Discovering our purpose can seem like an enormous burden, a significant thing to contemplate.  But if we are passionate about something, we can more readily come to know our purpose.  We live our purpose as a natural expression of the passionate self.

Passion is visceral.  When our bodies are alive, we are alive. According to Angelis Arien, anthropologist and storyteller, questions indigenous healers ask a person who comes to them complaining of dis-ease are: “When did you stop singing? When did you stop dancing?  When did you stop being enchanted with the stories, especially the stories of your own life?” Certainly, alienation from our own passion and purpose is a critical dis-ease.  Singing, ...

In my Horse Wisdom for Writers workshop, the horses help writers get down to telling their real stories. Not necessarily the pretty ones, but the ones that need to be told. We do an exercise in the round pen where we ask each participant to take a turn standing in the center with a horse at liberty and talk about what they are burning to write about. Once they get clear about that, they are to free ask the horse to move forward as a metaphor for getting their story out onto the page and into the world.  In one class, several people had worked with Desi, a lovely gray Arabian mare, and Desi had done her job of reflecting back to each writer whether she was interested in what they had to say or not. She showed each writer how well they...