
What does it feel like when your spirit guide is communicating with you? Often it feels like a loving presence, a lift in energy, or a sense of being accompanied, rather than hearing words.
What blocks people from connecting with their spirit guides? Trying to identify a guide the way you’d identify a person, by name, gender, or appearance. Letting go of that need and simply feeling their presence opens the connection.
What’s the simplest way to start connecting with my guides? I created a beautiful guided meditation to help you connect with your spirit guides, access it for free here.
About Gabby
Gabrielle Bernstein is a #1 New York Times bestselling author, motivational speaker, and host of the Dear Guides podcast. Her books include The Universe Has Your Back, Self Help and the forthcoming Unshakable Faith. She has spent more than two decades helping people heal, awaken to their purpose, and connect with a power greater than themselves.