Your Soul Has a Purpose

The great successful men of the world have used their imagination they think ahead and create their mental picture in all its details, filling in here, adding a little there, altering this a bit and that a bit, but steadily building - steadily building.
--Robert Collier

Tom Chappell, along with his wife, is the owner of Tom's of Maine, the natural care products company. In his audiotape, "The Soul of Business", he describes how, despite his incredible material success, he woke up one day at age forty-three and realized that he felt disconnected from the company and himself. He considered retiring. Then refound his purpose and decided to help other businesses bring soulfulness into their workplaces and incorporate into the business practices the values that he believed in deeply.

If you want the habit of gratitude to grace your life, it is essential that you, like Tom Chappell, develop the belief that you are here on Earth to fulfill some purpose that only you can offer to the world. You are an amazingly rare, totally nonreplicable individual with talents and gifts that the world anxiously needs. The more that you experience the truth of your uniqueness and beauty, the more you will feel gratitude for your particular gifts and the more you will be able to deliver those gifts.

Unfortunately, not many of us were born to parents who nurtured our individuality , honored our gifts, or helped us recognize our purpose. So as adults we may find it difficult to love ourselves in a wholehearted way that fosters a deep and quiet sense of gratitude for ourselves. In "The Women's Book of Spirit", Sue Patton Thoele offers the following meditation:

It may help to realize the value of gratitude toward ourselves if we were to visualize our heart as a delicate treasure, hand-blown from the rarest ethereal glass. A treasure valuable beyond imagining - fragile, irreplaceable, priceless, and ancient. There is no other like it - infinitely precious, existing before time and after infinity.

Make a commitment with yourself to cherish and appreciate that you were entrusted with such an inexplicable treasure when we were given the gift of life.