Finding the Meaning in Your Suffering by Following Your Curiosity

Dr. James Hollis on the exploration of meaning and purpose within the curious depth of ourselves.

You know, if if we run from our inner calling or you know, predilections, um we might live a safer life or a more comfortable life, but it will not contribute that chip to the mosaic that was the possibility. Most of the people that we would admire in history didn’t have easy lives. They had very difficult lives, even martyrdom. But we admire them because they embodied something within that was their truth.

As long as we’re curious, that spark is alive within us and and to to be able to pursue those questions.

It’s it’s about finding the meaning of your suffering. And and when you do that, then you have this deep sense of purpose and the rightness. There’s some something inside of you. I talked about those different modalities of of access to what’s going on in our depth. When they are in aligned, you you know the difference.

You feel it. It’s It’s called the flow or it’s called that sense of meaning or or or purpose.

But to say, “All right, what is it that is really calling to me?” And I’m not talking about a career necessarily. I’m just talking about a mode of curiosity or a mode of being or mode of exploration.

This perfectly mirrors “the call to adventure” within Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. And it touches on finding your bliss as not something blissful but rather something that can entail suffering from which meaning and purpose emerges from it.

This is similar to the experience a mother goes through in giving birth to their child. The end result is bliss but the experience is anything but blissful, as it is full of suffering. In the same way, we are giving birth to a larger sense of ourselves.