You Are Not Broken. You Are Being Initiated.(Finding the purpose of life)

It is 3am and you are awake again.

Reviewing the decision you made. The one you are about to make. Wondering whether the direction you are heading is truly yours — or whether it simply accumulated around you while you were busy building something. Whether the unease you feel is a warning or just noise. Whether you are showing up the way you want to for the people who matter most.

And underneath all of it, quieter and harder to admit: what if I wake up one day and realise I missed something essential?

Most of us who ask this question are really asking something deeper: how to find the purpose of life, not as a concept, but as a lived reality that actually guides the decisions we make and the way we show up every day.

I have sat with this question for most of my adult life. Not as a philosophical exercise, as a lived, sometimes desperate search for meaning. It followed me from the auction rooms of Christie's in London and Paris, through a decade working in conflict zones, through PTSD and the slow, unglamorous work of finding my way back to myself. It was still sitting with me when I started my practice, accompanying leaders and executives through their own versions of this terrain.

And what eventually emerged — through my own journey, through hundreds of sessions with clients, through years of going deeper into consciousness work — was something that now feels almost obvious:

What we go through is not random. It is initiation.

What Initiation Actually Means

In yoga, in shamanism, in qigong and many other traditions, initiation is a formal passage. A student enters a practice under the guidance of a master. They are led into the depth of it, confronting their limits, their shadow, the places where they resist and contract and want to turn back. The master does not protect them from the difficulty. The difficulty is the teaching. What lies beyond it: the understanding, the capacity, the access to something previously hidden — cannot be transmitted. It can only be lived.

Life initiates us the same way.

Every experience we go through carries a teaching. Not in a soft, everything-happens-for-a-reason way, but in a precise, sometimes brutal way. The conflicts I witnessed in the field did not happen for me. But what I was required to face in myself in order to survive: the fragmentation, the inability to reconcile what I had seen with any version of ordinary life, that was mine to work through. And working through it changed the structure of who I am, not just what I know.

This is what initiation does. It does not give you information. It gives you transformation, at the level of the body, the unconscious, the being itself.

Your incarnation has a purpose. The experiences that find you, the failures, the losses, the periods of disorientation, the quiet persistent ache that something is off, are not obstacles to that purpose. They are the path toward it. Life is asking you to understand something you could not have understood any other way. And this, I have come to believe, is the only honest answer to how to find the purpose of life: not by searching outside yourself, but by learning to read what life is already showing you from within.

We are the prisoners of our own beliefs and narrative.

The Mistake Most Leaders Make

Here is where it gets important and where most purpose-driven people I work with lose time.

When the initiation becomes uncomfortable, the instinct is to conclude that the discomfort means something is wrong. This doesn't feel aligned. This isn't right. I should be further along by now. So they resist. They abandon what is otherwise uplifting because it doesn't feel easy enough. Or they wait — for more certainty, more readiness, the perfect moment and the perfect moment never arrives.

This is one of the deepest paradoxes of being human: we do not grow when life is easy. We grow precisely when something is being asked of us that we cannot yet answer.

The discomfort is not the sign to stop. It is the sign that something real is happening.

What stands in the way is not the circumstances, not the market, not the relationship, not the team. It is us — our attachment to a version of ourselves that no longer fits, our grip on beliefs and identities that once served us and now quietly limit us. The initiation is asking us to loosen that grip. To let something go so that something deeper can emerge.

The Voice That Waits in the Space

What emerges when we stop resisting long enough to hear it is not a new framework. Not a mindset shift. Not another layer of understanding applied by the thinking mind.

It is a voice. Quiet, precise, and entirely your own.

It has always been there. It speaks from a place that sits beneath the mental noise, beneath the ego's narratives, beneath the beliefs you inherited and the identity you constructed. It is not rational — but it is never wrong. It is what you sense before you can explain it. It is the part of you that already knows what the next step is, even when every other part of you is arguing about it.

In my work, I call this connection to supraconsciousness. You might call it intuition, inner wisdom, the higher self. The name matters less than the recognition: there is a dimension of you that holds clarity you have not yet accessed. And it becomes available not through more thinking, but through direct experience, felt in the body, not processed by the mind.

This is what the initiation is leading you toward. Not comfort. Not certainty. Connection. To the part of you that can navigate uncertainty from the inside out, that can make decisions from clarity rather than fear, that can hold the complexity of a rapidly changing world without losing its centre.

What Becomes Possible on the Other Side

I will not tell you the other side is effortless. My own initiation took years, and continues. What changed was not that life became easier, it was that I changed in relation to it.

I understand now, in my body and not just my mind, that I am part of something larger than my individual story. That what I witnessed in the field, the darkness, the destruction, the limits of what one person can do, is held within a wider intelligence that I can access and work with. That the wounds I carry are not just wounds. They are also the precise source of what I am able to offer.

I operate now from my connection to high consciousness. Not as a concept, but as a living capacity, something I can feel, orient from, bring into a session, into a decision, into a moment of doubt. It did not come from reading about it. It came from being initiated into it, step by difficult step.

This is what I want for the people I work with. Not a better mindset. Not more healing to add to the stack. A return to themselves — so complete that what they do next flows from who they actually are.

The Question Worth Sitting With

If you are in the middle of something uncomfortable right now, a period of doubt, disorientation, or the quiet ache of a life that no longer quite fits, I want to offer you a reframe.

Not: what is wrong with me?

But: what is this trying to show me?

Because this, ultimately, is how to find the purpose of life — not in a book, not in a framework, not in another healing programme. In the experience you are already living, read differently. In the initiation, you are already inside, met with curiosity rather than resistance.

You are not broken. You are not behind. You are not failing.

You are being initiated. And everything you need for the next step is already in you — waiting not to be found, but to be remembered.

If something in this resonates and you want to explore what it looks like for you specifically, I offer a free 60-minute Perspectives call. No pitch — real work on what you are navigating right now. You will find the link here.