The surface tier of life purpose: the learning tier

Has there ever been a time in your life when all of your time, energy, and attention had to go towards dealing with life’s challenges, whether it’s health issues, difficult family dynamics, or money struggles?

You probably thought that those pesky issues were holding you back from being able to step into your purpose, as in starting a new career, offering your gifts in the world, writing a book...

If you’ve experienced this, I’d like to offer a different perspective. Yes, sometimes unexpected challenges come up and delay what really matters to us. But it’s also possible that during that time, you weren’t “blocked” — you were actually working through the learning tier of your purpose.

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You see, when our souls were planning this incarnation, they didn’t just pick our “mission”, or how we are to serve the world (our role and contribution). They also planned a few life lessons for us (uh-oh!) And those lessons too are part of our purpose — I call it the learning tier of purpose.

This tier represents what our soul wants to learn, heal, release, overcome, or cultivate in this life.

We will find ourselves being challenged to face the trauma, negative patterns, fears, or limiting beliefs created in a past life, so that we can finally break free of those.

Some examples of such pre-planned life lessons:

• Overcoming the scarcity mindset from many lives of poverty, and cultivating an abundance mindset.

  In this life, we may be born into a family of modest means, but be very driven to achieve success and financial freedom. In the process we’ll bump into limiting beliefs about abundance, make them conscious, “rewrite the script”, achieve abundance, and then perhaps even teach what we’ve learned to others.
  

• Overcoming the fear of using our intuitive gifts after being persecuted for those in a past life.

  We may be drawn to developing our psychic gifts, but run into fear or limitations, and we’ll consciously or subconsciously work through that old fear of being punished for using our gifts, eventually finding confidence and strength in being intuitive.
  

• Transcending the karmic or ancestral pattern of staying in abusive relationships.

  We will for sure find ourselves in one or a series of abusive relationships that we feel powerless to leave — until we start asking questions and figure out what patterns in us attracted those connections into our reality. We will likely transform our beliefs and choice patterns, and finally find ourselves in a healthy and balanced union.

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Sometimes, our soul just wants to stretch itself, if you will, into an area that it has very little experience with.

Let’s say, there’s a soul that has such a set of gifts (eternal soul qualities) that it typically focuses on leading, building, or expressing itself externally, and has had many lives as a leader, entrepreneur, prominent speaker and so on. But this soul doesn’t have a lot of aspects that are geared towards things like taking care of others or tuning into people’s needs.

In this life, this soul may choose, for a change, to learn about compassion, sensitivity, and caring for others, so it may find itself taking care of an elderly parent or a special needs child for many years. This role will be uncomfortable and somewhat unnatural, but will allow the soul to experience itself in a new way and cultivate new qualities.

To the human, it may feel like this circumstance is restricting them from achieving more in their professional life, while from the soul’s perspective, they’re doing exactly what is needed for their soul’s growth and evolution.

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So how can YOU figure out what’s in the learning tier of your purpose?

1) Here are some questions you can contemplate on your own:

• What blocks do I keep running up against?

• What are the main themes that keep popping up in one or more areas of life?

• What negative patterns do I notice in my relationships, in my finances, in my career?

• What is difficult for me, but I keep being asked to do it?

• If I look at the last 5 challenges I’ve faced across all areas of life, what do those situations have in common?

• What is the one fear / limitation / belief without which I would be free to fully step into power and my potential?

2) If you prefer working with a guide:

An Akashic Records practitioner can read your life lessons using your soul’s record.

Many intuitives can tune into your life plan and pick up on the main themes.

A channeler can ask your Higher Self or Guides about your lessons.

Your numerology (I prefer Dan Millman’s life path system) can reveal the main chosen challenges and opportunities for transformation.

Astrology can also reveal your challenges. However, one birth chart reading can mention so many difficulties that it would serve us well to focus on the most prominent patterns.

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Does the learning tier of purpose matter when it comes to choosing our professional path? This varies.

Some lessons apply more to other areas of life, such as personal relationships, and may only subtly show up in our work (such as in relationships with colleagues or clients).

A lesson like cultivating an abundance mindset can be experienced through pretty much any professional path.

However, certain lessons will be very important when it comes to our choice of path. To use our previous examples: someone working to overcome a fear of using psychic gifts may be guided towards working as a professional intuitive, and someone learning to care for others may be guided into a helping profession like nursing or childcare.

However, here’s what can happen when we’re guided into a profession for the sake of a life lesson. Once we’ve had enough of experiencing that theme or have cultivated the quality we wanted, more possibilities will open up for us, and we may find ourselves shifting towards a somewhat different role that will reflect more of the higher tiers of purpose.

The same goes for life challenges that appear to “hold us back” from stepping into our purpose: once we embrace those challenges and master the lessons, the next tier (our role and contribution) will often open up for us.

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In the next article, we'll look at a typical journey through the tiers of purpose and the changes that can happen in our life as we shift into the next tier. Stay tuned! :)